VII
THE DANCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Webster's defines consciousness as,

“the state of being aware of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.”

While sensations and awareness of one's surroundings may be necessary to develop consciousness, they are not it. Insects and animals are all aware of their surroundings, often with better senses than ours. They are also aware of themselves. Rover may get frustrated looking for the mutt behind the mirror, but when something itches he knows where to scratch.

Digital computers are more aware of their “thoughts” than are human beings. The central processor (CPU) of a computer selects and executes its instructions deliberately, and can produce a list of every one. Humans cannot account for their own neurological activity with remotely similar precision.

If humans are really aware of their own thoughts, why do so many hire a shrink to tell them what they are really thinking?

Some folks may have difficulty defining consciousness because they keep pets and cannot abide the idea that Rover, Fluffy, and Little Anthrax are only cute little machines with no more consciousness than a toaster. They want a definition of consciousness sloppy enough to include Mickey Mouse and their favorite critters and ensure the propagation of more Disney-programmed anthropomorphic confusion.

This text uses the word consciousness in a specific and narrow sense:

Consciousness is the awareness of being aware.

Consciousness can be temporarily shut off during open skull surgery with a low voltage electrode at the right spot, or permanently isolated to a single brain hemisphere by severing the inter-hemisphere connections. It can be inadvertently eradicated in neurosurgery without anyone identifying what's missing.

From the mathematical perspective, consciousness might be regarded as a second derivative of sensation.

The Development of Human Consciousness

As a baby, your brain received input. Some of this was constant (same mother, same environment, etc.) and some was varied. Even the “constant” information was dynamic in nature. Your mother's face changed as she spoke and moved. Her colors and shadings changed as daytime progressed into night. Her expression reflected her mood. You learned to recognize the constants amid the variables.

You also learned to control some input. If you cried, mother appeared bearing a flesh or rubber nipple from which food materialized— or she wiped your little butt. Your body had needs, discomforts, and cravings, but you had no thoughts.

You may have lain on your back in a crib looking at a line of colorful toys strung across the railing, just in reach of your little fingers. Mother might have come by and given the toys a spin, re-engaging your limited attention span. But occasionally your tiny hands, flailing about in instinctive bursts of activity, might also have set a toy spinning. At first you simply noticed that a toy was once again in motion. But after enough random brushes your brain began to make the connection— you spun the toy!

In time your body grew and developed mobility, which it used to seek out new sources of information. Like any good mammalian brain, yours came programmed with the curiosity essential to your conscious development, which came gradually during the natural course of living. If you are like most people, consciousness snuck up on you.

At the age of seven I received a bicycle, a fine Schwinn with 26" wheels and pedals which bottomed out an inch beneath my feet. Of course I did not know how to ride it, so after dinner my father undertook to teach me. He steadied the machine while I climbed into the seat high above the ground and put my feet to the pedals. Once suitably perched, I was told to steer and pedal while my father jogged alongside, his steady hand on the frame. We traveled one block, making a wide and shaky turn at a vacant gas station before returning home.

This routine was repeated the next two evenings. At one point on our third return trip the bicycle wobbled slightly, and I righted it without the stabilizing counterforce I'd come to trust. I looked around to see my father strolling along thirty feet behind me. He hollered, “Just keep going!” I had learned to ride a bicycle.

We develop consciousness in pretty much the same way.

My own awareness of consciousness appeared spontaneously on a hot summer night, as I laid awake wondering at the little bit of universe visible in the night sky. I had wondered about things before, but that night I suddenly realized that I was an entity consciously wondering about something. My first glimmer of real consciousness had appeared.

Precursors to Consciousness

The level of consciousness which you currently experience came from several interactive sources:

• Sensory information.


• Your ability to preferentially select the most interesting information.


• Your brain's ability to store data and retrieve it for you in the context of related information. (“Associative memory” is the technical term.)


• Your exposure to and relationships with conscious human beings.

When considering the development of consciousness it is important to make the distinction between beon and brain. While brain is essential to the process, it does not itself become conscious. Its job is to facilitate consciousness in the beon to which it is tuned.

