Top Down Conciousness

[The Hammer]

con·scious·ness
/ˈkän(t)SHəsnəs/
noun

1. the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings.

I have recently read an article (posted below), that states that Conciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, and that it may form in a top down fashion, as opposed to nature which builds from the ground up.

"Alexander [also] suggests that rather than creating consciousness, the brain actually limits it."

IMO, the brain works like a step down electrical transformer, taking the power of the Gods (Conciousness), and making it able to be percieved/utilized. A Step down Transformer is a type of transformer, which converts a high voltage at the primary side to a low voltage at the secondary side.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/think-act-be/201908/how-is-consciousness-related-the-brain

 

[George-ananda]

This is all part of Advaita (non-dualism=God/Consiousness/Brahman and creation are not two).

Infinite Consciousness incarnates finite forms to experience the finite evolving back to the infinite. It is all a play/drama of God/Brahman.

 

[The Hammer]

This is all part of Advaita (non-dualism=God/Consiousness/Brahman and creation are not two).

Infinite Consciousness incarnates finite forms to experience the finite evolving back to the infinite. It is all a play/drama of God/Brahman.

I don't disagree with this premise. I personally take it a step further and posit that the Gods are projections/manifestations of this Brahman, but I don't know if I consider Brahman to be Conciousness itself, but a facet that arises from it, much like the Gods are facets of it. I also consider the Source (Brahman), to be more of an Energetic signature, rather than a Deity in the sense of Worship.

 

[George-ananda]

I don't disagree with this premise. I personally take it a step further and posit that the Gods are projections/manifestations of this Brahman, but I don't know if I consider Brahman to be Conciousness itself, but a facet that arises from it, much like the Gods are facets of.

In Advaita philosophy in a discussion like this Brahman and Consciousness can be considered identical.

I only use the word God as a bridge for western readers unfamiliar with the concept of Brahman. You are right in taking gods then as projections/manifestations of Brahman just as we are.

 

[Sunstone]

I'm not inclined to think of consciousness as independent of the brain, but in all fairness, the OP has a lot to say for the notion that consciousness functions like a step-down transformer. I think the idea might have originated with Aldous Huxley, but it has since garnered much empirical support.

Take for example how the senses reduce the volume of information before passing it along to the brain. Heck, there are at least five to seven step-downs in the eye alone -- before the information falling on the retina even gets to the optic nerve leading to the brain.

 

[`mud]

`Consciousness`; the awareness of one's cognizance.

 

[Terry Sampson]

I struggle with the notion of immaterial, non-physical consciousness for the following reason.
I begin with the notion implicit in the the abstract noun: Absolute Space.

Let Absolute Space be a set of elements. The elements of the set are dimensionless points, none of which has any property other than location, if location can be said to be "a property". The simplest notion of a location in Absolute Space that I can think of is a specific position on each of three, infinitely long real number lines, each of which is perpendicular to each of the other two. Absent material/physical content, four unit cubes: one of Absolute Space, one of Consciousness, one of Brahman, and one of God, would, IMO, be identical and indistinguishable from each other, to wit:

 

[sun rise]

This story is an example of how the hard distinction between East and West is breaking down with a merger of modes of thought. I enjoy reading about developments like this.

 

[Terry Sampson]

Torah-observant Jews, who are aficionados of the Kabbalah, have recorded their own view of the cosmos in which, IMO, God and Ohr Ein Sof ("The Infinite Light") are synonyms for "the same thing/entity" [cf. attachment "Kabbalah Overview".] Indubitably, someone in RF will take issue with anything I say about about Ohr Ein Sof, so I'll leave it to others to tromp on or through what I have chosen to include in the attachment. Here, I quote only these items from it:

• “God” is an imprecise name for the only thing in the universe that actually exists.
• There is one infinite creator, the cause of causes and the maker of all. He is not one in a numerical sense — since He is not subject to change, definition or multiplicity. He is one in that the number one signifies an independent unit and is the basis of all numbers; the number one is also contained in all numbers. Similarly, the Creator is actually within everything, and everything is within Him. He is the beginning and cause of everything. The Creator does not change, and therefore one cannot add or subtract from Him.
• The unbounded revelation of G‑d underwent a profound constriction.
• This progressive constriction, called tzimtzum, brought about various planes of reality — called, in Kabbala, the five worlds. Each "world" is a certain level of concealment of G‑dliness, of the Or Ein Sof.

So, ... is God, an Infinite Reality, an über-Conscious entity? and is that Infinite Reality really immaterial and non-physical? Like I said, in so many words, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the notion that it literally and strictly is: immaterial and non-physical.

Likewise, in a much smaller, three-dimensional domain, I am hard-pressed to imagine or seriously support or affirm the notion of multiple, immaterial, non-physical consciousnesses that are capable of moving about in Absolute Space or through the known Cosmos.

