A Novel Way to Model Consciousness
Summary of Some Tentative Propositions Offered for Your Consideration
1) Essence and Evolution - The Context
A narrative of the formation and evolution of the Universe:
Our universe is an open system. Its only input and output is pulsing enformal, dimensionless, infinite Space that we have called Essentia. Everything and every event in our universe owes its existence to the flow of Essentia. The qualities of Essentia define goodness, beauty and all virtues as well as create, form, direct and nourish all of the physical entities, attributes and events of our physical universe. In that sense, events are caused by values.
The primacy and postulate of Essentia:
The flowing input and output of Essentia unilaterally creates, nourishes and challenges all entities and events and shapes the evolution of all natural systems in our universe, non-linearly, turbulently, synergistically and stochastically in appearance. What Essentia inputs into our physical universe is creative and transmutative and what Essentia outputs from the universe is selective.
The universe is entirely shaped by two distinct, semi-connected evolutionary processes: the birth and evolution of open systems comprised solely of Essentia and, within these Essentia systems, the birth and evolution of open systems comprised of Space-Time-Energy-Matter (STEM).
Essentia systems create and drive all STEM systems in one-way causality. STEM systems are entirely affected by, yet never affect Essentia systems. Every STEM system is embedded in and is an open evolving subsystem of one or more Essentia supersystems.
The evolution of both Essentia systems and STEM systems happens through processes of highly non-linear and apparently stochastic change (transmutations) and selection.
A model of intelligence and consciousness:
Intelligence is a feature of all open systems. Intelligence has three functions in such open systems: Selecting input, directing conversion of throughput and selecting output. Intelligence, as a selective capacity, is the core organising feature of all sustained open systems.
Intelligence is also the core capacity that creates and maintains all the relationships among purely Essentia systems and of Essentia super-systems with their respective STEM subsystems.
Consciousness coexists with Essentia intelligence. It is a second-layer- or meta-intelligence, it is The Intelligence of intelligence. Consciousness selects a filtered and refined portion of those inputs, throughputs and outputs that have already been selected by intelligence. Consciousness exists (He, She or It is) while intelligence acts (He, She or It does). Consciousness is always personal, while intelligence acts personally or impersonally.
The functioning of consciousness in Essentia systems is markedly different from the functioning of consciousness in STEM systems. Essentia systems share some of their consciousness with STEM systems by “spotlighting” particular flows of intelligence. Inputs to STEM systems are outputs from their Essentia super-systems.
2) Evolution and Culture - The Challenge
Following we present a narrative of the formation and evolution of culture in the context of an evolving Universe that is created and shaped by the flow of Essentia.
Cultures are a special class of short-lived natural systems invented by some species of STEM entities. Cultures are adaptive technological and social experiments in which members of such cultures instrumentalise parts of nature, including other members of their culture. In other words, instrumentalisation is the conversion and use of some components of non-cultural natural systems (minerals, plants, animals and humans for example) to serve as tools for their members. Tools or media are invented as extensions of bodily and mental functions designed to enhance the efficiency and power of those functions.
Cultures are experiments centred on some form of technology, the development and use of tools and the social engineering needed to optimise the use of such tools by their members. Particularly, in larger and more complex societies, as we have known them, the kit of tools almost always includes members (coloniser) and non-members (colonised) of the culture.
The reduction of humans to tools requires both the user and the used to make fairly radical cognitive and emotional revisions of the social programming humans are born with. In that sense a culture is a limiting structure that can and often does degenerate into a self-serving system, becoming an end in itself, to the detriment of the capacity of its members to appreciate, embody and express Essentia values. This poses two different problems: (1) how to prevent this degenerative process of culture and (2) how to correct it, if it happens.
Cultural evolution proceeds through the myriad inventions of tools and of social practices (mutation) and their adoption and discard (selection). Cultural systems evolve much faster than the natural systems in which they are embedded. Cultural systems may or may never prove to be long-term adaptive experiments that can be sustainably integrated with the other, slower evolving natural systems in our physical universe.
3) Culture and Transcendence of Culture - The Adventure and two Solutions
Following we present a narrative of the transcendence of culture and the emergence of the wisdom needed to integrate our cultural systems with the evolution of the other STEM and Essentia systems in the Universe.
People’s use of tools, together with the social engineering needed to use humans as tools, presents the risk of overwriting and dulling (yet probably never obliterating) our genetic programming. Our wild and original genetic programming has evolved to enable us to appreciate and express Essentia Values. Instead of being integrated into the life of a mature adult, this wild or raw programming that infants are born with, is often marginalised by immersion in culture.
Transcending culture is an ongoing practice by means of which acculturated individuals sooner or later become aware of and take responsibility for continuously restoring themselves to a full functionality, consonant with the wild and raw programming they were born with, seamlessly integrating it with their cultural programming. To transcend culture is the first step in becoming, at once, the wildest possible cultured individual and the most cultured possible wild Individual, who is wilfully and consciously expressing Essentia Values.
Transcending culture as a daily practice begins a process that eventually enlivens awareness of the primacy and everyday function of Essentia as the creator and driver of all the natural systems in the Universe. As this enlivened awareness develops, it especially enables a person to appreciate fully the particular ways in which Essentia operates in the wild, un-acculturated environment, within individuals and within cultures.
People transcend culture through alternating and integrating a course of self-transcending processes we refer to as education and synergetic trans-education. These involve resources for individual transition and transformation that cultures provide to help their members first to become acculturated (education) and then to become wild again yet conscious of Essentia (synergetic trans-education) in a transcendental oscillatory complementarity of the expression of cultural, wild and Essentia Values
It is only when members of a culture first learn to transcend their own and the dominance of all other forms of culture in their lives, that a species can begin to integrate successfully the evolution of their cultures and their biological evolution, together with the evolution of other natural systems in our universe and most especially with the evolution of Essentia systems.
If human experiments with culture are to become sustainable, we will first undertake to lift the pall of preoccupations, assumptions and beliefs that culture itself, casts over our minds and lives. Release from the dark and heavy burden of an acculturated mind and heart will require more cultural wisdom instead of less education and culture. It will require that cultures place the highest value on wisdom itself and so foster self-transcending cultural practices and culture-transcending natural practices.
Transcending culture will be the first and most essential step by which, sound and successful cultures will eventually help their members, to become devoted in making wise use of their technology on which their cultures are operating based on Essentia Values. The first priority of these cultures will always remain the fostering of daily practices that promote transcendence by the members of the culture itself.
A monograph by Bob Walling
[email protected]
8/23/14
*Note: On the above date, I have assigned this monograph to the intellectual commons. Since it now resides in the public domain, this whole document or any part of it may be used or copied by anyone for any non-proprietary purposes whatever without requiring attribution or creating obligation to me.