Got your WWAR message,

I’m OK – the road is still pretty rocky, though.

Sure! lets eat next time you come through. There’s a vast array of fast food joints here, as you might remember.

Leslye

WWAR alerted me you had written, but your email address wasn’t included (at least with Safari, and I’m too lazy to start up another browser. Since googling I’ve listened to a snippet of your radio show at EMORY & HENRY and hope this finds you happy & well.

I’m OK – it’s a rocky road, though.

Holler when you’re coming through, and this time I hope you won’t get blocked by a parade or locked out of your car! Food is always good!

Leslye

I was just checking out your podcasts. Very cool. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

-Mike

Jim,
I will probably get back into my “bottom up” intelligence soon.. but it’s on the back burner for the moment. I have the sense that reality permits (accepts, is congruent with, rewards, “can feel right with”) numerous points of view. Though, it seems to me, they may seem incompatible, that is only because they are not as fully developed as they can be. This is one way of saying the apparently illogical statement of “Though I don’t really disagree with you at a deeper level, I do disagree with you form the limited version of my perspective I now have.”

It may very well be that there is something “on high” that extrudes down to what we call consciousness. However, that seems very unlikely to me. Rather, I think the essence of the reality in which we live and of which we are capable of becoming aware, is composed in such a way that it evolves over time to contain things like life and consciousness. To say that it was designed to be that way seems limited to me. Rather, I would say, given that it is possible for realities to exist that permits interaction and change over time it is likely that such a one as we are in will come into being. I think that things like physical reality, matter, time, space, life, consciouness… and more that we have yet to reach, will eventually emerge. I like the term “emergent qualities”.

That is part of my fascination with the bottom up intelligence experiments and theory. It also underlies an equal, though equally amaturish, interest in computer based intelligence and consciousness. It seems very likely to me that there will eventually be machine based intelligences (though the machines may be more like meat than metal) that will act and speak and feel and want much like we do and that they will seem as conscious to themselves as we do to ourselves.

The possibility that at some level in the evolutionary climb they can be said to be touched by, or to have reached, contact with some sort of higher level ( something on high extruding down), does not, at the moment, interest me anywhere near as much as the exploration of the climbing process.

Harry
Jim Kee wrote:

Harry,

On the top-down/bottom-up issue, my basic albeit totally unprovable contention is that consciousness, in the self-awareness sense, is a top-down phenomenon. I suspect that everything of real significance in us is basically a downward extrusion from “on high,” if you will, and that physical existence is secondary to something going on in a higher dimension.
As Jesus purportedly said in “The Gospel of Thomas,”If the flesh exists because of the spirit, it is a miracle; but if the spirit exists because of the body, it is a miracle of miracles. I marvel at how such great wealth established itself amid this poverty.”

Jim

—–Original Message—–
From: Harry Baya
Sent: Wed 9/20/2006 8:51 PM
To: Jim Kee
Subject: Re: [Warp Baya] Comment: “‘New” Consciousnesses”

Jim,
Great to hear from you. I responded in the Blog… but I know I am way over my head in all this. I have a point of view and enjoy exploring it but I am painfully aware of how personal and limited it is. I’m open to expanding it.. but I can’t make it happen… I just have to let the meme’s battle it out and notice where I happen to be along the way.

Harry

I’ve read a little further in Emergence and the author suggests that cities are life forms that have lives on the order of 1000 years. I am still inclined to think they are either a kind of life where sufficient change occurs that death is not as needed as it was with our kind of life, or they are simply early in their evolution and that something like death and mating will occur as it did with what we now call life.

I have little problem with the thought that consciousness dies with the body. That seems highly likely in the reality we know. My best guess is that in some sense there is another level of reality in which everything has always existed and always will; it’s just unfolding. Whether it does it again and again, or can be experienced from outside or something…are issues I can’t get a feel for. And, I assume, there are levels above that one.

My veiw is that humans are examples of “dumb” cells working out a community, the human body, that seems to be intelligent and conscious. It took them a very long time and a lot of trial and error, but here we are.

I have never heard of Adam Kadmon… which shows how little I know in this general area. I spent 20+ years as a Quaker so I do have some mystical orientation and exposure ( i.e the ‘“woo-wooâ€? zone of fuzzy New Age fantasy’ is not completely alien to me). However, I see the bird flight, and similar behavior as bottom up, not top down. In some way the two blend for me. The communal spiritual experience of the Quakers seems to me to be more like the ant colony intelligence than awareness of some external being. I think it is part of the range of human potential and is somehow magnified by the number of people involved. It seems like a kind of shared force field linking some particular energy in each of us. I see it as bottom up based on what’s within each of us rather than relating to anything that could exist without us, or independent of us.

I am vaguely aware that trying to make this sort of thing fit the words and concepts available to me is somewhat futile, but still, for me, worth trying. I see the emergence of complexity, life, consciousness and whatever comes in the phases after those as being as inately miraculous as would be the existance of some “top down” central source independent of those experiencing its energy.

In my hall of miracles the biggest one is that anything exists at all and the second is that anyone, especially me, exists and is conscious of existing. After those comes the apparent pre-set likelihood that some kinds of complexity cause life, consciousness and so forth to arise.

