"How uniquely personal is consciousness?"

Here’s a story for you.  Way back in the past, I took a Joseph Campbell workshop out in Esalen.  During one of the exercises, they took us on a guided meditation to find our spirit guides.  We climbed down into a hole in a ground, and found a waterway, and followed it to a quiet pool, and there, by the side of the pool, we met our spirit guides. 

 

Well, duh!  A waterway deep underground!  Who am I going to meet?  I call him Mudman.  He was made of a kind of red clay, and he was kind of vaguely slapped together in human form, but it was as if the artist hadn’t gotten around to finishing him before he came alive.  He had huge shoulders and chunky legs (I don’t even know if there were feet) and he practically had no neck.  He was so much clay, I don’t even know if he knew how to see or hear, or taste.  He gave me a few words of wisdom, but I don’t remember what they were, now.

 

A couple of years later, I was taking this dance workshop.  We start with a meditation, and the whole idea is to get out of your symbolic thinking mind, and "into your body."  It helps you stop all the thinking in a way similar, I believe, to meditation.  While dancing, if it works, it becomes very dreamlike, difficult to remember what happened.  I believe this is because we are out of our right brains and into our left brains (or vice versa, I forget which is which).  In any case, as in a dreamlike state, long term memory stops working, words stop working, and without words, it is difficult to form memories. 

 

We do develop an alternative symbolic language, while dancing.  It is a language of movements, and emotional states, but it is wordless, primal, and it often feels like we are tapping into something like the collective unconscious, and we are connecting to each other in a way that many people associate with God.  I don’t, but that’s another story.

 

So one day, I started dancing, and I kept my eyes closed throughout the first ten minutes of the dance.  I was soon deep inside my body, and dancing purely on feeling, with no conscious planning or forethought at all.  A strange thing started happening.  I started to feel as if I was being possessed, as if some other consciousness was coming into my body, and taking it over.  At a certain moment, I had a choice.  I could let this consciousness come in, or not.  I felt safe enough, and I didn’t feel like the consciousness was malignant, so I decided (in a kind of non-deciding way) to let it take me over. 

 

This consciousness started moving my arms and legs, and boy, it had no idea what to do!  It was as if it had never had any arms or legs before in its life.  My legs grew jerky, and I fell to the ground.  It lacked control, like a little baby.  It wanted to go somewhere (have my body move) but it didn’t really have a clue how to get it to move.  And yet, slowly, slowly, it learned. 

 

I ended up crawling across the dance floor.  Somewhere along the line, I connected with a friend of mine, who was also crawling along the floor, and we slowly, using huge, huge effort, crawled about ten feet across the floor in maybe five minutes, as if we were dying of thirst in a desert, and thought we saw a mirage of a water hole just over there.

 

After a while, I came to realize that it was the mudman who was this consciousness in my body.  Since he was supposedly my spirit guide, I didn’t feel too unsafe, and was kind of enjoying the feeling of being possessed. 

 

I have never, since then, felt possessed like that again, but I cherish the experience.  It was the experience of being other.  Of not being myself.  I felt I could understand those people who speak in tongues in pentacostalist religions, as well as the people who "channel" old souls. 

 

So what happened, really?  Was I truly possessed by an external consciousness?

 

Here’s what I believe.  I believe it felt like it was external, but it was actually my own consciousness.  It was perhaps a splitting of my own consciousness, and a part of me that I was not hitherto aware of came into control.  I was safe, not because it was me, but because it was not a malign part of me.  I believe that people can learn to do this.  It is a skill.  It is also a kind of fakery.  If you use physical experiences, you can get yourself out of your mind, and into a different body.  You can speak in tongues.  Fear can do this, too, as in when handling snakes.  Similarly, fire walking, and other intense emotional experiences that you can be thrown into by experienced facilitators, such as charismatic religious leaders, can split you apart, and make you feel possessed, by either malign, or benificent entities.  I suspect that many people’s experiences of god comes from the same place.

 

I think that this experience may be available to me almost any time, although it does take serious preparation and a kind of mental openess or readiness to make it happen.  Just knowing it has been there, helps me know it can be there.

 

I would kill to have had an MRI of my brain during the experience.  I half believe the MRI would actually show a totally different consciousness from my normal state of consciousness, in some way. 

 

I don’t think I am tapping into a "real" universal consciousness, but it is an artifact of my body and brain structure.  I do think that the feeling created in other people’s bodies and brains is similar enough, that we can call it the same thing.  I think that when more than one person is like this at the same time, we are in touch with intuitions and become much more sensitive to each other; almost, but not quite enough to say we are in each other’s brains.  But I can’t be sure about that.