 

[Jaximum]

"The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems which means that they are interconnected and interdependent." - Fritjof Capra

When we try to discuss consciousness, (location in our brains individually, nature as a state humans collectively inhabit, or consciousness' unique signature as something people agree we share the experience of but can't really agree to what-it-is through communication) we immediately encounter an analytic-over-systemic-thinking problem and an applied-over-general semantics problem.

As the early church sought to "treat the Potter as a lump of clay," (Isaiah chapter 29), young science has upside-down postulates to reexamine.

Analytical Science has been wearing Dogmatic Religion's Stratton goggles.

 

[February-Saturday]

In phenomenology, awareness is universal. We normally think awareness requires both a subject that's "aware" and an object to be "aware" of, but during ego loss there is no longer a sense of self and so we have a form of awareness that has no real subject.

You could call awareness consciousness, because the two terms are not always cleanly divided, but this is essentially a form of idealist monism. Personally, I think it's a pedantic semantic discussion and it isn't really any different from naturalistic monism.

It's a worthwhile distinction in the context of mysticism and phenomenology, but it has no relation to the natural sciences, if that makes sense.

 

[Terry Sampson]

Continuing from my Post #9.

I went back to the OP to give it another look, which involved going to the Psychology Today article linked there. I noticed that the article is, itself, a response to a previous article. To try to keep my thinking straight, I copied both articles in order and highlighted significant points in each. I've collected those points and post them below:

• "What If Consciousness Comes First?"
  Bridging the mind-body gap will require a fundamental shift in perspective.
  Posted Jul 22, 2019, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette Ph.D.
  • ... one question about the relationship between the brain and consciousness that continues to appear unanswerable, even in principle. This is the question of why we have conscious experience at all.
  • Some researchers hold on to the hope that, if we just continue to investigate the brain’s physical properties, we will eventually be able to explain why conscious experience exists and why it has the intrinsic qualities it does. But the problem is more intractable than that.
  • The issue is that physical properties are by their nature relational, dispositional properties. That is, they describe the way that something is related to other things and/or has the disposition to affect or be affected by those other things. Most notably, physical properties describe the way that something affects an outside observer of that thing. But there is something going on in conscious experience that goes beyond how that conscious experience affects people looking at it from the outside. For this reason, the “what it’s like” to be a conscious mind can’t be described in the purely relational, dispositional terms accessible to science. There’s just no way to get there from here.
  • This explanatory gap is what is now commonly referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness, ...
  • The key to resolving the hard problem of consciousness lies in the following observation. While physical properties cannot explain consciousness, consciousness is needed to explain physical properties.
  • ...if all we ever have is relational/dispositional properties—that is, if everything is only defined in terms of other things—then, ultimately, we have defined nothing at all.
  • ...if the universe is to actually exist, its properties can’t be exclusively relational/dispositional. Something in the universe has to have some kind of quality in and of itself to give all the other relational/dispositional properties any meaning. Something has to get the ball rolling.
  • That something (at least in our universe) is consciousness.
  • If we look carefully, we can see that all of the physical properties that science has so carefully measured and cataloged ultimately derive their meaning from the effects they produce on a conscious observer: ...
  • Ultimately, the hard problem of consciousness is the result of a category mistake. We have been trying to reduce consciousness to physical properties when it is consciousness that is the more comprehensive category, and it is only in terms of consciousness that physical properties themselves can be understood.
  • Recognizing the ontological primacy of consciousness could finally open the door to the kind of research that promises answers to some of our most pressing questions: not just scientific ones, but ethical and existential ones as well.
• "How Is Consciousness Related to the Brain?"
  Near-death experiences, psychedelics, and meditation provide intriguing clues.
  Posted Aug 08, 2019, Seth J. Gillihan Ph.D.
  • I realized just how difficult it was to explain how—and why—matter gives rise to subjective experience.
  • I encountered the topic of consciousness again in my research as I reviewed the brain correlates of self-related processing (e.g., recalling an autobiographical memory). Some researchers argued that their findings provided clues about the brain areas involved in consciousness itself, given the overlap between consciousness and self-awareness. However, my co-author and I found no reliable brain areas that were specifically involved in self-related processes, which would seem to bring us no closer to understanding how the brain might give rise to consciousness.
  • More recently, I’ve heard some truly mind-blowing hypotheses about the nature of consciousness. I recently encountered the ideas of Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who had a near-death experience (NDE) in 2008 ...
  • Alexander suggests that rather than creating consciousness, the brain actually limits it.
  • So if our experience of consciousness doesn’t arise from the brain, where does it come from? According to Alexander, “We truly live in a mindful universe, with top-down causal principles that are very powerful in determining the events of human lives.” He posits that these causal principles “are not the simple, predicted result of a kind of bottom-up causation looking at the subatomic particles and cells.” Instead, consciousness is the building block of the universe and gives rise to everything we experience—including ourselves.
  • ..."consciousness was nothing more than an epiphenomenon of the chemical reactions and electron fluxes occurring in the brain.”
  • The change in Alexander’s thinking emerged after his NDE, ...
  • Alexander said the “spiritual aspects of that deep coma journey” were much more “rich, real, detailed, vibrant, alive, and memorable than anything I’d ever been through. I remember them as if they just happened yesterday.” In contrast, he said his memories from the first 36 hours after coming out of his coma “faded within a week or two.”
  • Since that time he has come to the conclusion that the brain impairment he experienced didn’t impair his consciousness, but actually allowed him to experience consciousness in a more profound way.
  • "It’s not increased activity in any brain region that leads to such extraordinary phenomenal experiences,” he said. “It’s actually the brain turning off.”
  • ...decreases in brain activation in certain regions, ...The greater the degree of deactivation in these regions, the more profound participants reported their experience to be.
  • ...a 2016 study found that LSD led to less activity in areas of the brain called the “default mode network” (which is postulated to underlie our sense of self); the degree of deactivation in these areas was significantly correlated with participants’ ratings of “ego dissolution.”
  • This study also found greater activity in the primary visual areas of the brain among those in the LSD condition, which is in line with the visual hallucinations they experienced.
  • "You don’t have to have an NDE to come to a much richer understanding of your consciousness and its relationship to the universe. You can cultivate that through meditation.”
  • Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris agrees. He describes having had similar experiences during his meditation practice, as well as in lucid dreams ...
  • "If you lose your sense of a unitary self—that there’s a permanent, unchanging center to consciousness—your experience of the world actually becomes more faithful to the facts. It’s not a distortion of the way we think things are at the level of the brain. It actually brings your experience into closer register with how we think things are.” And in a recent podcast episode with his wife, the author Annaka Harris, he entertains the possibility of “panpsychism,” which holds that consciousness is an inherent property of all matter.
  • ...considerable daylight between Harris’s and Alexander’s views of consciousness and its relation to the brain. For example, Alexander believes that long-term memories are not actually stored in the brain, after the initial period of encoding and consolidation that requires an intact hippocampus—an idea that Harris dismisses.
  • Consciousness is, by definition, an inherently subjective phenomenon.
  • While we can study the physical effects of drugs and their phenomenological correlates and debate the facts of medical cases, perhaps ultimately their interpretation is a matter of subjectivity, based on minds unknowable by everyone but their owners.

