GEORGIOS MAVROUDIS *******

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Research on Consciousnessby the Aid

of thePsychedelic Experience

FEBRUARY

2002 ***

FOREWORD

Bewilderment; confoundness; mystification; infantilism… those are the words that best describe the contemporary condition in science when it comes to the issue of consciousness. In an age when we appear to have reached an immense sophistication of knowledge over the nature of matter, the cosmogonic evolution, the life, the society, we remain almost speechless against the slippery inquiry of the nature of consciousness. If mathematical formulation is to be the bedrock of ideological and scientific certitude then we have no certitude whatsoever in the realm of what is the mind. We endorse to all of kind of hypotheses unconsciously but when we are pressed, we cannot defend our position. It is not an exaggeration to report that all rationalistic formulas seem to fail on the probing of this strange, yet overwhelming, phenomenon.

In contrast to the natural sciences, psychology is still suspended by the lack of dare or innovation to overcome the challenges, which come out from the mystifying darkness of consciousness. While physics have already made their great leap towards the quantum indeterminacy and biology has penetrated to the spinal cord of life, the DNA, psychology is still under their capitulation, with a deficiency of its own original methodology for the investigation of the phenomena that is concerned with. Of course, we can give the mitigation that psychology is still a young a science, an immature discipline against an incredibly perplexed problem: The question of what mind is, what consciousness is and what behavior is for. Those are not simple questions. Those enigmas delegate the humankind to the dangling enterprise of discovering the truth for millennia. We are not really much progressed since Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Parmenides had postulated their first speculations on the nature of consciousness. We might have progressed in methods of probing the brain but our theories on the issue are, all in all, a drama of discrepancies and crudeness.

On this paper, the reader will find that there is a general apprehension against obsolete theories that govern stubborningly the field of psychology. Both Cartesian dualism and cognitive theories will have to be strictly criticized. A new skepticism will stand against all present assumptions with the premise of a more radical revaluation of the mind and consciousness. No doubt, it is a dauntingly difficult task to face most of the new cognitive doctrines and the physicalist map of the philosophy of science. Their descendance from the traditional rationalism guarantees their full consistency and thus their undefeatable status to any rival theories. Yes, naiveties of the embodied soul and the Cartesian theater kind, as Dennett designated, are forlorn by their fallacy when they are put next to the reductionistic cartography of the brain. However, the triumph of the cognitive research is surprisingly undermined by the parade of brand new ideas coming from the field of the natural sciences. While, journals and books proclaim that the time of naivety is over and consciousness becomes accessible to objective research, yet in compliance with the quantum physics, chaos theory and morphogenetic fields in biology, this very proclamation seems to join the same naiveties. The message that we got from new approaches in other levels of our reality is that any judgment which rushes to be established over an obsolete or yet incomplete conception of the universe and life is doomed to failure by a humiliating canceling. That and only that should keep us open to new approaches and ideas, to new theories and philosophies and at the same time uncommitted to any present ideologies. Otherwise, our hopes for unraveling the nature of consciousness or any other phenomenon that stands beyond our grasp will be afflicted by a terrible suspension of progress.

Therefore, in this paper the research will march in the darkness of consciousness equipped with a different verdict. This verdict will be shaped by two inescapable factors that, in a way, condition the issue of consciousness. The transcendental experience and the quantum mechanics will intricate the question and will feed us with an abundance of new ideas and notions about the mind. They will send us farther away for a deeper comprehension of consciousness. Their

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unanimity to each other and, most importantly, their unanimity to the sense of having a mind, their amenability to the old suppositions of our pristine imagination incite me to use them for the enterprise of transcending obscuring and disorientating notions on the scientific safari of consciousness studies.

Until now, science has been regarded as the road that leads away from the traditional modes of thinking about the self and the universe. Science is known as the highway to the truth, which is supposed to be diametrically opposed to the archaic accepted wisdom, many times called superstitious or raw. But as more information is gathered from various sources, a cosmos is build that gets increasingly akin to the old good commencements on our nature. It is not an overstatement the fact that new scientific reports return humiliated to many initial theses that were held centuries ago. They do not proved necessarily identical to their initiations but analogous to them and that leads one to think that this highway is a roundabout, really. I do not take the position of an extremely radicalism in the following pages. I do not imply that all the current science is square to one and, hence, that we need to return to mysticism in order to resolve the problem of consciousness. My proposal is an attack against the reluctance of cognitive scientists to comprise on their investigation of mind the antipodes of human experience that have been reported as long as we possess the linguistic capacity and the novel revolutionary knowledge that they, averagely, insist on refusing to use.