 

Anyway, Harp, great question, and thanks for asking!  ;-)

Regarding your question; I think we are each isolated in our own conciseness. I do not think we are all a part of a larger universal consciousness. When we look into our own conciseness, as in my experience, or deep meditation, I think we are taking a look at an overview summation of all of our brain, and mind functions. However, this does not rule out the possibility of paranormal senses that we do not commonly regard. There is so much that we do not know.

Funny you should mention this just now, since I am in the middle of discussing an article on the subject of consciousness.  The article reviews a lot of the current thinking on what consciousness is, and it concurs with my thinking on the subject.  The basic gist: there isn't really any consciousness at all.  It's all in your head.

It's a bizarre way to look at it, but from a scientific standpoint, "consciousness" doesn't seem to be anything at all.  We don't have a clear definition of it.  We can't measure it.  We don't have any idea what it means or how to relate to it or alter it in any reliable fashion.  It lends itself easily to pseudoscientific notions like "universal pool of consciousness".  We might as well say it doesn't exist at all.

That's stupid, obviously.  If there's one thing in the universe we know is there, it's our own consciousness.  "Cogito ergo sum," Descartes said.  I think therefore I am.  Everything else might be an illusion, but I'm here.  Right?

Well, not necessarily.  Descartes doesn't really clearly define either "cogito" or "sum" ("to be" is the most highly contested word in all of philosophy).  His statement is punchy, but epistemologically useless, because nothing follows from it.

Still... consciousness certainly seems to be there, doesn't it?  We open up skulls and see nothing but brain goop in there.  There doesn't seem to be any connection to any outside forces, or "universal pool of consciousness", or anything like that.  Even if it were, it doesn't mean anything.  Jung talked about a "collective subconscious" but it seems to be much more about the heritable patterns of brain structure than about any sort of mysterious shared goop that we can't see.

It feels awkward to say this, because I really don't know where that consciousness comes from.  With 50 billion neurons and trillions of synapses (each of them more complex and connected that the mere billions of transistor junctions in a computer) it's not hard for me to believe that it somehow falls out of the complex feedback patterns of neurotransmitters.

But I don't really know how it happens.  I've got some clues.  I know that certain parts of the brain seem to take responsibility for certain parts of what appear to be consciousness: identifying images, understanding spoken words, forming my own words, formulating plans, executing muscle movements.  There appear to be many different things which make up an "I", and I can believe that "consciousness" isn't anything more than the complex interplay between those parts.

What I've just said is lousy science.  I'm pursuing a thing I can roughly identify but can't define, and the very most important thing in science is clear definitions.  How can you prove that something isn't what you say it is if you can't say what it is?  (The fundamental operation of science is disproving things, not proving things.  Proving stuff is hard, and isn't always possible, but we can take things and try to disprove them over and over.  Those that stand up to all of that get to stick around.)

I do know that I don't see any reason to believe in any of the "dualistic" notions, where "consciousness" is somehow a separate thing from the brain, simply because they don't serve any useful scientific purpose: until you can point to the "soul" and allow me to do tests on it that could disprove it, I can't use the notion, no matter how intuitive it seems to me to be.

I'm afraid that consciousness will remain a mystery for some time to come.  It's clearly an important problem, but one so vaguely defined that all we can do is tinker at the edges. 

A very cogent and forceful rejection of dualism. Kind of a diatribe against some of the social policies that arise from dualism, but nonetheless very informative. And it has the best property of any social science text: liberals think it's right-wing and conservatives think it's left-wing. Everybody hates it so it must be on the right track.

 

It was William James who coined the term, "the stream of consciousness," which is good place to begin because there is a certain comforting linear continuity to it.  If Peter and Paul fall asleep in the same bed, each awakes to his own consciousness; so at least we don't have to worry about falling asleep and waking up as somebody completely different and strange to us.  But, then again, let's say they are identical twins, each with exactly the same genes and environment, the same education and language, the same parental influences and meta-genetic material to mediate among them.  Yet, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, they develop into two different personalities, in part due to their interaction with each other (and the divisions of labor they negotiate), as with others who alternately, prompt, stimulate and stunt their growths in various dimensions.  They grow up different but completely different?  No, I don't think so.

