From Nothingness to Value Ethics by Gavin William Rowland

Hi Gavin,

Your response to me was a delight. You are exactly the kind of person I hoped to find when I decided to enter the contest. Unfortunately, I am just about to head out the door to spend the rest of the week in the mountains. But when I return I will respond in more depth.

Before I run out the door, and to give you something else to think about while I am gone, I will send along my definition of 'consciousness' for what it is worth. This was part of my essay that got removed in order to stay within the character count limitation. I had regrets later that I didn't cut something else instead.

Anyway, here it is:

We begin with the structure of consciousness. Here is a list of some, perhaps not all, of the features or components of consciousness:

Awareness, experience, perception, the ability to notice, the self, thought, feelings, intentionality, attention, free will, purpose, imagination, conception, pattern recognition, memory, self-reflection, logical ability (reason), knowledge, comprehension, understanding, meaning, value, morality, wisdom.

The list is arranged in the order the components would appear in a narrative I might deliver to answer the question, What is consciousness like for you? I might say,

"I am aware that I have experiences, I perceive a world around me which just asked me a question about consciousness, and I notice that I need to use the word "I" frequently just to respond to the question. That "I" is my self.

"I experience thought happening and among the thoughts I experience are many feelings ranging from pain to various other sensations and urges. My attention seems to be focused on one mental aspect at a time. Among the feelings are intentions, which somehow urge me to take some action. I take those actions by exercising my free will to redirect my attention so that I may achieve some purpose.

"I can imagine counterfactuals by an exercise of will. I can recognize patterns and concepts among those counterfactuals. I can relegate those concepts, along with perceptions and other experiences to my memory and retrieve them later. I have the ability to consider concepts and infer new and different concepts as logical implications of the ones I am considering. I can reason.

"In my memory I have accumulated quite a store of concepts along with myriad percepts which, taken together, I count as knowledge. I comprehend many of the interrelationships among the percepts and concepts that I know. Thus, I understand much of what I know. I seem to understand some of the relationships between what I know and the world around me, which gives that knowledge some meaning. Some of those relationships are more important than others, which gives them value. Applying those values to the world constitutes morality. And understanding morality constitutes wisdom."

Warm regards,

Paul Martin

Dear Gavin,

I consider your essay as a rare sober voice. Thank you. Indeed, as you said on my page, we have a lot in common, so our differences are rare and subtle. Let me focus on one of them. Your essay ends with "Thus our universal laws and our heartfelt intentions can be unified as expressions both of something from nothing." I am a traditionalist in that respect, I do not think that "something from nothing" is a reasonable idea, if this "nothing" is indeed a complete ontological nothing. I think the very special laws of nature is a clear signature of the upper Mind. Well, this is a rare disagreement, while I could quote many important places from your text, which I fully share. I consider you essay deep and to the point, so I score it high.

Good luck!

Alexey Burov.

Dear Gavin

I enjoyed reading your essay that concerns issues of great philosophical and scientific relevance. Thank you for submitting it to my attention!

Just a question. You say that to explain the universe from nothing is easier than to explain it from something, because any sort of initial condition presupposes a further condition as its cause (the turtle's tower), while "an original state of nothingness, by contrast, should require no further explanation of prior states." But this means, in my opinion, to replace a difficult problem with another no less difficult. It means namely to understand how can something come out from the absolute nothingness . Leibniz, great mathematician and philosopher you very appropriately mentions, said that the biggest problem of metaphysics can be summed up in the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The answer of Leibniz was roughly "Because there is God who chose to create the world", otherwise it would be much more logical that there was nothing at all, since, as the ancient Greeks had understood, from nothing comes out nothing. But God seems to be outside of science, and therefore Leibniz question seems destined to remain unanswered.

My best wishes for you!

Giovanni

Hi Gavin,

(Responding here as well as my page).

Just a quick response amidst business. I really appreciate your reading and commenting on my essay. This weekend I will download. print, and read your essay.

One quick disagreement. I think the place to look for the "credible hypothesis" it is to look at the failure of the scientific/materialist vision. This I tried to do in my book. I think the physics-side is too ambiguous and also far from meaning.

