Contrasting explanations
As I continue to think about the ideas in my book, The Seer’s Explanation, I’m struck again and again, first by the fact of – and then by the role played by – dreaming in our lives.
I think that the topic of dreaming is a good one with which to illuminate the contrast between the conventional explanation of reality and the seer’s explanation.
The conventional explanation of reality says that consciousness somehow arises in the brain as a function of physical processes. A neuroscientist would probably say that these processes are electrical in nature and that they have evolved for the purpose of seeing to our daily needs and ultimately to our survival. Looking at dreams from that perspective, the scenes we witness while dreaming must also be caused by electrical signals. These signals are presumably associated with neural pathways laid down in our brains by our own experiences and our responses to them.
This is the standard view of causality, where physical events have physical causes, and causality itself is taken to be an entirely physical phenomenon. But we may notice that this explanation places the scenes we witness while awake and those we witness while dreaming on very different footing. The first category is perceived by the brain, and the other is produced by the brain.
From the point of view of the seer’s explanation, however, consciousness is the basic “stuff” of which the world is made.
The scene I see before me (when I’m awake OR when I’m dreaming) is a representation of the conscious energy that I am – “my” energy – molding the clay of the multisensory impressions I’ve stored in the course of my life experiences. These scenes are not caused by anything going on in the brain; the brain itself is part of the scene I’m witnessing, along with the rest of my body.
The seer’s explanation says that the entirety of the “world” we experience is actually a description.
This description is of increasing complexity as we grow, but it is made of simple building blocks that we learned to perceive as we were taught language, as we were given the words to name and describe objects and basic actions. Each word we were taught was related by our parents and other teachers to a perceived object or scene, and our words represent memories which stored our impressions of those objects and actions.
Our words represent memories? It is, I believe, helpful to recognize that our experience and our memories exist in separate domains. We can focus our attention on either the domain of actual experience or the domain of memory, but we can’t focus on both at the same time. Often we can switch our attention back and forth, but if the experience we’re having is sufficiently intense, we will actually be rendered “speechless”, without access to the domain of memories and the words which name them until after the experience is over. That understanding can help us see that our words don’t actually name the elements of our experiences, but rather they name the elements of the memories of those experiences.
What is the nature of the relationship between our words and the objects recorded in those memories?
Is one of those two domains, i.e. words and objects, more fundamental? In the conventional explanation, the objects must be more fundamental, because many of them would exist whether or not there was a sentient creature around, a being with the ability to formulate a word with which to name them. Looking from the seer’s explanation, however, we see that they are on equal footing, both objects and the words which name them simply different aspects of the energetic configurations which are stored as those memories.
So we were taught language, and we were taught the description of our world at the same time. As we grew, the physical-ness of our world, rich with sensory impressions as it is, literally captured our attention, and we forgot the actual nature of the relationship of our words to our physical perceptions. And we came to see our world as what’s real, and our words simply as handles with which to interact with the various parts of the world.
As a useful metaphor, we may consider here the viewing of a movie at the local cinema.
We give our attention to what’s happening on the screen, and, depending on how engrossing the film, we may even momentarily forget that we’re watching a movie and react as if we are watching separate objects moving about one another. But in reality, everything in the visual scene we’re watching is the same: it’s a pattern of the color and intensity of light that varies across the screen and over time. What we’re watching is in reality just light.
In a similarly fundamental way, the objects we perceive in our waking life are also all the same: they’re all made of the same catalog of available atoms which reflect and absorb light and which interact electrically with whatever they come in contact. In terms of one more metaphor, it’s as if you’re concocting the dishes you cook by working with recipes that call for the names and quantities of the 92 naturally occurring ingredients – representing atoms – it takes to make each object, including the air in the spaces among them.
For us, the appearance of a physical world is a manifestation of memory.
Without memory, or those stored configurations of energy accompanied by the words which name them, the world would appear simply as a kaleidoscope of light, sound and physical sensation, which is the way it appeared to us before we learned language and the associated description of the world which we mistake for the world itself.
But what of the physical sciences? Don’t they study actual physical objects and their properties, objects with which we simply interact? On the home page of my website is a series of slides, the first of which depicts Albert Einstein being asked about the relative primacy of consciousness and the physical world. His answer indicates that he will attempt to answer the question using the ideas and terms of quantum mechanics, which is the scientific discipline most successful at explaining the behavior of the building blocks that make up our world.
Again, Einstein proposes to answer this question in terms of quantum mechanics.
I have him doing so because that discipline is completely at odds with an explanation of the physical world that’s built on the world’s primacy with respect to the consciousness that observes it. Without getting into too much “scary” detail, quantum mechanics does not talk about the existence of an independent world, but instead talks about how we sentient creatures perceive the world, or more technically how we measure it. An adherent of the conventional explanation of reality would naturally think that a valid scientific theory would have to talk about what the world actually is. But instead it talks about the relative likelihood of any particular measurement of some aspect of the world turning out in some particular way. The observer who conducts this experiment cannot be separated in any fundamental way from the world he or she observes! A question to my physicist friends: shouldn’t that fact alone be sufficient to demolish our belief in the conventional explanation?
