Knowledge

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

The nature of the beast

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Either we think through nature or nature thinks through us – either way, nature gains the power of thought.

Part 1: Dualities

Our presence in nature goes to show that there is more to reality than the unseeing and impersonal. Something has changed, and if that change is natural, then nature now forms a duality that is both sensible and insensible. In this duality the body retains its own needs and predilections, though like the ‘tame’ beast it can be pressed into the service of larger causes. Likewise, the dualities of change raise our schemes and intentions into powers and perversions under the influence of an emergent knowledge, or at least our version of it. We presume to identify truths, defend principles and know ourselves by espousing something that is no thing, something we see as all the more real for being more than us – whereby basic drives and noble values come to co-exist in us, and nature. Thus there is a paradox at the heart of nature: we know and so a part of nature knows, and it seems that all we know is owed to an erstwhile nature that knows nothing.

Part 2: Possibilities
We are a part of a nature that is in a process of change, in the act of becoming something more than it was. So it is possible to see evolution as something happening to nature. However, whilst it is patently obvious that thought has a presence in the universe, we are loathe to conclude that nature thinks through us, or even that will power makes a fundamental difference. Nonetheless, we introduce possibilities in the form of purposes, meanings, goals and designs that change the face of nature. Then, as a part of nature, we embody convergences of possibilities, each acting on the other and building into changes that extend the vital facts of nature into burgeoning faculties. And as nature comes to perceive itself though us, so self-perception elevates the natural into the realms of a super-nature – because nature doesn’t behave like that at its lower levels. Meanwhile, there remains the fact of what we were and still are – as animals contending with the dilemmas of our pleasures and pains. Typically, we crave food as much for the sake of pleasure as hunger, yet we make sacrifices and put ourselves under pressure to accomplish ends which place our basic needs and desires in conflict with our higher aspirations.
Part 3: Realities
In the bigger picture, the incongruous presence of personal existence in an impersonal universe is indicative of a convergence of possibilities with different natures. Thus nature changes through a series of ‘quantum shifts’ whilst losing nothing of what it was. So here we are. We look to the origins of the universe in terms of ambient possibilities of a different nature to the observable laws of physics, yet downplay the more obvious presence of animate possibilities acting upon the austere laws of nature. Nevertheless, something has obviously changed and the best example of this change is ourselves. We are both animal and animus, and the brain straddles this duality: being the insensible source of sentience, the impersonal seat of personality, the dark root of illumination, the blind cause of choice. And the mysteries of the body are eclipsed by yet deeper mysteries of the ‘known mind’ by which we presume to master ourselves, for it remains evident that the stark aloofness of our crowning glory in logic and reason can lead us to acts of wanton brutality that far surpass the savage nature of the beast. Paradoxically, our intellectual rowess is no surety against ourselves; and logic is not everything – for the nature of reality is such that we act through the auspices of other natures, binding our choices – and reason can serve any master.

Mike Laidler

Presuming to know

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Philosophical discourse is not as it seems to the onlooker. Outwardly it appears to revolve around versions of belief; but in reality the whole point is to get beyond belief, which is why beliefs are seen to feature so prominently.

In fact it is impossible to progress philosophically until belief is examined by tackling the presumptions underlying what we think and know, ultimately by facing up to the extent of our presumptions behind everything – thereby to discover something paradoxical – that we can know nothing about the world that does not depend on making presumptions, but that we prefer to think otherwise, to believe in certainties for the sake of ‘making progress’.

Meanwhile, for those who believe that knowing is a matter of what they know, the unexamined life, or the version examined by others, remains their preferred choice.

Mike Laidler

What next?

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The past may be seen to predict the future for all solid-state elements in a mechanistic universe. This excludes the sub-elements of the quantum universe and the supra-elements of the sentient universe.

However, what is known of the quantum universe, in the context of the everyday physical reality that is ‘more real’ to us, is that the peculiarities of the former support, but don’t resemble the nature of the latter, which can be seen to exist in addition, ‘on top’ – in a supra-reality that now includes the fact of the seeing.

Only it seems that we have yet to learn this lesson with respect to the sentient universe regarding itself, a lesson that can only begin by recognising it as a reality known to be peculiar to the nature of itself – a reality as real as the peculiar nature of solid rock, which we also know is really not solid in a different reality.

Perhaps the difference is due to the diverging nature of reality, whereby what is and what ‘is next’ simultaneously occupy different realities. And as we learn that there is more to existence than either quantum or Newtonian physics can explain, we know that we can know it because of our first-hand experience of a peculiar reality of a different order – of knowing, learning and explanation in a reality that simultaneously occupies the physical universe, yet is not peculiar to it.

Mike Laidler

The problem of happiness

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The problem of happiness is that we have made it into a problem. Children are born with happiness in their being, which they systematically unlearn in learning to be happy.

There is no thing in the world that encapsulates happiness, apart from the things in the world said to make us happy. Thus ‘being happy’ is a construct that is conditional upon finding out how to be happy, which usually depends upon finding the things that make us happy – as if happiness is a thing to be found in the world.

Ironically, the quest to be happy can undermine our well-being on the premise there is something to be found that we do not have, as if it might flood into our lives to fill a vacuum – as if happiness is the experience of that it.

Unfortunately there is much sadness to behold in this quest for happiness – for those who need happiness to be defined for them will never find it on those terms.

Mike Laidler.

Translations

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Every word is a translation of a meaning, which we change by degrees when translating words into words, believing the words to be the source of meanings to be discovered. And so we find ourselves actively exploring what we have to say in the process of saying it.

Yet all the words ever stated and yet to be stated cannot encompass the meanings by which we bring them to life. And so we are able to debate interminably the meaning of what was said, sometimes admitting: ‘I think what I am saying is ….’.

Mike Laidler

A look at luck

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We all know what luck is, most of us have seen it in action and some of us may claim to have benefited from it, but it is no ‘it’.

In fact luck doesn’t exist, yet it does. It exists as a state of knowledge about the world and the facts in that world. It exists in the world as known, and in that world we see people being lucky and unlucky to varying degrees. However, knowledge is another ‘none-it’ in existence. Coincidentally, we can talk about what we know, point to the books that have changed what we know, and learn from what we are told. Nevertheless, things are not as they seem – yet so they are, given that the seeming is now a fact in action.

In fact luck, like the knowledge by which we assess it, operates in a metaphysical reality of existence and non-existence – a dual reality where there are both facts and non-facts, according to our comparisons – facts that are so different from one another that they bear no point of comparison, except by way of contrast. So it is also true to say that we make our own luck, knowing that, in truth, there is more to existence than all we can make of it.

In the same vein, there can be more to coincidence than all we can attribute to luck, chance or our knowledge of it, just as there is more to knowledge than all we can know of it at any one time. Perhaps we are ‘lucky’ to be able to know anything at all, given the reality of oblivion and ignorance in which it operates on the way to becoming something more than it was.

And who dares say what is real and not real in the world of coincidence, a world in which opposites come together.

Mike Laidler