Quantum physics and the psychedelic experience figure out as the most promising elements for the unraveling of consciousness’ nature. Perhaps, not all philosophers, scientists or trouble-free people can see the reason for the psychedelic or quantum usage in such a research. Nevertheless, once they obligate themselves in a deep study of these issues they will concede that their hesitation was based on their ignorance on the offerings that those sources of information give to the puzzlement of contemporary epistemology and psychology on the issue. It seems that a big eureka waits us all there. The enigma of consciousness can be thoroughly understood in a more substantial way, as long as we enlarge both the map of causalities in our theoretical analysis through quantum mechanics and the spectrum of our cognitive experience by the use of psychedelic compounds. Therefore, the research will go hunting for a sufficient answer to the mystery of consciousness via the “jungle” of the transcendental experience and its verifying accompaniment of the quantum physics.

It should be evident already that here we are talking about the spiritualization of science or, maybe, the scientific concretization of spirituality. Well, that kind of compromise should transpose the problem giving us the chance to gather all the useful data in a landscape of dissipative ideas and to structure a theory of consciousness that will not steal away from us the uniqueness that we feel as human beings; neither the magnitude of our being. Such an endeavor can only provide us both with an anthropical optimism and a set of knowledge that will be adequate to the probing of the meaningful nature of possessing a consciousness.

The paper is punctuated in three main parts that confess the problem of consciousness from three different perspectives. First, cognitive theories, based on physicalistic notions, will give their own popular account. As we will apprehend, though, their incompatibility and the wide variation of their direction gives a vacillating disposition that pilots not in a secure way to the understanding that we are searching for. Although, cognitive scientists like Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker have written powerful books that shed light to numerous previous uncertainties on how the mind works, nevertheless, their versions of consciousness are really superficial, as they neglect aspects of the issue that in any way defy explanation. However, an explanation is not given, apart from a short comment of superiority against ostensibly naiveties that entrench the question. They are truly tentative on diving in for a deeper explanation of consciousness. An explanation that will grant us the sort of approval that comes when an explanation really fits with the subject of its inquiry.

And since consciousness is not only the frantic firing of the neurons –at least to our “illusory” experience, as many scientists want us to believe, we will jump to the second part on an issue that still, in the dawn of the third millennium, remains largely unexplored. The psychedelic experience, albeit as ancient as our species and our cognition, has not yet been explored in an ample way. The governments suspend our formal knowledge on the issue and hence we linger on in not a particularly more advanced level than the primates’ knowledge. We are infantile on the puzzle of the psychedelic ecstasy in an analogous way to our bafflement about the nature of mind. It seems that once we take the admission to go forward on such an eerie experiment, we will be able to unravel the greater mystery of them all. It is that revelatory the psychedelic experience and that misconstrued from our contemporary culture. The aim of this paper is to

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show evidently how psychedelics can reorient us in the study of consciousness and how can counter the questions that still have been left unresolved by the physicalism of cognitive science and psychology. The transcendental experience will expose the partial meagerness of the physicalism on consciousness by introducing us to the undeviating method of introspection and its supremacy against neuropsychology. No need to say that I do not expect immediate approval, since any introspective approach is not easy to be, consistently, transferred to words, just like neurological events cannot be consistently exposed to experience. Conversely, I would not venture a research of consciousness from such a route, if I did not had a kind of backup, a stance that guarantees the verification of several daring propositions and speculations that dwell up from the hallucinogenic experience. This is the naturalistic approach that will close the paper.