WHAT CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT

Although many humans raise pets from infancy, often speaking to them as they would to a human child, exposure to language and limited human consciousness does not induce pet-consciousness. (Undoubtedly, your pet is the exception.)

Intelligence is a measure of the ability of a device to process information and learn. Animals and computers have intelligence, yet they do not develop consciousness. A computer has beaten a world class chess master. The computer system manifests intelligence but is not conscious.

Some scientists have advanced the notion that intelligence comes from having a large brain. If this was so, we should expect elephants, sperm whales, and macroencephalic humans to be smarter than normal folks. We would also expect a correlation between human brain sizes and IQ. But some humans are smarter than elephants, and Einstein's brain weighed in as unremarkably average.

THE BRAIN-BEON INTERFACE

Although your computer screen is capable of displaying visual images, it does not normally receive television programs. Why not? Because it lacks a specialized device called a tuner which translates coded electromagnetic signals into visual images.

Circuit cards including a tuner are available for those wanting to transform their computer into a clunky television set.

The human brain must contain its own tuner circuitry which connects to beon. However, the analogy is limited. Unlike a TV tuner which allows only a one-way flow of information, the brain's circuitry must provide a bidirectional connection to beon. Moreover, it is normally tuned to only one “station,” a process which occurs during gestation.

Components of Consciousness

Beon Theory declares that consciousness can only be developed by something which can violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The same property is required for creative, imaginative thought, and for understanding conceptual information.

Following Sigmund Freud's teachings, psychologists have believed in the existence of two brain functions called the conscious and subconscious minds. Some accept a third function, the super-conscious. However, psychology does not correlate these functions with any specific brain structures.

Psychology is thus the only so-called science which believes in the existence of definable functions which are not caused by any identifiable physical mechanisms. When religions do the same sort of thing, invoking non-identifiable mechanisms such as God or soul to explain creation or consciousness, they are labeled, well— religious.

Imagine hearing a strange thumping noise coming from the engine compartment of your car. You drive it to a mechanic who looks it over, listens to the noise, and says that your car needs a $600 framistat rebuild. Harking back to your high school auto shop class without recalling anything about framistats, you ask the mechanic to point out the faulty component. He cannot, declaring that it is within the engine assembly.  She says I'm so good at slipping between whimsey and  serious stuff. That she needed 3 readings to get this.  Maybe a forewarning?

You persist, requesting that he show you an old framistat from his junk parts bin. None available. You request a look at a service manual showing the location of the framistat, or even a diagram.

With a disapproving sneer at your ignorance, the mechanic explains that the framistat is not exactly a part within the engine, but is really the combined function of a number of parts working together. Which parts? That depends on what he discovers when he disassembles your engine.

Would you really trust your car to this turkey? Let us hope not, and that while cruising down the road after scraping off the lump of squirrel tail stuck between alternator pulley and drive belt, you realize that there are no functions without mechanisms and no effects without cause— at least not on this planet.

The Real Mechanisms of Consciousness

Beon Theory will prove helpful to psychology after its current degree holders die off, if only by specifying the two components of mind:

• Beon is the super-conscious mind.


• Brain is the sub-conscious.


• That which psychology calls the “conscious mind” is the mysterious framistat. Not a specific entity or mechanism, it is the composite function of beon and brain working together.

• The driver is the equivalent of beon, the super-conscious mind.


• The car is the analog of the brain. It contains thousands of parts of which the driver is unaware, integrated into a complex machine which can be fired up at the turn of a key and controlled by slight forces applied to a steering wheel and floor pedals.

  The internal systems of modern cars are controlled by computers which operate without the slightest input from the driver— a driver who is no more aware of the actions taken by his vechicle's computer than of those taken by his own brain's hypothalamus.



• The composite function is controlled and directed motion, the analog of intelligent thought. The auto industry, which is in the business of recognizing how things work, spawned a magazine named after the combination of definable mechanisms: Car and Driver.

Any critter or computer can process information well enough to control its own behavior. Some humans have an additional ability: abstract and practical creative thought. The beon component of a human mind provides this advantage.

