[Image: I’m not 100% sure I know what this depicts, but have to admit that it got my attention when I saw it on Flickr, courtesy of an account run by someone styling themselves as “Halloween HJB.” (This Flickr user seems to specialize in photographing vintage prints and other images, and then cleaning up and otherwise enhancing these photos for visitors’ appreciation. I’m reproducing it here under that user’s Creative Commons license; thank you! For more background about the artist and the subject, see the note at the foot of this post.]
Thanks, as ever, to whiskey river: lighting my way for over 20 years of blogging, on Fridays and otherwise.
From whiskey river’s commonplace book:
Quantum Consciousness
I believe that if we try to examine the nature of our consciousness we will find at its basis it exhibits quantum like qualities. Seen from a distant, large scale and external perspective, we seem to be able to structure our consciousness in an exact and precise way, articulating thoughts and linking them together into long chains of arguments and intricate structures. Our consciousness can build complex images through its activity and seems to have all the qualities of predictability and solidity. The consciousness of a talented architect is capable of designing and holding within itself an image of large solid structures such as great cathedrals or public buildings. A mathematician is capable of inwardly picturing an abstract mathematical system, deriving its properties from a set of axioms. A solo cellist is able to hold the whole musical structure of a Elgar’s Cello Concerto or Bach’s Cello Suites in his or her consciousness when preparing for a performance.
In this sense our consciousness might appear as an ordered and deterministic structure, capable of behaving like and being explicable in the same terms as other large scale structures in the world. However, this is not so. For if we, through introspection, try to examine the way in which we are conscious, in a sense to look at the atoms of our consciousness, this regular structure disappears. Our consciousness does not actually work in such an ordered way. We only nurture an illusion if we try to hold to the view that our consciousness is at root an ordered deterministic structure. True, we can create the large scale designs of the architect, the abstract mathematical systems, a cello concerto, but anyone who has built such structures within their consciousness knows that this is not achieved by a linear deterministic route.
Our consciousness is at its root a maverick, ever moving, jumping from one perception, feeling, thought, to another. We can never hold it still or focus it at a point for long. Like the quantum nature of matter, the more we try to hold our consciousness to a fixed point, the greater the uncertainty in its energy will become. So when we focus and narrow our consciousness to a fixed center, it is all the more likely to suddenly jump with a great rush of energy to some seemingly unrelated aspect of our inner life. We all have such experiences each moment of the day. As in our daily work we try to focus our mind upon some problem only to suddenly experience a shift to some other domain in ourselves, another image or emotional current intrudes then vanishes again, like an ephemeral virtual particle in quantum theory.
Those who begin to work upon their consciousness through some kinds of meditative exercises will experience these quantum uncertainties in the field of consciousness in a strong way.
In treating our consciousness as if it were a digital computer or deterministic machine after the model of 19th century science, I believe we foster a limited and false view of our inner world. We must now take the step towards a quantum view of consciousness, recognizing that at its base and root our consciousness behaves like the ever flowing sea of the sub-atomic world. The ancient hermeticists pictured consciousness as the Inner Mercury. Those who have experienced the paradoxical way in which the metal Mercury is both dense and metallic and yet so elusive, flowing and breaking up into small globules, and just as easily coming together again, will see how perceptive the alchemists were of the inner nature of consciousness, in choosing this analogy. Educators who treat the consciousness of children as if it were a filing cabinet to be filled with ordered arrays of knowledge are hopelessly wrong.
(Adam McLean [source])
From elsewhere:
We don’t think that a camera or a computer has an experience of seeing blue even though they also process light waves and can distinguish between blue and other wavelengths of light. And the same goes for plants of course. Plants distinguish between different wavelengths of light and the further processing of these distinctions affects their subsequent behavior. But we assume that plants, cameras, and computers can do all of this without having a felt experience. And so the mystery is, again, why do some organisms have a felt experience of that processing? I often use a worm as an example because we don’t know if worms are conscious. They have brains and central nervous systems, but it’s not at all clear whether the lights are on for a worm—whether it feels like something to be a worm. But if it does, it’s obviously very minimal and nothing like our human experience…
[Quoting philosopher Rebecca Goldstein:]Sure, consciousness is a matter of matter. What else could it be? Since that’s what we are. But still, the fact that some hunks of matter have an inner life is unlike any other properties of matter we have yet encountered, much less accounted for. The laws of matter in motion can produce this. All this? Suddenly matter wakes up and takes in the world.
(Annaka Harris [source; the “audio documentary” from which this is excerpted is here — Harris’s book on the subject is here, and elsewhere])
…and:
My high school trigonometry, physics, and calculus teacher once bent my mind with a discussion of fundamental properties of the universe: things which could be “measured,” sort of, but which were not readily definable. These included concepts like length, time, mass, and so on. The best you could do was to “define” them by their synonyms; you could say that length is the same thing as distance, for example. Sometimes you could “define” them more precisely in terms of one another — for instance, “length is the distance an [object, etc.] travels in a given unit of time.” But when you tried in pure terms to define “time,” say, you were stuck by the limitations of human language to grasp physical realities.
(For what it’s worth, the Merriam-Webster site as of this writing says that time is “the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues.” Haha, yeah, right, M-W — nice try, trying to slip that simple synonym period past us by embedding it in a forest of heavy and altogether vague verbiage.)
I’ve often wondered if consciousness, too, might be a fundamental property of certain forms of matter, and this seems to be what Annaka Harris is getting at. As with length and time and so on, it seems to be inseparable from the “thing” which expresses the property of consciousness…
And yet, it’s also something more — something other — isn’t it? Are the contents of this particular jar the same as the jar itself? If you take away the jar, why should the goop inside vanish?
I dunno. I can’t see it, myself.
(JES)
__________
About the image: The original print apparently dated to 1920, by a Spanish (born in Puerto Rico) artist named José Cuchy Arnau. It seems to have been an illustration for an early 20th-century pulp detective story featuring the popular (fictional) private investigator Nat Pinkerton; the title of the print (if not the story), apparently, was “Dinner with a Head.” Most of that information — including a capsule bio of Arnau, and an unretouched photo of the illustration — I found here. (The page is in Spanish, but Google Translate seems to do a decent job of converting it for us monolingual types.) At a guess, that’s our PI hero skulking behind the curtain while the grisly activity in the foreground unfolds.
As for Nat Pinkerton himself, there’s a kind of skimpy Wikipedia article (mostly about a film of a Nat Pinkerton story)… but this page at Jesse Nevins’s online “Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes” is much more entertaining. I mean, come on:
Pinkerton intervenes to solve the conspiracy behind President McKinley’s assassination. Pinkerton fights “Chinese Karl,” the Yellow Peril lord of New York’s Chinatown, fights pirates on the Hudson, a killer mesmerist, a rogue lion tamer, Oka-Yuma, an Evil Surgeon, a thinly-disguised Irene Adler, nihilists in Chicago, a monstrous altered hound courtesy of the Dr. Moreau-like Mad Scientist Doctor Myann, a murderous orangutan, the Big-Headed Dwarf Genius Yellow Peril Li Lo Tsching, a U-boat pirate, a lethal Lupin, a subterranean city inhabited by the descendants of Lost Race escaped slaves, and Professor Fox, Pinkerton’s Moriarty.
Quite a guy, huh?
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