I don’t have anything much to say about what the next emergent stage is after consciousness. It’s possible that those with a greater reach than me can sense more and that something like Adam Kadmon (or the “Cosmic Christ, whatever that may be) is their early perception of that stage.

My guess is that communities of humans (clubs, cities, nations, etc.) are very primitive life forms in a new evolutionary chain and that the Internet is going to become the nervous system, the brain and the stimulus/reaction mechanism for the being, or beings, that will exist at the next level. Another possibility, and both could be, is that machine based intelligence and consciousness will become the next stage in the process and will eventually evolve independently from us… whether we continue to exist or not.

The collective unconscious to me relates to the pre-set tendencies (mental and physical) related to our path of evolution.. stored in our bodies and brains. It’s a useful construct for dealing with part of human experience and behavior but, as I see it, has nothing “magic” in it. It’s very deep and very powerful and strikes the same resonant chords in us (I think) as mysticism, magic, music and art… but it’s who we are and what we do, and not anything that implies anything exists independent of us. It may imply communication channels of which we are only vaguely aware, but, if so, these will someday be dealt with by whatever science becomes.

Other days I’m a little more open to the more radical views of mystical experience, but most days I see it a very normal, natural, little understood, side of the wonder and joy of life.

I wonder, however, if this phenomenon might even be more wondrous and mysterious than it appears at first glance? I remember confronting this question some years ago when I observed a large flock of birds performing perfect, simultaneous swoops and turns as if they were a single organism guided by a single brain. It led me to wonder about the possibility of a “group mind” that was controlling the movements of these individual units, which would suggest some sort of “top-down” mechanism.

True, I admit that we are invoking an idea which is beyond the domain of conventional science, and some of my friends would accuse me of drifting off into the “woo-woo” zone of fuzzy New Age fantasy.

In my defense I summon Socrates, who, through Plato, stated that our ordinary space/time world is the realm of shadows, and that “reality” lies in the realm of the “Forms.” Could it be that individual space/time ants live, move, and have their being in a Platonic-like Form of “Antness,” a kind of “Meta-Ant Consciousness” existing on a level other than our space/time continuum?

Yes, yes, I know I’ve moved into an area more properly the purview of science fiction writers. But, if you’re still with me, allow me to extend the idea one step further.

In your reading, have you run across the concept of Adam Kadmon? This is usually encountered in Kabbalistic literature, and is generally translated as “Primordial Man.” However, it is sometimes taken to mean something similar to Plato’s notion of a non-spatial/non-temporal Form for all mankind. In fact, all humans–past, present, and future–collectively comprise the being of Adam Kadmon. Carl Jung was profoundly influenced by the concept, writing about it extensively and perhaps using it as a source for his notion of the “collective unconscious.” Others, with more pronounced New Age leanings, even suggest that Adam Kadmon, through the evolution of human consciousness, is destined to become the “Cosmic Christ”, but I will leave such speculation to the woo-woo crowd.

Anyway, Harry, pardon my ravings, but, hey, it’s all your fault for blogging your way into my madcap brain!

Coincidentally, many years ago I had an assignment to write an original essay about the nature of computer systems. The instructor neglected to give many rules about the essay, so I went off the deep end. I wrote about an imaginary system modeled after ants! My lowest components in the architecture were “erts”, and I talked about how the components communicated and made aggregated decisions, and how the system evolved, etc. The instructor didn’t know what to do with it, and he resolved to more carefully define similar exercises in the future. (I did get an A in the course, though!)

The idea of cities being forced to “die” is interesting. In a way, we have that sort of evolution throughout history. Cities being destroyed (by natural calamity or war) and rebuilding is one example. But the main one that occurs to me is whole societies, such as the classic example of the Roman Empire. There’s an oft-cited “truism” that a society can last for 200 years but then begins to decay and is ripe for overthrow. This is used as an argument that the US is ripe for a huge fall – a projection that seems all too realistic these days. I also recall from undergrad philosophy the Hegelian theory of thesis, antithesis and synthesis; for example, a society or economic system arises, it’s opposite arises, and conflict produces a new system with characteristics blended from the two. This just sounds a lot like evolution to me. I’ve always been mesmerized by how societies work at all, when no one knows “what the plan is.” Human systems, economic systems….nothing more than ant hills.

Another thought: I have a book by Marvin Minsky called The Society of Mind. Regretably I haven’t read it yet. I was fascinated by a review I read a long time ago, which is why I bought it. The contention of the book (as I understand it) is that consciousness is an illusion – it’s actually nothing particularly profound. Instead, what we have is an assembly of a large number of independent but communicating parts, each with their own purpose – but which when taken as a whole look seem like a unique whole with characteristics that look like consciousness. Since I perceive that consciousness is a sacred, inscrutable gift, I was amazed that there would be a theory to the contrary. Consciousness to me is one of the things that to me dictates life after death: it’s incomprehensible to me that consciousness dies with the body. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I haven’t read Minsky’s book yet: I may fear he’ll convince me that what I think of as a mystical essence – the hallmark of my soul – is actually nothing more than a mechanistic construct.

Lots more to think about. Thanks for stirring the pot!

Rick