Before Birth

Imagine that you were born color-blind. You could study physics and learn that color is simply the way that the eyes and brain normally translate different wavelengths of electromagnetic energy. However, this knowledge would not bring you the experience of color perception.

Imagine that you were born blind. With effort you could learn the mathematical concepts of visual imagery and the neurological mechanisms involved in vision. Yet this knowledge would not allow you to see.

Next imagine that you were also born deaf.

The primary sources of sensory information used by humans are sight and sound. People deprived of either one can cope with this handicap and develop remarkable skills. Neither handicap precludes consciousness. But what of someone born blind and deaf?

Deafblind individuals do not fare well. The few who develop a notable level of consciousness were not born deafblind, but acquired their handicap as the result of illness or drugs. They require intense assistance.

Helen Keller's remarkable success was a function of her innate high intelligence given focus and expression by a skillful and dedicated teacher. Keller was not born deafblind. She lost those senses when a year and a half old while just beginning to speak.

Her re-introduction to language and symbolic information came when her teacher ran water over one hand while spelling out the word “water” on the other, repetitively. But what would have happened if Keller had no sense of touch?

Conceivably, an extremely skillful and patient teacher might have found a way to communicate via the media of taste and smell, but this is not likely. Someone born with the sensory abilities of an amoeba would have few tools for the development of consciousness.

It is conceivable that someone born without sight, hearing, or tactile ability could be kept alive as a research project and with patience and dedication, eventually taught a language involving taste and scent. If consciousness somehow occurred during this process, when the only feedback the victim of the experiment could provide would be through brain waves or farts, would anyone know?

While the likelihood that someone born blind, deaf, and numb could develop consciousness is minuscule, the chance that a person born alive but totally senseless could become conscious is zero. We have no knowledge of such a person being born, but as drug technology develops, the possibility improves.

Such a person could be kept alive as long as the government or an insurance company pays the bills for survival maintenance, or while lawsuits against doctors and pill makers remain pending. Would it develop consciousness? How? Without a way to receive sensory information, however primitive, consciousness does not appear to be possible.

A senseless person might have the mental potential of a genius, but it would never be realized. He could spend fifty years in a bed connected to tubes, yet never become aware of his existence. The beon component of mind would never receive data.

If a beon connected to a sensory-deprived brain would not achieve consciousness, it follows that the same beon would obtain the same results if it was not linked to a brain at all. Beon could exist forever without realizing its potential for consciousness, and that's pretty much what has happened.

HYPOTHESIS:

That part of you which has become conscious, beon, came into existence before the universe began. It has only recently developed consciousness.

Finally interfaced with a coherent source of sensory information and associative memory, you are currently developing consciousness. It might be better said that you are actively choosing consciousness, else you would be reading a comic book.

Your brain is a machine engineered to induce consciousness in a beon.

Consciousness Without Body

Exactly how the arcane concept of different spaces might translate into reality is anyone's guess, and I have no more clue as to what that actually means than do the string theorists who postulate from 10 to 27 different dimensions within subatomic matter. Nor do I fully understand the nature of the ordinary 3-dimensional space in which we live, although like you, I take its existence for granted.

The existence of aeon and dark energy are two of the hypotheses necessary to our theory. Each had, and still has, the potential to spontaneously interact with the other— but only if brought into mutual contact. Therefore we have hypothesized a spontaneous collison, or brush, between aeon and dark energy.

This event produced disturbances, lumps, within the previously inert states of both aeon and energy.

These lumps of aeon and energy need have been only tiny differentiations within each substance, like raindrops in an ocean. That is plenty enough if the ocean had previously been absolutely still, never before disturbed.

The lumps of aeon are the entities we've been referring to as beons.

The disturbances within energy produced the first manifestation of entropic force, which, as you will recall from the energy page, returns energy to its original zero-point state.

However, by the Third Law of Thermodynamics this cannot occur. A thermodynamic system above the temperature of 0°K by even the smallest amount cannot return to 0°K.

The beginning of the universe effectively began when dark energy and aeon met— when force and counterforce interacted. Aeon changed the thermodynamic state of energy, and as energy attempted to return to its original state, it affected aeon and created beons.

