2008年10月2日木曜日

The Spark of Awareness, E-Mail Think Tank Series

Matt: 

That 'spark of awareness' is inherently an immaterial thing, thus
difficult to measure and so outside the purview of science, at least
science as conceptualized in the Western tradition. It's what you get
when you take any entity - human, animal, plant, or bacterium - and
strip away everything 'external' to it. Body, memory, emotion, sense,
all of these things can be removed while still leaving the little
light of awareness intact.

Even 'dead' matter can be said to possess this spark, at a very
fundamental level, if you think about the way in which matter is
mostly empty space, with vanishingly compact concentrations of stuff
(very similar to the mathematical concept of Cantor dust) which are
able to create larger and more complex structures by virtue of their
ability to 'sense' and 'react' to other particles. The forces -
electromagnetic, gravitational, strong and weak nuclear - endow every
particle with both the ability to notice other particles (through the
forces those particles exert) and to act upon those particles (by
extering force on them), either pushing them away or pulling them
closer. In this metaphor, the material component of matter is
analogous to the spark of awareness: that which notices the world,
initiates action upon it, but is too small to see (quarks are the
smallest part that have been observed, but the laws of physics make
probing at lower levels prohibitively difficult; however the pattern
that science has so far shown indicates that the Cantor dust of matter
may well continue on to much smaller scales), and is not, itself,
fundamentally changed by anything in the outer world. That is, a
particle's position may be affected, but the motion itself does not
alter the particle in any internal way. In an analogous fashion, the
Self internal to every being cannot be altered by anything that
happens external to it, including events both within the entity and
without.

Of course, that Self or Awareness is also identical between any two
entities, for it is found by removing all of the features that
distinguish one entity from another. Thus another way to look at the
situation is of myriad little windows upon the world, allowing the
world to perceive itself from every conceivable direction. I think of
it as God's Eyes, endlessly observing the universe and thus bringing
it into being.

Like I said, this is not the kind of thing easily penetrated by the
usual methods of science. Physics has probably made more inroads into
the subject than any other branch, but if it has done so, it has been
because it has spent centuries rigorously ignoring all of the wider
implications of its researches into the nature of matter, and swearing
blind that it is not engaged in any sort of study of the nature of
consciousness. The Eastern Vedic tradition, and the Buddhist tradition
that evolved out of it, have tackled the problem in a very scientific
fashion, though their methods - rigorous comparison of the internal
states created through contemplation, meditation, and introspection -
are so far outside the purview of Western science that even now few
scientists will even toy with the idea of their validity.

Now, you might well object that the awareness of a rock is not to be
compared with the awareness of a worm, much less a human. The best I
can put it is, while the spark of awareness of a human being is itself
exactly identical to that of a quark, the human organism serves to
amplify the ability of that spark to both perceive and act upon the
world. A quark is limited in its perceptions and actions to a few
other quarks inside a subatomic particle, whereas a human can, of
course, work at a much greater scale. Indeed, you could say that the
whole purpose of the great chain of being is to amplify the effects of
awareness so that it can operate at every possible scale.

Whew! A long answer to a short question. Let me know if you have any more.

Matt

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