Thanks,

Ted

Dear Gavin,

thanks for your response and your suggestions. I will visit the websites!

Giovanni

Dear Gavin,

What an excellent essay! I agree with much of it. You say:

"Within living things, there is no threshold of complexity at which consciousness can be said to begin."

That is key! If there were, consciousness would clearly 'emerge'. Also, you note 'learning' and 'decision' are all the way down to the cell, while "within the human brain there are perhaps 100 trillion synapses."

So one must explain how, with no threshold of complexity, consciousness is everywhere abundant on earth, each becoming conscious without crossing the threshold. And explain how one hundred trillion synapses are 'integrated', capable of pretty well understanding other similar brains, (or even cat and dog brains!). Quantum entanglement is generally 'monogamous', occurring between two particles [if it occurs at all!] Are all the quantum 'wave packets' conglomerated to produce self-awareness and feelings of happiness, sadness, pride, shame? A field solves all of these problems [and feels right too.] You ask "what endows it with properties of mind? What endows gravity with the property "Come here now!"? You say the consciousness field is ontologically separate from matter. Not so. It is a classical field, with energy, hence E=mc**2 equivalent mass or matter. I think that ideas of "determinism inherent in matter" are confused, but this is beyond the scope of a comment. A classical field is better understood ontologically than an "underlying complexity dimension".

You discuss "value ethics". But the fact that, over millennia, across all religions, "Do unto others..." is what one would expect from a consciousness field, common to all, not from isolated, individual, 'emerged' minds trying to figure things out in a dog-eat-dog Darwinian world. In other words, a universal physical consciousness field that interacts with local biological flows [momentum density: ions in axons, vesicles across synaptic gaps] sensing and 'nudging', solves problems that are otherwise incomprehensible. The details of the physical field are scattered through the comments on my page, but for a taste of the physics involved look at The Nature of Quantum Gravity.

The idealist view that the universe is at base-level "just information" is simply confused, while Spinoza's 'substance' (that which stands beneath, under-standing) is very compatible with a consciousness field that spans the universe, as occasionally sensed directly by vast numbers of people. The primary drawback to the field today lies in misconceptions associated with the Quantum Credo, but this too shall pass.

Thank you for participating in this contest and good luck!

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Gavin,

Nice essay, covering may areas missed by most and with unique insights, well set out and described.

You were straight up high in my scoring regime with your opening; "..many foundational problems would be better approached by starting at the origin of the universe and finding a process that results in our observed reality. As a part of this process, we would need to be open to questioning our assumptions.

I'm dismayed so few seem able to genuinely do so, but then 'one man's meat.." so basing fresh views on rigorously deep and sound foundations is crucial and very difficult. I suspect that's why old doctrines cling on regardless! (along with cognitive dissonance of course).

I agree with most points, but as an astronomer I should say you do cite some poorly supported theory. You write; "wherever we may position ourselves - here, or a billion light years away - we would see the same pattern of expansion. It appears as if the universe began everywhere at once" where we've had recent good evidence that was a misunderstanding and flawed analysis. Indeed some excellent dynamic mapping has been done from Planck survey data (updating WMAPS) showing complex asymmetries, the so called 'axis of evil', large scale flows and a helical' background. One model fitting all that well is a version of the 'big bounce' recycling theory. I can give you links if interested.

Have you also considered the 'Higgs process' and so called 'dark energy' in relation to 'from nothingness'? The evidence of 'continuum energy' and it's magnitude is now well accepted and discussed in many branches. I prefer the term 'condensate' as the source of the condensed matter we find from local perturbation. All that may be trivial to and not in conflict with your point but may it help make 'nothingness' usefully less esoteric?

I also like the later sections, and identifying against common assumption that; "Evidence of learning and purposeful decision-making is seen throughout biology, all the way down to the level of single-celled organisms" which many deny, though do you feel we need to find a point where 'higher intelligence' can be defined?

Finally I agree with the 'idealist' view you cite that "all things are in some way mind-dependent". Do you agree the suggested parallels (I use) with subjectiveness and observer dependency?

I hope you may also study my own essay and give your honest views.

