{"id":8255,"date":"2018-09-12T10:20:08","date_gmt":"2018-09-12T18:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8255"},"modified":"2022-03-25T08:14:14","modified_gmt":"2022-03-25T16:14:14","slug":"the-spit-brain-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8255","title":{"rendered":"The Split-brain Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

An extended Nowa Fantaskyka<\/i> remix.<\/p>\n

The year is 1982. I read Isaac Asimov’s newly-published Foundation’s Edge<\/em> with a sinking heart. Here is the one of Hard-SF’s Holy Trinity writing\u2014 with a straight face, as far as I can tell\u2014 about the “consciousness” of rocks and trees and doors<\/em>, for Chrissakes. Isaac, what happened?<\/em> I wonder. Conscious <\/em>rocks? Are you going senile? <\/em><\/p>\n

No, as it turned out. Asimov had simply discovered physical panpsychism: a school of thought that holds that everything<\/em>\u2014 rocks, trees, electrons, even Donald Trump\u2014 is conscious to some degree. The panpsychics regard consciousness as an intrinsic property of matter, like mass and charge and spin. It’s an ancient belief\u2014 its roots go all the way back to ancient Greece\u2014but it has recently found new life among consciousness researchers. Asimov was simply ahead of his time.<\/p>\n

I’ve always regarded panpsychism as an audacious cop-out. Hanging a sign that says “intrinsic” on one of Nature’s biggest mysteries doesn’t solve anything; it merely sweeps it under the rug. Turns out, though, that I’d never really met audacious<\/em> before. Not until I read “The Universe in Consciousness<\/a>” by Bernardo Kastrup, in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.<\/p>\n

Kastrup goes panpsychism one better. He’s not saying that all matter is conscious. He’s saying that all matter is consciousness\u2014<\/em> that consciousness is all there is<\/em>, and matter is just one of its manifestations. “Nothing exists outside or independent of cosmic consciousness,” he writes. “The perceivable cosmos is in consciousness, as opposed to being conscious.” Oh, and he also says the whole universe suffers from Multiple Personality Disorder.<\/p>\n

It reads like some kind of flaky New Age metaphor. He means it literally, though.<\/p>\n

He calls it science.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Just as plausible, apparently.<\/p><\/div>\n

Even on a purely local level, there are reasons<\/a> to be skeptical<\/a> of MPS (or DID, as it’s known today: Dissociative Identity Disorder<\/em>). DID diagnoses tend to spike in the wake of new movies or books about multiple personalities, for example. Many cases don’t show themselves until after the subject has spent time in therapy\u2014 generally for some other issue entirely\u2014 only to have the alters emerge following nudges and leading questions from therapists whose critical and methodological credentials might not be so rigorous as one would like. And there is the\u2014 shall we say questionable<\/em> nature of certain alternate personalities themselves. One case in the literature reported an alter that identified as a German Shepherd. Another identified\u2014 don’t ask me how\u2014 as a lobster. (I know what you’re thinking, but this was years before the ascension of Jordan Peterson in the public consciousness.)<\/p>\n

When you put this all together with the fact that even normal conscious processes seem to act like a kind of noisy parliament\u2014 that we all, to some extent, “talk to ourselves”, all have different facets to our personalities\u2014 it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the whole thing didn’t boil down to a bunch of overactive imaginations, being coached by people who really should have known better. Psychic CosPlaying, if you will. This interpretation is popular enough to have its own formal title: the Sociocognitive Model<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There could be a sort of psychiatric Sturgeon’s Law at play here, though; the fact that 90% of such studies are crap doesn’t necessarily mean that all of them are. Brain scans<\/a> of “possessed” DID bodies show distinctly different profiles than those of professional actors trained to merely behave as though they were: the parts of the brain that lit up in actors are associated with imagination and empathy, while those lighting up in DID patients are involved with stress and fear responses. I’m not entirely convinced\u2014 can actors, knowingly faking a condition, really stand in for delusional people who sincerely believe in their affliction? Still, the stats are strong; and it’s hard to argue with a different study in which the visual centers of a sighted person’s brain apparently shut down in a sighted person when a “blind” alter took the controls.<\/p>\n

Also let’s not forget the whole split-brain phenomenon. We know that different selves can<\/em> exist simultaneously within a single brain, at least if it’s been partitioned in some way.<\/p>\n

This is the premise upon which Kastrup bases his model of Reality Itself.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

You’ve probably heard of quantum entanglement. Kastrup argues that entangled systems form a single, integrated, and above all irreducible <\/em>system. Also that, since everything is ultimately entangled to something else, the entire inanimate universe is “one indivisible whole”, as irreducible as a quark. He argues\u2014 let me quote him here directly, so you won’t think I’m making this up\u2014<\/p>\n

