Consciousness

The Sound of Silence

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Science is a reality proceeding to its completeness through the realisation of possibilities and the discovery of what is there. A prerequisite for this exercise is the capacity for knowing which the knower uniquely brings to the facts under study in a reality now extended by a new and different kind of realisation – one that takes place in the mind.

This process of completion began long before we invented science. Hearing a sound extends the reality from its physical state into a co-existing mental state. It is futile to argue whether the one or the other is the more real, they both add up a new reality – a reality that has already changed with the advent of its perception. We now know that we occupy both versions of this new reality – knowing that the physical waveform of sound is not everything to know, that perception brings sound to life and without that living perception the ‘sound’ remains in the silence of its physical state. Meanwhile the forests may fall and the mountains crumble without the full reality of sound having made its appearance.

Scientists know that the reality of knowledge is incomplete without an objective basis, yet tend to overlook the fact that the objective basis is incomplete within a wider reality that is known to obtain – that the world is incomplete in the oblivion of its physical completeness without the presence of a knowing realisation to change what happens next.

Mike Laidler

 

The consciousness uncertainty principle

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Consciousness is bigger than anything we can set-up in consciousness as the form of our awareness.  

 

We are certain that we are conscious and yet we cannot discern its nature in any preconscious state of nature.  Nor can we prove that such preconscious states relate to the fact of consciousness without relying implicitly on the very fact we are trying to establish explicitly in terms of those other facts.  In other words, we can know the essential nature of consciousness only from within and must start from that knowledge in order to assess any fact about its nature and origin.


Furthermore, every time we probe the form of our consciousness in order to find out something new about it we alter the state of our awareness in the wake of our discovery – we generate a new state of consciousness, so ensuring that there is always something new to learn.  And if, as it would seem, consciousness remains bigger than any fact we can determine about it, then our awareness of that paradoxical fact holds the key to expanding our horizons.   


Mike Laidler