Best of luck

Peter

Hi again Gavin Rowland,

I really appreciated your essay as well as your comments. You also mentioned two books that are of interest to me - yours and also Roger Trigg's.

You commented about the up-in-the-air state of contemporary physics. I just read the "Tangled Up in Spacetime" article in January's Scientific American. That "It from Qubit" effort is drawing a lot of attention from physicists, perhaps reflecting the current state.

I hope things go well with your work.

Ted Christopher

Gavin,

'Big Bounce' theories are very much alive and well, most a bit MORE consistent than the BB but none so far complete enough to confidently replace it. Even Penrose admits his 'Conformal cosmolgy' version has ultimate limits.

Also don't forget that accelerating expansion is still only a HYPOTHESIS! Sure it was popular when the (unseemly!) 'race' to produce it from redshift reported in with a winner, but that was hype. There ARE OTHER ways to produce greater redshift with distance, not generally adopted yet, but veracity in science is NOT a 'vote' system! This video explains one along with it's unique related wide consistency with OTHER findings.

Geometrical redshift from expanding helical paths. So we must always be careful not to assume any one theory as 'fact' to then preclude others.

On the matter of 'accretion' and recycling a widely consistent active galactic nucleus (AGN) model ('supermassive black hole' in old money) is able to reproduce the unexplained CMB asymmetries found. A published joint paper of mine describes it; though again with too many changes to old doctrine to be 'adoptable' as a new paradigm quite yet! here, or

HJ. Vol.36 No 6. 2013 pp.633-676.

Recent science across many fields and a number of essays here discuss 'continuum energy' or the dozen other names and wide evidence we have for this 'sub matter' state. Sure it may still take 20 years to become 'standard science' as did everything!

I've tended to read around 20 of the latest papers a week, and find I need to do at least that to keep up and get a coherent picture. Most supercede the old stuff most still rely on! It's a shame apparently even many professors may only read 2 a month! I hope that may widen your horizons a bit and not confuse too much! Do ask questions on the attached as well as my essay.

Best wishes

Peter

Gavin,

I can agree with your abstract statement: "I propose that many foundational problems would be better approached by starting at the origin of the universe and finding a process that results in our observed reality. As a part of this process, we would need to be open to questioning our assumptions. In this essay I explain how existence, in terms of something from nothing, may be the consequence of a dimension of constructiveness."

By the tone and details of your essay, you seem able to free yourself from accepted ideas and supplement them with others like "our universal laws and our heartfelt intentions can be unified as expressions both of something from nothing," the subjective time and space existing independently in the mental realm." Your essay seems to be an open exploration which invites the same openness with the reader.

In the same spirit essay speculates about discovering dark matter in a dynamic galactic network of complex actions and interactions of normal matter with the various forces -- gravitational, EM, weak and strong interacting with orbits around SMBH. I propose that researchers wiggle free of labs and lab assumptions and static models

I hope you can get a chance to read and comment on mine.

Regards,

Jim Hoover

Dear Gavin;

I have read your essay with great interest and pleasure.

the fommowing remarks that are no critics:

Your "Nothingness" can in some way be compared to my "Total Simultaneity" that has no time and or space. It doesn't "exist" in our emerging reality.

Time and space are in my perception "restrictions" of our reality, they are needed for consciousness to become "aware" of the FLOW of time and space. However I think that time and space are not created BY our emerging universe but by "nothingness" or Total Simultaneity. This is the emerging of what you are calling "whatness".

I think that any "complexity" that should start for new again is not "destroyed" but stays available as probability (eternally) in what you call "nothingness".

I like very much your approach of consciousness on page 5.

You say "Our conscious experience is also characterised by a spatial continuum" I would like to say : "Our by time and space restrcted emergent consciousness" is part of Total Consciousness" in Total Simultaneity (nothingness ?)

"Emergence often yield novel and inexpected consequences" I fully agree with that , could have written it myself.

I was very pleased with your approach and gave it a high valid so I hope that the above remarks will lead you to read, leave your comment and also a rating to my essay : "THe Purpose of Life"

best regards and good luck

Wilhelmus de Wilde

sorry I forgot to log in...