 

I recall meeting my half-brothers for the first time at the age of 27.  It was like gazing into a genetic mirror and seeing reflections of myself--not only physical resemblances, but psychological ones as well--and it was equally strange for them to see their own reflection in me.  There were unspoken understandings, or should I say, areas of acceptance and trust, which I can imagine would be even more pronounced for twins.  Every once in a while, I meet someone who has had a similar education to mine and we have many of the same kinds of unspoken understandings that allow us to leap over the usual problems of discourse, although perhaps not with the same familial level of trust, the same kindred affinities that can, under certain circumstances, repell like poles of a magnet, as well as attract.   

 

I think these affinities may be seeded all throughout the social and biological world.  Why do we get along with one person with whom we have almost nothing objectively in common, and are indifferent to people with whom we would be considered a "close match"?  Why do we prefer the sweet pickle to the salty, or one breed of pet over another?  In many respects, these differences that we use to define ourselves through contrasts conceal even broader areas of agreement and affinity with others with whom we share a kind of collective bond.  We focus on the contrast because that is individually defining, while the commonality (although equally defining) tends to be ignored, at least by people who are habituated to thinking of themselves as individuals.

 

There are others, however, who throw themselves upon the zeitgeists of their age, whose consciousness flows out and summarizes and distills the many minds they come into contact with, and who render it into a synthetic breakthrough, in the form of a theory, a novel or an artwork.  These are people who wrestle with or, perhaps, who are engulfed by one of its internal contradictions and have been culturally "selected" to represent a particular philosophical perspective.  For example, a member of a discriminated against minority may feel himself being pulled into championing the rights of his minority once the larger society begins to question the gulf between its constitutional values and the rights that people actually have. 

 

In fact, it may well be that what people take to be "consciousness" is an entirely collective affair, especially since it involves linguistic conventions which are quintessentially collective in nature, and which are virtually indespensable to processing "awareness," as we encounter it as an individual.  Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a human being without the collective intelligence of his culture--which is to say, of his humanity.  An individual is "aware" when he experiences sensation, but I would say he is only "conscious" when he can indicate these sensations to "himself" using collectively defined "signs" and "symbols." 

According to Berger & Luckmans' "Social Construction of Reality," this "logosphere" or cultural "reality" is segmented much the way species have branched off from a common ancestor.  Accountants speak their own specialized language, which is separate and distinct from that of metallurgists or dentists--and even within, say, Marxism or Christianity there are sectarian distinctions, so that a Marxist accountant would tend to have a very different "consciousness" than a Christian dentist--although a Christian and a Marxist dentist might have more in common than they would with a metallurgist of their own ideology.  The geography of this logosphere can be overlaid onto the natural world giving everything a meaning and mutually-defining cultural "place"--e.g., roads, opera houses, post offices, counties, states and nations all take their meaning and significance from the cultural logosphere.  It also has peaks and valleys, as individuals climb to the tops of their professions, or slip down the slopes into in the valleys of formula and cliche.

I do not think we would have consciousness if it weren't essential to our survival.  I think that we would poison ourselves with our technologies without it.  So, that when we speak of consciousness, what we are actually talking about is an on-going struggle to raise consciousness--to overcome the rigidities of absolutist and authoritarian thought, so that we have the flexibility to apply human intellect to human problems.   

 

There are always a number of people who are ahead of the curve, and whose ideas are not quite ready for prime time consumption--not because they are defective or unpolished, but because they are just too far ahead of their time.  I am thinking of the literature of Jorge Borges, which is just now coming into full appreciation because of what might be called its post quantum world view.  These remain a kind of paradox of classification, since their very nature they are unshared and therefore private--yet, they are encoded in terms that the collectivity can decode, once they have the interest and the background to do so--so they are essentially collective.  If I write them down, my ideas flow directly into in the collective repository of Humanity.  But even if I only mention them, incompletely worked out, they are passed from mind to mind until they eventually find a fertile foothold (or else they die out, which they may deserve to do anyway).

 

So, from my point of view, there is no end of collective consciousness, and our ability to tap into it is limited only by the imagination of the collectivity.

The rebirth of "a" soul in a new body.  Question: IS "your" counsciousness also your soul?  If not then what would be a good definition of consciousness as compared with your soul.  Religions, some, have mentioned reincarnation is their philosophies, but is it the same consciousness as previous lives is an interesting concept.  I think, there is a universal pool of souls, when we leave our current human form, we become a light vessel, until we are re-born.  We all have universal "knowledge" when we are born, pure thoughts and feelings, then society "teaches" us, and we "forget" this knowledge (This could also be related in a religious way to the fall from the garden of eden). 

This answer leaves I think more questions than answers, but here it is.  Love a great question that makes one think.  Thanks