Given my earlier reasoning in this thread, I think I can safely say that I am more inclined to share Sam Harris' view (i.e. panpsychism), although I am still unable to explain how "consciousness can be an inherent property of all matter."

 

[Terry Sampson]

I think I can safely say that I am more inclined to share Sam Harris' view (i.e. panpsychism), although I am still unable to explain how "consciousness can be an inherent property of all matter."

That said, I thought about Eben Alexander's view, i.e. "that rather than creating consciousness, the brain actually limits it." And, although I think I can agree that the brain can "limit consciousness", I don't agree that the brain always limits consciousness.

There is, IMO, certainly some very intriguing stuff happening in the correlation (???) between "brain deactivation" and heightened "profundity of participants' experiences" in NDEs, psychedelic experiences, and meditation. One of the most intriguing phenomena, in my view, is the research on NDEs among the blind.

I may be missing something in the very little bit that I've read, but it would seem to me that individuals who have been blind since birth or at a very early age would have "less visual experience" in their "memory banks" to draw from, and yet I read of reports of heightened visual "accuity."

See article attached: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind: A Study of Apparent Eyeless Vision, Kenneth Ring, Ph.D. and Sharon Cooper, M.A., University of Connecticut (Dec. 1997).

• ABSTRACT: This article reports the results of an investigation into neardeath
  and out-of-body experiences in 31 blind respondents. The study sought
  to address three main questions: (1) whether blind individuals have neardeath
  experiences (NDEs) and, if so, whether they are the same as or different
  from those of sighted persons; (2) whether blind persons ever claim
  to see during NDEs and out-of-body experiences (OBEs); and (3) if such
  claims are made, whether they can ever be corroborated by reference to independent
  evidence. Our findings revealed that blind persons, including
  those blind from birth, do report classic NDEs of the kind common to sighted
  persons; that the great preponderance of blind persons claim to see during
  NDEs and OBEs; and that occasionally claims of visually-based knowledge
  that could not have been obtained by normal means can be independently
  corroborated. We present and evaluate various explanations of these findings
  before arriving at an interpretation based on the concept of transcendental
  awareness.

I have not yet determined whether or not tactile, auditory, olfactory, and gustory accuity is also heightened among persons who previously had very little or no memory of experiences with those senses and either had NDEs/OBEs, psychedelic experiences, or meditation experiences.