MAKING SENSE OF INNER SENSE
‘Terra cognita’ is terra incognita. It is difficult to find someone not taken aback and fascinated by the incomprehensible but indisputable fact: there are material systems which are aware of themselves. Consciousness is self-cognizing code. During homo sapiens’s relentness and often frustrated search for self-understanding various theories of consciousness have been and continue to be proposed. However, it remains unclear whether and at what level the problems of consciousness and intelligent thought can be resolved. Science’s greatest challenge is to answer the fundamental question: what precisely does a cognitive state amount to in physical terms?
Albert Einstein insisted that the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple and can be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. When one thinks about the complexities which present themselves in modern physics and even more so in the physics of life, one may wonder whether Einstein really meant what he said. Are we to consider the fundamental problem of the mind, whose understanding seems to lie outside the limits of the mind, to be essentially simple too? Knowledge is neither automatic nor universally deductive. Great new ideas are typically counterintuitive and outrageous, and connecting them by simple logical steps to existing knowledge is often a hard undertaking. The notion of a tensor was needed to provide the general theory of relativity; the notion of entropy had to be developed before we could get full insight into the laws of thermodynamics; the notion of information bit is crucial for communication theory, just as the concept of a Turing machine is instrumental in the deep understanding of a computer. To understand something, consciousness must reach an adequate intellectual level, even more so in order to understand itself. Reality is full of unending mysteries, the true explanation of which requires very technical knowledge, often involving notions not given directly to intuition. Even though the entire content and the results of this study are contained in the eight pages of the mathematical abstract, it would be unrealistic and impractical to suggest that anyone can gain full insight into the theory that presented here after just reading abstract.
In our quest for knowledge we are exploring the remotest areas of the macrocosm and probing the invisible particles of the microcosm, from tiny neutrinos and strange quarks to black holes and the Big Bang. But the greatest mystery is very close to home: the greatest mystery is human consciousness. The question before us is whether the logical brain has evolved to a conceptual level where it is able to understand itself.
The brain is the seat of the mind, mindware. Mindware is a ware which is aware of itself. What enables this in a way unremarkable and quite ugly object to produce the phenomenal effect of thought and consciousness is a tantalizing puzzle of cosmology. As opposed to the straightforward and clear definitions of software and hardware offered by computer science, mindware is the embodiment of the paradox. If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t. Are we able to think because our brain is sufficiently complex or is the brain complex because we think? Is there a point where the brain ends and the mind begins or the mind-brain is one undivided ware? These are fundamental questions. We live in a challenging and exciting time in the science of the brain. All the indications are that the evolution of self-consciousness is at a turning point. After a long and frustrating search, a scientific picture of the mind and its place in the natural order has begun to emerge. Many diverse fields, from mathematical logic and cognitive science to computer theory, fundamental physics and topology, are contributing to the new postbiological understanding that consciousness is wholly natural and physical.
Mental phenomena are a bundle of contradictions. The attempt to localize a thought in the brain strongly resembles the attempt to localize a quantum particle which happens to be everywhere and nowhere. Is the brain classical or more like a renormalized atom, an electron, a neutrino, a quark or a macroscopic nucleus? How many times have we thought that we have finally unlocked the puzzle and solved the great mystery? How many times have philosophers and scientific visionaries proclaimed: “consciousness is understood, consciousness is explained”? Yet with each new theoretical advance or technological leap forward, consciousness repeatedly vanishes like a dream, like a mirage in a desert, so desirable but unattainable and constantly shifting away from the thirsty traveller. Isn’t it time we understood why? Isn’t it time we realised that we are on a journey which may never end, that the incompleteness of consciousness is fundamental, not just the result of the deficiencies of the current level of science. Consciousness is knowledge, and gaining knowledge of consciousness inevitably changes consciousness itself, perpetuating forever this unending loop of circular causation. Is this the fundamental limitation we must accept? Could there be only temporary understanding of consciousness? A theory of the mind can never be completed: it necessarily will give way to the next theory, and this change is in itself the only theory of consciousness one can ever possibly hope to achieve.
In the tension area between the finite and the infinite, between facts and illusions, of the two great extremes of modem philosophy: Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum and Nietzsche’s God is dead, we are still trying to understand consciousness but resolution is nowhere in sight. Again and again we find ourselves in a closed conceptual box, from which there is no escape. We can guess a great deal, learn some truths, but never the whole truth about consciousness. Unlike in the Einstein’s great gedanken experiment, we cannot get out of the ‘lift’, even theoretically. Only help from outside the box may help us to solve the puzzle. For theology and religion it is God. For a physicist it is the power of mathematics, with its, in the candid words of Eugene Wigner, ‘unreasonable effectiveness in the natural sciences’. A worst-case scenario would be if self-understanding is not part of the human equation and only contact with another nonterrestrial intelligence, if we were ever to establish such contact, could enable us truly to understand ourselves.
I’ve studied consciousness as long as I can remember myself. As a matter of fact, we all do, we are all researchers into consciousness, into SELF. Man’s introspection begins as soon as the cognitive function is installed through the child’s rather trivial but miraculous social development from no-mind to mind or, as some would prefer, from less to more mind. This is an endless quest. Those who nurture the illusion that one day we will reach a total understanding, the full truth of consciousness, and those who claim to have already done so, could both be profoundly at fault. Just as the quantum uncertainty principle sets up a fundamental limit on the observation process, consciousness is essentially and fundamentally incomplete. The great paradox and the beauty of SELF is that it can and does gain knowledge of itself, but it does so at the expense of increasing ignorance and uncertainty, leaving in tatters the gains that were made,...
