Brahman and Idea

We can equate God with the sum collection of all self-awareness.

The trouble with imagining God as a personality working with physical reality is that in anthropomorphizing Him in that way, we trivialize Him. I have wondered about arguing that we are made in God’s image, and so we must resemble Him, but the resemblance must not be so strong as to include our weakness. No, we resemble God in our self-reflective consciousness.

God, therefore, looks out at us through every pair of human eyes we encounter. The owner of those eyes may or may not be aware of her own God consciousness, but she is conscious and she does have the capability to self-reflect, and so she carries God consciousness.

Sufis say that humanity is the lens through which God observes the world, a beautiful way to put it.

 For a long time I have been wondering, why would God need a lens? Why would God need the eyes of people?

The secret is that there is no reality. Reality is not real. We cannot prove that anything exists outside of our senses and so for all intents and purposes there is nothing outside our sensory sphere. Sure, physicists and mathematicians have proved that there are ten dimensions to reality, but those dimensions exist only as idea to them. And so, since we have no outside-of-senses reality to back them up, our sensory experiences are just as transparent, just as flimsy, convincing only because that is part of the construct.  

Would it be fair to say, then, that reality exists because God wishes it to exist? Yes, sort of, and yes, duh. An infinite consciousness is capable of conceiving infinitely many ideas, many of which (infinitely many) are capable of self-reflection and self-reference. Here, then, we have our multi-verse, hypothesized by quantum physics. I need to think about this more, but it seems right to suggest that a self-referent idea or program needs something to refer back to, something complicated enough to support self-reflection. Since to be truly self-reflective requires the capability of an infinite regress, that complicated structure must needs be very complicated. For such an idea to be so capable, it must appear to have some durability, and, hence we have reality with people in it. 

Note that this is all in the realm of idea. We think we are living a hard life, but we and everything "around" us is idea.

The Word was in the Beginning because self-reference has something of a linguistic nature, even if it is in the form of some sort of symbol.

As this is just the beginning of a train of thought that began for me today, I need time to flesh out some of the assumptions contained in my argument.

Surely others have thought the same thoughts as I express here, and the scriptures of many spiritual disciplines treat of the same concept. I just need to figure out the correlations. I am putting together some pieces I have not seen put together before.

For what it's worth, I picture idea springing from Brahman like plumes of snow blow from a great mountain, like the whorls of tiny cyclones spin away from a whistle. Not creating the snow, not making the sound, but its nature and their nature somehow the same.

I know, I know! I thought I was going to be posting my art on this blog and all I am posting is this dang philosophy!

So now you know. This is my internal world, all I really care about.

The Photo Essay That Doesn't Belong

Here is a little photo essay presenting my daughter Angela and me.

It is important in a photograph to depict something about the deeper feelings of the subject. Here you can see that Angela and I are serious contemplators of Universal Truth.

But it is important also to be lighthearted. In this next photo Angela smiles to think of our fortunate position at the intersection of quantum inspired multi-verses.

Angela says, “C’mon Dad, look into the many versions of your future. Look deep, deep.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “Work it!”

 “Now you get it, Dad. You can come back now!”

We showed these to my wife Ann, Angela’s mom, and she said that they were not appropriate for this blog. I am very grateful for that comment, because it gives me the perfect excuse to say:

Yes they are!

If this blog is going to be authentic, it must treat of more than philosophical ruminations, more than the thought behind the production of art, more than all that high falutin’ serious stuff. This blog is a bit of my art, a performance piece if you will.

To exemplify its own theme, this blog must include what is real to this consciousness—even emotion, as in the post “Betrayal;” or silliness; or odd subjects that don’t seem to belong. If it is perceptible to this witness, it belongs.

This post is another example of the self-reflective, thanks to Ann’s remark and my opportunity to respond. And this paragraph is self-reflective on its self-reflection. As such, it epitomizes the very ascending spiral of self-awareness that I have been saying underlies everything meaningful that I do.

A computer could not do this and mean it. If a computer could do this, still it could not talk about being able to do this. Or else about doing that which just preceded this sentence.

A human composed this essay. And, though these words are pretty good evidence that a self-aware creature is experiencing himself in their production, there can be no proof for the reader. A computer can be programmed to mimic anything. A person, not self-aware, can say anything she is taught to say. But there is no need to present proof. I am observing the proof. I am the proof.

As such, I am inaccessible to you, who are your own proof, because just now you remembered to be self-aware.

Angela asks, “Are you going to tell what really happened when we took those pictures?’

No.

Baseballs and Underpants

I promised to explain Russell’s set of all sets that are not members of themselves. This is great for me because I really have to struggle to make it clear, and I really enjoy a challenge.

Let’s limit ourselves to one room. In our kid’s bedroom we find four baseballs. A mathematician would call this collection of baseballs a set. This bunch of baseballs is not itself a baseball, so this set of baseballs is not a member of the set of baseballs.

Now we turn to underpants, stacked neatly in the dresser drawer. Is this stack, or set or underpants itself a pair of underpants? Of course not.

We do the same for socks, shirts, toy cars, pencils and paper clips until we empty the room.

Being of an artistic nature, we make an installation in the local art museum, and in the space the museum gives us, we stack the baseballs, underpants, socks, shirts, toy cars, pencils and paper clips. This fascinating artistic installation is a collection of sets—a set of sets. None of these sets is a member of itself—the group of toy cars is not a toy car—so the installation is the set of all sets (from our kid’s bedroom) that are not members of themselves.

But wait a minute. This installation, this set of sets—is it a member of itself? Well, it is a set, a collection of piles of underpants and paper clips, piles that are not themselves underpants or paperclips.

So what do we decide? If this is a set that deserves to be included in a description of the installation, then that would mean it was a member of the installation—a member of itself. But if that is the case, it can’t be in our installation, because the installation includes only sets that do not contain themselves.

On the other hand, if we banish the set of sets, then it is a set that does not contain itself, and so it is included—only to be excluded.

This argument dashed the hopes of mathematicians who set out to find and prove all theorems. And don’t feel too bad if you had trouble following the argument above. The implications drove some mathematicians crazy.

Every language, including mathematics and logic, has a sentence that says, “This sentence is false.”

Russell found a way out of his paradox by separating logical statements into types. 

A self-referent declaration is a different kind of assertion from true theorems and from false statements. A simple logic program would not know what to do with such a statement, but would most likely get tangled in an endless loop. We ourselves see that endless loop starting up, and that is the difference. We are capable of transcending endless loops, puzzling over them, and laughing them off. The computer has to run around in circles for a while until its software says, “That’s enough of that. Stop now.”

What does all this have to do with you and me? We self-aware creatures are unique the same way. Our self-reference just does not fit in a physical world of simple logic. When we are tootling along and not reflecting on the quality of our awareness, we fit in the physical universe. We are doing the same mental work as a computer would.

But our self-awareness, our ability to remember ourselves—when we exercise it—lifts us right out of the world.

Descartes argued that there were two types of entity—mind and body. This idea is called the Cartesian duality, and contemporary philosophers love to refute it with all sorts of models of consciousness based on structure. And they are right, and they completely miss the point.

It is true that there is no real split between mind and body. In theory a computer can do everything a mind can do, the vast majority of the time. But my self-awareness, my experience of my awake state, when I exercise it, is absolutely different from the sensible world. (You would say the same thing—I hope!—about yours.)

The only way the reductionist philosophers can be right—and they may well be—is way, way spookier than the duality they are trying to escape.

I love this stuff.