“that the sole ontological primitive there is is cosmic phenomenal consciousness \u2026 Nothing exists outside or independent of cosmic consciousness. Under this interpretation one should say that the cosmos is constituted by phenomenality, as opposed to bearing phenomenality. In other words, here the perceivable cosmos is in consciousness, as opposed to being conscious.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why would he invoke such an apparently loopy argument? How are we any further ahead in understanding our<\/em> consciousness by positing that the universe itself is built from the stuff? Kastrup is trying to reconcile the “combination problem” of bottom-up panpsychism: even if you accept that every particle contains a primitive conscious “essence”, you’re still stuck with explaining how those rudiments combine to form the self-reflective sapience of complex objects like ourselves. Kastrup’s answer is to start at the other end. Instead of positing that consciousness emerges from the very small and working up to sentient beings, why not posit that it’s a property of the universe as a whole and work down?<\/p>\n

Well, for one thing, because now you’ve got the opposite problem: rather than having to explain how little particles of proto-consciousness combine to form true sapience, now you have to explain how some universal ubermind splits into separate entities (i.e., if we’re all part of the same cosmic consciousness, why can’t I read your mind? Why do you<\/em> and I<\/em> even exist as distinct beings?)<\/p>\n

This is where DID comes in. Kastrup claims that the same processes that give rise to multiple personalities in humans also occur at the level of the whole Universe, that all of inanimate “reality” consists of Thought, and its animate components\u2014 cats, earthworms, anything existing within a bounded metabolism\u2014 are encysted bits of consciousness isolated from the Cosmic Self:<\/p>\n

“We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of cosmic consciousness, surrounded by its thoughts. The inanimate world we see around us is the revealed appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms we share the world with are the revealed appearances of other dissociated alters.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And what about Reality before<\/em> the emergence of living organisms?<\/p>\n

“I submit that, before its first alter [i.e., separate conscious entity] ever formed, the only phenomenal contents of cosmic consciousness were thoughts.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In case you’re wondering (and you damn well should be): yes, the Journal of Consciousness Studies is peer-reviewed. Respectable, even. Heavy hitters like David Chalmers and Daniel Dennet appear in its pages. And Kastrup doesn’t just pull claims out of his ass; he cites authorities from Augusto to von Neumann to back up his quantum\/cosmic entanglement riff, for example. Personally, I’m not convinced\u2014 I think I see inconsistencies in his reasoning\u2014 but not being a physicist, what would I know? I haven’t read the authorities he cites, and wouldn’t understand them if I did. This Universal Split-Brain thing reads like Philip K. Dick on a bad day; then again, couldn’t you say the same about Schr\u00f6dinger’s Cat, or the Many Worlds hypothesis?<\/p>\n

Still, reading Kastrup’s paper, I have to keep reminding myself: Peer-reviewed. Respectable. Daniel Dennet.<\/p>\n

Of course, repeat that too often and it starts to sound like a religious incantation.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

To an SF writer, this is obviously a gold mine.<\/p>\n

Kastrup’s model is epic creation myth: a formless thinking void, creating sentient beings In Its Image. The idea that Thou Art God<\/em> (Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em>, anyone?), that God is everywhere<\/em>\u2014 that part of the paradigm reads like it was lifted beat-for-beat out of the Abrahamic religions. The idea that “The world is imagined” seems lifted from the Dharmic ones.<\/p>\n

The roads we might travel from this starting point! Here’s just one: at our local Earthbound scale of reality DID is classed as a pathology, something to be cured. The patient is healthy only when their alters have been reintegrated. Does this scale up? Is the entire universe<\/em>, as it currently exists, somehow “sick”? Is the reintegration of fragmented alters the only way to cure it, can the Universe only be restored to health only by resorbing<\/em> all sentient beings back into some primordial pool of Being? Are we<\/em> the disease, and our eradication the cure?<\/p>\n

You may remember that I’m planning to write a concluding volume to the trilogy begun with Blindsight<\/em> and continued in Echopraxia<\/em>. I had my own thoughts as to how that story would conclude\u2014 but I have to say, Kastrup’s paper has opened doors I never considered before.<\/p>\n

It just seems so off-the-wall that\u2014 peer-reviewed or not\u2014 I don’t know if I could ever sell it in a Hard-SF novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An extended Nowa Fantaskyka remix. The year is 1982. I read Isaac Asimov’s newly-published Foundation’s Edge with a sinking heart. Here is the one of Hard-SF’s Holy Trinity writing\u2014 with a straight face, as far as I can tell\u2014 about the “consciousness” of rocks and trees and doors, for Chrissakes. Isaac, what happened? I wonder. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,49,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomycosmology","category-omniscience","category-sentiencecognition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8255"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10189,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8255\/revisions\/10189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}