I think it’s incredibly telling that the hard sciences have practically stalled out in terms of advancement, only ever capable of spiraling deeper and deeper down their holes of “specialization”, while the polymaths, the true geniuses capable of bridging the gaps between these chasms seem to be so few and far between.
Rupert Sheldrake, if you haven’t heard of him, is unorthodox when it comes to the priesthood of science. A highly accomplished biochemist by training - but openly religious (Anglican upbringing) - he is one of the relative few in the scientific world who is capable of entertaining ideas without necessarily believing them which I think helps contribute to his ability to bridge these wide divides and come upon what could end up being the early markings of a paradigm shift (or even multiple).
The basic idea presented here is “panpsychism”, the idea that psyche, aka consciousness, exists in some form or another, infused throughout the entire universe. This would not only explain the “consciousness of degrees” that we observe in, for example, animals like dogs, whales, dolphins, elephants, etc (i.e. a more “limited” or different form of consciousness than our own) but also bridge a long-standing gap that has been created between “religious understandings” and “scientific understandings” of the universe, imo
I've gradually come to settle on the idea that some form of panpsychism is the best fit for the phenomenon of consciousness. It opens up the possibility that consciousness is a field phenomenon or a latent potential existing in all of what we would traditionally consider to be inanimate matter.
Except for certain figures like Philip Goff and Donald Hoffman etc. you don't see many scientists willing to wrestle with the concept of consciousness. (I have my problems with some of these guys' assumptions too, eg. I don't think the term 'simulation theory' is useful and I'm not convinced there is a 'hard problem' of consciousness at all.) But mainstream science is scared of examining it and has no idea how to. A thorough examination of consciousness might reveal that the phenomenon of consciousness differs even across the human race, including the revelation that people may operate at different levels of consciousness, thereby introducing the concept of people who are more human and less human according to the intuitive understanding that consciousness itself is what makes humans special. Very problematic.
Most scientists also don't want to think or talk about the possibility, even theoretical, of greater-than-human consciousness, even though if consciousness proceeds from a discoverable principle, and that principle depends purely on the arrangement of physical matter, then it should be axiomatic that matter can be arranged to optimise for consciousness. Hilariously, materialists accidentally end up in a very anthropocentric view of the universe when they instead take as axiomatic that we already represent that optimisation, and that possibilities for consciousness don't extend very far below or above the current human experience. I've also heard of technological singularity ideas getting angrily dismissed as 'creationism by the back door' by some scientists, because they anticipate the extrapolations and don't want to acknowledge any line of thinking that would challenge their atheist cred.
Whether or not extramission represents the best way to understand the way a consciousness entity comes together and starts to experience things, I don't know. It does however call to mind other spiritual ideas of how consciousness is constituted, such as the Buddhist simile of the chariot, if we hypothesise that our interactions with everything around us, including things we merely look at, are constituent parts of our consciousness in the same way that synaptic activity is, on a different level and scale. A conversation with another person could be considered a building block in a dual consciousness, where the information is bottlenecked through one extremely noisy, low bandwidth synapse.
I think it’s incredibly telling that the hard sciences have practically stalled out in terms of advancement, only ever capable of spiraling deeper and deeper down their holes of “specialization”, while the polymaths, the true geniuses capable of bridging the gaps between these chasms seem to be so few and far between.
Rupert Sheldrake, if you haven’t heard of him, is unorthodox when it comes to the priesthood of science. A highly accomplished biochemist by training - but openly religious (Anglican upbringing) - he is one of the relative few in the scientific world who is capable of entertaining ideas without necessarily believing them which I think helps contribute to his ability to bridge these wide divides and come upon what could end up being the early markings of a paradigm shift (or even multiple).
The basic idea presented here is “panpsychism”, the idea that psyche, aka consciousness, exists in some form or another, infused throughout the entire universe. This would not only explain the “consciousness of degrees” that we observe in, for example, animals like dogs, whales, dolphins, elephants, etc (i.e. a more “limited” or different form of consciousness than our own) but also bridge a long-standing gap that has been created between “religious understandings” and “scientific understandings” of the universe, imo
I've gradually come to settle on the idea that some form of panpsychism is the best fit for the phenomenon of consciousness. It opens up the possibility that consciousness is a field phenomenon or a latent potential existing in all of what we would traditionally consider to be inanimate matter.
Except for certain figures like Philip Goff and Donald Hoffman etc. you don't see many scientists willing to wrestle with the concept of consciousness. (I have my problems with some of these guys' assumptions too, eg. I don't think the term 'simulation theory' is useful and I'm not convinced there is a 'hard problem' of consciousness at all.) But mainstream science is scared of examining it and has no idea how to. A thorough examination of consciousness might reveal that the phenomenon of consciousness differs even across the human race, including the revelation that people may operate at different levels of consciousness, thereby introducing the concept of people who are more human and less human according to the intuitive understanding that consciousness itself is what makes humans special. Very problematic.
Most scientists also don't want to think or talk about the possibility, even theoretical, of greater-than-human consciousness, even though if consciousness proceeds from a discoverable principle, and that principle depends purely on the arrangement of physical matter, then it should be axiomatic that matter can be arranged to optimise for consciousness. Hilariously, materialists accidentally end up in a very anthropocentric view of the universe when they instead take as axiomatic that we already represent that optimisation, and that possibilities for consciousness don't extend very far below or above the current human experience. I've also heard of technological singularity ideas getting angrily dismissed as 'creationism by the back door' by some scientists, because they anticipate the extrapolations and don't want to acknowledge any line of thinking that would challenge their atheist cred.
Whether or not extramission represents the best way to understand the way a consciousness entity comes together and starts to experience things, I don't know. It does however call to mind other spiritual ideas of how consciousness is constituted, such as the Buddhist simile of the chariot, if we hypothesise that our interactions with everything around us, including things we merely look at, are constituent parts of our consciousness in the same way that synaptic activity is, on a different level and scale. A conversation with another person could be considered a building block in a dual consciousness, where the information is bottlenecked through one extremely noisy, low bandwidth synapse.
You'd enjoy this. I've had multiple OBE's. While hooked up to medical equipment. I believe.
https://youtu.be/2tpda3qYkec