So said Descartes. Who is he? Wikipedia tells us this:
The arrogance of the West calls Descartes the Father of Philosophy. “I” is his concept, encapsulated into an aphorism serving as the title of this Blog Post. It is this concept that comprises so much to which we in the West direct our study of philosophy.
As we learn more of the science of things, see so many new discoveries having consequence in understanding the Cosmology of existence in this, to observe that “I Think” and conclude from “I Am” looks a little like oversimplification.
Questions we need to ask of us and others are these:
Is that it? Is that all of it there is? Is it the mind I sense as mine doing the thinking or is it the brain in its bio-chemical functioning doing the job? Are they one and the same or different properties of being as part pf me? My brain dies when I do. Does my mind do likewise? If it continues where does it go? If it doesn’t why doesn’t it?
Is the mind more than this bio-chemical marvel in operation in our head? If so, if it is more than an anomaly of the function of a bio-chemical process, how did it become separate? How did it come to be? Did it come before our body materialized in our mother’s womb and/or the brain was formed in this process of gestation? Or, is the body but a portal, a conduit, a vessel for expression of the mind in this unique temporal dimension?
The scientists tell us about this complex Universe we occupy. That Universe is observed in part by our power of observation and conclusion. They describe how it is made up and how it functions in the dimensions of space and time. The scientists tell us of the constitution of matter, that matter of which we are aware, more matter of which we are unaware.
We see a striking similarity between the universe and the essential breakdown of matter into its component parts. Broken down these parts appear to consist of objects orbiting around an additional object in the middle. These orbiting groups of objects in turn orbit one around the other group in growing dimension, spinning out from the center of the first orbiting mass.
Does that refer to matter, particle, neutrons, quarks, waves, or does that relate to planets, stars, galaxies and universe, oh, and which Universe? Scientists now talk about more than one, the multi-universe, alternative universes, and parallel worlds.
The scientists then say the basic component of matter, particles or other smaller component parts, are really not those at all. They are in fact waves. They are movement that we observe at the given moment of time in which they move. As such we see them as something in place which in fact they are not. They are pulses of energy on the move. They’re composed of movement within a confined integrity within the passage of time.
The component parts aggregate together, namely, they consist of what we observe as a set mass characterized as a singular object. Within the power of our observation we recognize that object as a material object. It is the object as we observe it to be that makes up the spatial structure we identify as material. The object observed has far more properties than we observe. It is not material, only our reference point, that part observed by us is material. We see its observable component parts as one object existing outside of us. However, it exists only in our observation, nowhere else.
The essential part of property of an object we observe to be material is not material. The observation we make of it is how the brain, the bio-chemical part of us is programmed to account for the existence of it within that brain’s capacity to observe it in its existence.
The bottom line of what the scientists say is matter is not that (it is not matter).It is movement. What we see is illusion created by the pre-conditioning in our brain. They haven’t determined whether this pre-condition, this programming is the creation of the function of the brain, the influence of the mind or instilled by an outside source, the object itself or something beyond that, or some combination.
In the process of occupying a common environment where we are linked in communication one to the other in the passage of time, our brains are programmed to recognize non material objects as material objects in the same way. Therefore it seems in the sameness to each of us of all things seen, we believe it to be the same. To the extent that it is made up and confined within the parameters of its moment of movement it is the same seen by us as the same. Through the multiple ways we communicate with each other our brains learn to identify things observed in the same way.
The Cosmologists take a further step with the Scientists and by testing determine:
This object, this movement, whatever it is has in its existence is no more than our observation of it. This adds to the illusion. By testing they have determined the existence in space limited in time limited as movement in a moment of it as it is observed by a consciousness. More confounding: its place in space is not necessarily limited in its placement there; it can change in the process of observation of it.
The Schrödinger Cat Experiment demonstrates this.
Schrödinger’s Cat gives the best illustration of this. I discuss it in the foregoing blog post.
The Cat is in a box, which at first the cat is there, then it is not there, then it is there again.
It is surmised there are channels available to pass thru time and place to other times in places, forward, backward and laterally. For lack of a better term describing them they are called “Wormholes” the forward and backward feature of them could amount to time travel, lateral movement could be travel from one universe to another.
