Faster Brains

A while ago I saw an article about a gene discovered to have a relationship to dyslexia. The wrong form of it seems to entail difficulties in processing visual and aural information. Most interesting was that our nearest great ape cousins don't seem to have this gene at all. Got me thinking. Dyslexia is a problem processing sounds and symbols. Apes don't have the gene necessary to do so. Maybe we needed this to be able to do language. What do you need to do language? You need the ability to process incoming data quickly. Lots of animals use sounds. Apes can understand or use simple words and symbols. But to speak/understand/read a language you need to process lots of often complex information quickly. So, to become human we needed to have our mental processing speed increased. Now, what is the speed of thought? It does not make sense to understand consciousness as bound by any speed limits short of those imposed by quantum reality. I.E., if the information could be presented to consciousness at light speed, we'd understand it. So, the limitations on processing must be biological in our cases. This gene may have unlocked faster processor speeds.

Or maybe it was about providing a substrate -- or format -- for a storage medium so the incoming information could be assimilated more quickly and usefully. Language is necessary for our human form of consciousness. Words condense thought and perception into manageable blocks and grammar allows them to relate meaningfully, indeed to create meaning. Perhaps this gene in someway provides the bio-chemical structure for storing and manipulating structured bits of information and the "programs" for storing and using them?

Consciousness and Creation

In the beginning there was someone, someone in the sense of consciousness, in the sense of intending or being able to intend. Either one of many such or alone, though if one of many, only this one having been the cause of our universe and being knowable by us. This consciousness caused or is coterminous with what we understand, looking back at it, as the Big Bang and the quantum substratum from which it emerged and from which emerged the material universe of which we are part. Act of creation itself, of the material universe, must be considered, from the point of view of the universe as a whole, as being timeless. For consciousness, everything that was or will be was present simultaneously. The physical manifestation of this is that the first light of the Big Bang, traveling at the speed of light, and therefore from that perspective without time duration, fills everywhere along its path instantaneously and simultaneously and thus exists at the very moment across eternity and everywhere. Within that context, creation is an act of constructing a grand cosmic stage for consciousness to enter into and play a myriad of parts as it buds off each individual consciousness, as it became particularized. Shakespeare presented the world as a "stage" in exactly this way. Perhaps he too is in some sense a “son of god”, someone with direct access to the larger perspective of the grand consciousness, giving us insight into the perspective of the one consciousness of which all others are pieces of. Raises too, then, the possibility that the whole universe is a diversion, a very complicated diversion to keep One occupied for all eternity, whatever that means. Nevertheless, leaves us particulars the traditional question of the meaning of life, our lives. Western culture suggests meaning is created and purpose is to understand, master, control and change reality. Other cultures see nature as something to be venerated, respected, and/or entered into in a cooperative manner. What accounts for the West’s distinctive answer to this question? Is our approach good or bad, verdict is still out. But if our world is this diversion, then we in the West -- in being ourselves intent in writing the play -- are more active participants in it. We give this diversion its spice. If “god” can be said to speak more clearly, more “actively” at the micro-level in which we live in the West -- from the Jews and Greeks on -- it is also true that we perhaps more needed the message of the other “son”, Christ, of love and concern for others, to rein us in and draw our attention to the good. Maybe the one consciousness has made many or all possible stages.

Life in America

We can divide daily existence into three modes: 1. the time we spend directly and immediately immersed in the world in some specific activity such as working, fishing, driving, planting, reaping, rowing, watching TV, whatever; 2. the "personal" time we spend in reflection, self-observation, thought, or just plain mindlessness; 3. the time we spend with others, in social interaction of all sorts. Often we are in all three modes at once, like talking to a fellow worker while running the forklift or losing ourselves through hours of flipping through the TV stations with a friend.

Life in modern America provides a neutral context for our existence; neutral in the sense that the space exists for whatever we need or choose to do. The activities we pursue are constrained by what it is we physically do as work and to make our way through the day and by what is available to us. But our activities are slotted into our existence pretty much free of taboos, traditions, history and culture. The biggest determining factor here is our personal wealth (which offers lesser or greater variety of needful and possible activities) and the current technology. Our leisure time -- for example -- is now often watching TV. Before TV, we passed our mindless leisure time in other ways, though there was probably less of it because with increasing modernity, we have in general gained more leisure time, as well as more ways to use it. Indeed, what we DO is subject to constant change as a result of “progress.” We work with and entertain ourselves through an ever-expanding number of technologies and devices. Yet, and here finally is my point, while what we DO can look pretty "modern" -- because what we do it with is “cutting edge” -- the neutral context in which we live allows us to continue to live in a variety of traditional and self enclosed environments when we are in our personal and social modes. That is to say, we may drive cars, watch DVDs, and play video games but we still live within an assemblage of patterned existences that goes straight back to the medieval life of town and country. Many of us are still peasants.

Truth

In the bare-bones of things there lay veins of truth, and the veins run together.

Reading Cosmology

I don't really understand the equations, but I think I get the gist. Einstein was one switched-on fellow. His insights go way beyond what he is famous for. Seems he also laid the groundwork for modern cosmology by postulating that the universe is homogenous and isotropic. That means that on a large enough scale, it has uniform density and no direction. If this is true, the universe is a bound but expanding surface. Like the surface of a balloon that expands as you blow it up but remains a sphere. Observations, by Hubble and others since, confirm that the universe is homogenous and isotropic. Einstein apparently reasoned that it would be absurd for the universe to -- in my words, not his -- be doing any "work," i.e. to have a non-uniform density (what would keep it or make it non-uniform but "work") or to be "going anywhere" (moving where?). Physics is confirming his cosmological constant and an accelerating expansion. He spent the last years of his life working on a unified theory that may be worth taking a closer look at.

Can stars think? They do shine.

What is consciousness’ role in quantum events? Is it creator or arbitrator of events which we know as quantum probability? What would it be like to be that bit of consciousness attached to a rock or a mountain, or a quantum particle? What is an experience of the interactions of such things over their “lifetime” if indeed consciousness adheres to such things? Does level of organization determine what consciousness adheres to or does everything have a bit of consciousness in it.

Interaction is the data of consciousness.

What sort of sensory interfaces might there be for stars? Magnetic fields?

To Expand a Bit

One day wondering down Glover-Archibold trail, I took my musing on cosmology to the point of asking the most basic question: why is there something rather than nothing? After giving this some thought, I realized that nothing cannot give rise to something all by itself. The Big Bang by itself explains nothing. And to suppose something always existed doesn't answer the question of why it exists. Much more straightforward to suppose that someone existed. Nothing cannot bring into existence something, only someone can do that, can intend that. This train of thought follows on my earlier musings on consciousness, which obviously exists but also seems to lead back to a someone rather than something. The most straightforward story to tell is that either the universe -- cosmos -- of matter and consciousness simply always was or there was a consciousness that always was that at some point intended that there be matter. What would that consciousness or any consciousness be when conscious only of itself or of nothing?