CONSCIOUSNESS AND THINKING
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so!” - William Shakespeare, in Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.
“Je pense, donc je suis!” (I think, therefore I Am.) - René Descartes, the “first principle of philosophy” in Discourse on the Method.
According to these two famous quotes, the ability to think is an amazing gift from God that we have as human beings! Our ability to think implies existence and gives meaning to everything. But, what exactly is thinking? And who, or what is it, that thinks? Physicist Max Planck shed important light on these questions when he said:
“We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we [think and] talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
So, thinking is a function of consciousness. But then, we have to ask: ‘Exactly what is consciousness?’ The dictionary definition of consciousness is: “The state of being awake and aware of one’s surroundings.” But upon analysis, we see that this doesn’t suffice as a definition because awareness and consciousness are not the same thing. One can be conscious without being aware of one’s surroundings. We find no definition of consciousness as a thing in and of itself, without reference to the physical senses, yet we know that a person who is asleep and deprived of all sense stimuli is still conscious.
Are consciousness and biological life the same thing? No. Verified OBEs and NDEs are proof that they are not. Our very best scientists and philosophers admit that they do not know what consciousness is in the same way we know what awareness and cognition are. We can see why this is the case, when we realize that the process of trying to investigate consciousness scientifically is like an eye trying to look at itself without a mirror. As Planck’s statement implies, we cannot look at consciousness from a point outside of consciousness.
Is thinking and being the same thing, as Descartes implies? I don’t think so. Thinking in the words of a language of some sort is just one function, perhaps just one of the simplest functions of consciousness after the act of drawing the distinction of self from other-than-self. Other functions of consciousness include identifying with the distinction of self, focusing and organizing distinctions in self and other-than-self into logical patterns, and experiencing a range of qualia. Note: Qualia (Latin singular: quale, meaning kind of experience) is a term that philosophers use to describe the properties of our conscious experience of objective phenomena. In other words, qualia are the details that we are aware of in reality and/or in our personal model of reality, based on memories of personal experience.
Attempting to define consciousness is an exercise that very quickly leads to a spiral of circular reasoning into the heart of creativity and a new understanding of language, mathematics, and logic. It’s like looking into a dictionary to learn what a particular word means and finding, within the definition given in the dictionary, another word, the meaning of which is also unknown. Then, of course, you have to look up the definition of that word, only to find that it is defined using the word we were looking up in the first place!
There actually is no ultimate definition of consciousness possible because, as Planck says, we cannot get behind consciousness. We can talk about what consciousness feels like, what it enables us to do, what it is similar to, what forms it can take, but not what it actually is, because everything else we experience depends on the existence of consciousness, and ultimately, the existence of consciousness in objective reality is a paradox. I am motivated to paraphrase quantum physicist Niels Bohr: How wonderful it is that we have uncovered a paradox, because now we have an opportunity to make some real progress! The paradox of the ‘a prior’ existence of consciousness is the key to understanding the nature of reality and even to understanding the nature of human existence.
Considering the nature of human existence, I want to encourage you to read Extracts from Adam’s Diary by Mark Twain. Not only is it a very humorous commentary on the biblical book of Genesis and the meaning of words, but it is also an entertaining look at the basic man-woman relationship. Adam blames everything on Eve at first, but by the end of the brief look into his diary, we see that she has convinced him that he was actually to blame for everything all along. At the end, he says: “I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. At first I thought she talked too much; but now I should be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life. Blessed be the chestnut that brought us near together and taught me to know the goodness of her heart and the sweetness of her spirit!”
It will only take you about ten minutes to read Twain’s Excerpts from Adam’s Diary. So please go to https://www.online-literature.com/twain/3264/ and read it, and then go to my blogsite at www.ERCloseTPyhsics.com for more about consciousness, thinking, and the nature of reality.
CONSCIOUS THINKING, LOGICAL SUSTEMS AND THE NATURE OF REALITY
As I said, the paradox of the ‘a prior’ existence of consciousness is the key to understanding the nature of reality. This is so because the organizing function of consciousness is found existing as what Dr. Vernon Neppe and I call gimmel, the measurable third form of reality in the heart of the proton, the most stable object in the universe, and in the energy of the electron shells surrounding the nucleus of all stable atoms. That stability is created by the organization by gimmel of the total angular momentum in every atom of the physical universe, completing the stability of atoms of the physical universe as basic unitary logical systems. In the composite forms of reality, gimmel also completes the physical universe as a finite 5-D logical system consisting of three spatial dimensions, one temporal dimension, and one dimension of consciousness. The logic of this system is the reflection of the logic of the 9-D infinity of Primary Consciousness, which is the infinite Mind of God, within which everything is embedded.
The form of each 4-D atom is a toroidal energy vortex with the triadic content of mass, energy, and gimmel as its total quantized substance. The form of the cosmos is a 5-D toroidal vortex, expanding out of, and back into itself periodically. The energy form of each conscious thinking individual is also that of a torus of dynamic spiritual energy rolling through the cosmos and expanding into or contracting away from the 9-D domain of Primary Consciousness as a consequence of that individual’s conscious actions. 9-D Primary Consciousness is forever mathematically self-referential without beginning or end. (Coincidentally answering Leibniz’s most important question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”: There is something rather than nothing because there never was, and never will be a state of absolute nothingness!)
Physical reality, as the form of the finite manifestation of Primary Consciousness, also exists without beginning or end, constantly changing in form, creating the illusions of beginnings and ends, but with no creation or destruction of the substance of reality. This is reflected in the natural law of the conservation of substance, measurable in quantum equivalence units of mass, energy, and gimmel. The inclusion of gimmel, the conscious portion of physical reality linking individual quantized consciousness to the conscious substrate of Primary Consciousness, assures the spiritual immortality of our souls. Finally, we see that reality is a self-referential continuum ranging through all dimensional domains from finite quantized physical reality to the infinitely continuous infinity of the consistent logical system of the Spiritual Reality of Primary Consciousness in God.