Beon theory seeks the simplest possible explanations for observable phenomena. No mysterious or complex forces were involved in any interaction between aeon and dark energy.

Suppose, for example, that aeon and energy cannot simultaneously occupy the same space. This would mean one of two things: either aeon must displace energy, or energy must displace aeon. If this should happen to be true, it implies the existence of a simple exclusion principle. In turn, this defines force and counterforce.

A beon created from the collision of aeon and energy could conceivably develop consciousness as a result of these primitive, low-level sensory experiences. The process could be similar to the way in which a child learns, by causing some aspects of its environment to change, repetitively but not in exactly the same manner each time, eventually recognizing that it caused the changes.

Consciousness begins with observations of small and simple changes. Early consciousness will likely have been primitive and slow to develop, perhaps taking trillions of years by our standards. Within an empty and formless universe which contains no clocks, a trillion years is as good as an instant.

Suppose we adopt an hypothesis which is consistent with general monotheism— that only a single beon initially became conscious.  J: 10/24/09 sufficiently awkward to take her off track. The  cadence is off. Sentence rhythm disrupted. Like  dissonance in music.

Unlike the well-defined material structures from which we humans derive consciousness, this entity's sources of sensory feedback would have been simple and limited— perhaps no more than fleeting fluctuations of energy unknowingly caused by beon itself.

Perhaps that beon inadvertently created a sustained energy pattern. Our world provides examples of such things, such as tornadoes, columns of air twisting violently within a small subset of the planet's available space. Tornadoes create their own confinement, and in a sense create their own sub-space.

Similar concentrations of energy appear in dynamic structures such as lightning plasmas, hurricanes and extraplanetary storms like Jupiter's “great red spot.” These are produced by the confluences of other forces and are therefore not self-generating, but once set in motion they take on a life of their own.

A phenomenon known as resonance commonly occurs in engineered systems. It is simply the to-and-fro exchange of energy from one form to another, like a basketball bouncing on a gym floor. Left to itself, a basketball will bounce a few times, lower each time, until it stops. But with only a slight downward push at the top of each bounce, a periodic up and down motion is easily obtained. A basketball player can keep the ball moving with little force, and with slight vector adjustments can steer the bouncing ball in any direction.

Perhaps consciousness initially arose from an equally simple exchange of force and counterforce between energy and beon.

Ball lightning provides an impressive example of structured, concentrated energy in a dynamic form. Long the stuff of human lore, its existence was denied by science until regular people won another fight against scientific dogma by arming themselves with cameras. Ball lightning typically appears as irregular globes of intense light manifesting during electrical storms.  Jonetta likes this explanation of resonance.

The cause of ball lightning is unknown, it has not been experimentally reproduced, and mathematical models for its self-sustaining behavior are shaky.

Tornadoes and ball lightning provide examples of short term stability. Their dynamic internal structure keeps them going, but being subject to the laws of thermodynamics, the concentrated energies which keep them coherent are eventually dissipated.

Bicycles show the connection between motion and stability. A stationary bicycle can be kept upright only by a rider skillful at the art of balance, or by someone standing on the ground and holding it. A moving bicycle remains upright without any skill on the part of its rider other than the ability to turn gently and avoid obstacles.

Rotating wheels produce a physical effect called “angular momentum,” which stabilizes any rotating object— bullets, footballs, and our planet. Tightrope artists carry a long pole to stabilize themselves. Angular momentum is like a stabilizing pole through the axis of a wheel which lengthens as the wheel spins faster.

We tend to regard things which do not change as being stable, but the physical universe offers a contrary lesson. Subatomic particles and galaxies derive their stability from motion, as do the stars, planets and moons in between. Rotation appears to be essential to stability.

Like these dynamic structures, beons were originally formed within a random event. Yet, beon is fundamentally different. Unlike vortices and plasmic balls, beon can choose to exist— but only if it has acquired consciousness. The ability to choose is only available to an entity aware of its own existence.

God, of course, is the first beon to become self aware.

Sat 10/24/09 21:36