The same musing suggests there has to be more than one universe in existence to accommodate choice and change as naturally exercised by us. The explanations range around the topics of the exercise of free will, the results of choice, the relative nature of existence that is within our exercise of consciousness to see, like seeing or not seeing Schrödinger’s Cat. This is then extended from the act of consciousness coupled with the act of choice of one alternative in the exercise of free will over another, or by a predetermined cause, the choice of Yea in either and all events demands the generation into reality of its partner Nay.
The yea and nay being mutually exclusive it is then reasoned that the other happens, exists, in another universe. The effects of this kind of generation of course wears out the non-concept we have of infinity.
A writer named Robert Lanza
[i] takes the cosmology of space, the pathology of cognition and surmises within that context along with many other factors, like Schrödinger’s Cat, that the world is not as we believe it to be. He calls this his theory of Biocentrism.
Note the footnote following his name. In the reference I have included a cursory explanation of Biocentrism. The theory is essentially as follows: those things observed by us to be outside of us are not controlled by the confines of space and time as we believe them to be. Starting with the fact they are movement captured by us as stationary material in the instant of time we make our observation of them, they are as we observe and no more than the observation we make of them.
Although occupying the cosmology of what constitutes our existence and perhaps in some way the universe from which we are observing that existence, that which we observe is not necessarily bound by either time or space.
From there Lanza asserts the control we can exercise over what we observe by observing them and thereby choosing the characteristics in which we make our observation of them, thereby seeming to create them.
Deepak Chopra a kind of Renaissance Transcendentalist and New Wave Thinker speaks of our power over the objects outside of us much in the same way, however for other reasons. He takes what he believes to be the extrinsic properties of them and us and speaks of what can evoke from, between and within the communion of both.
In many ways this is not unlike the existential existence derived by the encounter between Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Much of the same thought permeates writing on Buddhism and premises in foundation from beliefs of other Eastern Systems of Philosophy and Thought.
The bottom line is this: boiled out so much of this is the same, not simple, but uniform in its basics.
The technically adept West arrogantly believes it has it all right. Science, Religion, Philosophy, it is all time limited material, serially evolved and or projected! All of the rules discovered about it with all of those yet to be discovered, absolutely determine it and by determining formulate it absolutely.
But then there is the East, the reverse or mirror image of the West in so much of this. The concepts of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc see things quite differently. I can only speak with a small amount of authority having studied Buddhism.
I was educated and trained in the Western tradition. I found Buddhism as an important subject of study after a lifetime of an existential search of “What’s it all About?” I could not find a complete answer in the Western Traditions.
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) prompted my introduction to what I have come to believe are the facts of what it is all about.
I arrived at knowledge of what my life has been all about by putting it together into memoir then stepping back and looking at it. In the memoir I wrote:
We Have a Plan
We seem to follow a plan as we live. Whose plan, what plan, where did we get it? I honestly do not know other than I know the plan is not mine. I know this because there are too many things in my life I would not have done, would not have planned to do, and am totally surprised by having done them.
I arrive at this conclusion in this way: I look at the results of this plan as I have lived it. I am pleased. I would not change the result in any way. At best, at each juncture of the plan, each event I encountered following it, I had the choice of accepting the direction in which I was urged or refusing to take that course. The times I have followed the plan I obtained the best result.
What I learned applied in the context of this topic is that my life included more than myself in the living of it. This is seen in the decisions I made, why I made them, and the purpose they showed in where these decisions took me. The end result was to my benefit, and in many ways was in spite of me were the choice to have been mine.
This discovery of mine is significant in this respect. A purposeful bias accompanies me in the exercise of my conscious interaction in my life. It seems the bias is the exercise of a power the source of which is not in me. This power seems active in all of us, guiding, directing and it challenges us.
The significance of this as it regards the topic of this essay has to do with recognizing a bias going on in the process of our conscious interacting in our world which is not singularly ours. It is as if there is a power active within us, patterning so much of what we are doing.
It is the presence of this power that can be seen in the way we think, the way we develop our powers of cognition and the how we interface our world using it.
We have the power to learn, the power to share, the power to make more of what we have in this process we use in confronting the world, interacting with it and with each other.
It seems like we are all programmed in the same way from birth to death in the use of our capacity for sentience and cognition. We use it in a practical way, in different ways through stages of our lives, and use it to survive within this strange framework of time and space in which we find ourselves.
I have discussed this process and proclivity in a number of blog posts previously. One of my first posts was
ESSAY: LIMITS BY DEFINITION JANUARY 14, 2009. Click on it to read it.
In this essay I speak of reality and interacting in what we sense it to be. Centering on how we interact using the marvelous machine we know as our brain we learn with it, store what we learn, make short cuts to remember what we learned and extrapolate the data assembled into a more meaningful whole from which we go on learning.
It is fascinating looking at the pragmatic way we use this power that is ours, use it for our purposes and expedite the process doing so.
ONLY THE MOMENT IS OURS TO DO is an essay posted on
April 25, 2009 discusses the instantaneousness of time in which we act and the overall plan choreographing the act with all of the other acts linked to it.
The conclusion reached in that essay was this:
Retrospective view is the one insight given us from which we can learn something. When I look back I see this:
• Everything that happened follows a direct course linked to the events which led to it. One after another they all connect. In this way these previous events do influence the subsequent events.
• It is as if they form a pattern. A pattern I have had little or no hand in formulating.
• So many of the events are such that there is no way I would have chosen them to happen. They are no more directed by me than was my birth to my parents in the time frame it occurred with the gender choice for me as I entered this life.
• The degree to which I stepped back out of the way eased the process of the happening of these events. The extent in which I could turn it over, let it be, go with the flow, the easier time the process has reaching its result.
• As each of these events transpired, one following necessarily on the other, the pattern of them produced in my view a favorable result. Not a pattern I might have chosen. But, not something I would now choose to turn aside. I like the result in spite of what I would have had it be.
From the foregoing I have come to believe my life has occurred according to plan, not my plan, but a plan, that flowed along on its own terms. I do not know who set the plan, where it came from; whether or not set in some dimension beyond this one in which I find myself, none of it is of material consequence to me.
What is significant about it is this: It is in this way it seems to happen. Anything I have done to defeat it backs up and beats me. It occurs in spite of me. When I take control of my moments and try to direct my response it makes it harder for the natural consequence of my moments to occur. Having 74 years of living this experience I am convinced this is how it works!
Lanza argues that the primacy of consciousness features in the work of Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and Bergson.[7] He sees this as supporting the central claim that what we call space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than external physical objects.[8] Lanza argues that biocentrism offers insight into several major puzzles of science, including Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the double-slit experiment, and the fine tuning of the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe as we perceive it.[2]According to a Discover magazine article adapted from Lanza's book, “biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of physics, as scientists have been trying to do sinceEinstein’s unsuccessful unified field theories of eight decades ago.”[9] Lanza's theory of biocentrism has seven principles:[10] 1. What we perceive as reality is a process that involves our consciousness. An "external" reality, if it existed, would by definition have to exist in space. But this is meaningless, because space and time are not absolute realities but rather tools of the human and animal mind. 2. Our external and internal perceptions are inextricably intertwined. They are different sides of the same coin and cannot be divorced from one another.
3. The behavior of subatomic particles, indeed all particles and objects, is inextricably linked to the presence of an observer. Without the presence of a conscious observer, they at best exist in an undetermined state of probability waves. 4. Without consciousness, "matter" dwells in an undetermined state of probability. Any universe that could have preceded consciousness only existed in a probability state. 5. The structure of the universe is explainable only through biocentrism. The universe is fine-tuned for life, which makes perfect sense as life creates the universe, not the other way around. The "universe" is simply the complete spatio-temporal logic of the self.
6. Time does not have a real existence outside of animal-sense perception. It is the process by which we perceive changes in the universe.
7. Space, like time, is not an object or a thing. Space is another form of our animal understanding and does not have an independent reality. We carry space and time around with us like turtles with shells. Thus, there is no absolute self-existing matrix in which physical events occur independent of life. P