Quantum mechanics, among other new-fangled scientific theories, have brought things upside-down quite impressively. The twist of this novel theory has not left the epistemology and philosophy unaffected. The conceptual changes on the nature of matter, brought by quantum physics and the recognition of the active participation of consciousness in any empirical observation of any physical experience has settled an avant-garde in the universal philosophy and epistemology. Nothing is the same after the equations of Bohr, Heisegger, and Einstein. Not only technology shifted to colossal modifications through the invention of television, transistors, and the non-locality of many modern-day communication systems but philosophy too, gradually, turned its back to the absolutism of ideologies and doctrines. The quantum heresy vitiated the realm of philosophy as no other movement ever achieved. The uncertainty principle inspired numerous lovers of thought and attributed to every conceived facet of reality. By doing that, we gained a new standpoint of apprehending reality and mind. In addition, science is also introduced to this new physical reality and the changes here, although slow in their unfolding, are expected to be spectacular. Matter has been proven a myth; in reality, matter is found to be frequencies of energy waves dancing under the principles of the uncertainty. Also, mind, stunningly, has been discovered to be the primal substratum of being, the actual foundation of the universal isness. With those assumptions, psychology should be prepared for a flight and the inspection of consciousness should gloriously pass in another level, transcending the vicious circle of the physicalism. Although, psychologists and cognitive scientists still waver to take seriously the quantum theory and what it can offer, however, in the future a more homogenous acceptance is expected to take place. When that happens, we should anticipate a profound flourishing of psychology that will deviate the meager state of consciousness studies to an exhilarating revolution both in the discipline of psychology and the probing of consciousness. But most importantly, the enrichment of the understanding of human nature will be the hallmark of such a bending.

In few words, the implication of the paper could be abbreviated in the following sentence:Yes, consciousness is reduced to matter, but who said that the rigidity of matter could not be

reducible to the fluidity of mind?

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PRELUDE

The Reverted Intrusion

In the perpetual turmoil of human history, on a planet of regular changes and cultural “cooking”, there has been recorded a polarity between the centralized European culture and the rest continents that were, for the most part, the background in the interaction between the civilizations. Europe was always more privileged due to its small size and its high density of its population. On the other hand, Asia, Africa, and the pre-discovered America were too vast to allow its peoples to come together and labor their cultural gems. The enormous distances isolated ideas that were ought to become known by their fermentation with foreign ones, something that did not happened, effectively, until fast transportation was invented. Europe, though, flourished from the dawn of history until its culmination when its civilization expanded to all directions by the imperialistic purports of its ambitious citizens. The short distances worked as a kind of a lubricant in its cultural growth, as ideas, philosophies, religious beliefs, and scientific dictums collaborated to each other, breeding new waves of knowledge and upgrading the life standards and the range of the European civilization.

When the explorers discovered the New World, when Marco Polo trekked the Asian depths, when Africa was mapped, the European culture, with all its vigor, met the other face of the world. The less thriving continents, where people and customs were very different and the rationalism was somewhat at odds with the one Europe inherited from the Greeks. The exotic beauty of the new lands was accompanied by exotic traditions, myths, and religions. However primitive, they had an essence of truthfulness and precision that, unconsciously, pushed the European conquerors to violently dictate their own customs, religions, and truths. It is true that the Native Americans, or the Asians did not had any acceptable science –their minds and their culture, according to early reports from the conquerors, were blurred by supernatural incoherencies. Sadly, those assumptions were the trigger for one of the greatest lapses of the European civilization, and that is the horrific Inquisition against people who were forced to abandon their own belief systems for the superiority of their conquerors.

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In parallel with this, Europe was arising from the superstition and demonology of the ages. Linneus initiated a process of scientific labeling of nature and rationalism soon overshadowed the European continent, and later, its colonies. We could conceive the expansion of the Western civilization towards other continents as synonymous to the expansion of rationalism towards the medieval darkness. Physical laws, chemical reactions, astronomical calculations, medicinal therapies, anatomical probing, all were sources of a new light that was enlarging the scope of our understanding in the nature of the cosmos, the life and the psyche. Our sight became less nebulous by the acquisition of coherent knowledge and, thus, any intuitional sense of the truth was to be surrendered to a misfiring state against the “imperialism” of science and rationalism. Just like the Incas, the Mayas, the Middle Easterners, the Indians and the Africans did together with their cultural fruits.

However, as they say, time is the highest judge of all. History is always flowing to the right pathways and sides with the ones that deserve of vindication. Beliefs and theories that do not have an acquaintance with the truth are troubled by the progression of the humanity. More or less, this is what is happening the last century in the world culture. I think that the Western world is at the point of a monumental regress from its convictions due to the emergence of several belying factors that happen to condition the scientific, philosophical, and social development. From the beginning of the 20th century, the field of physics encountered shockingly the irrational core of reality by the realization of the wave/particle state of the atom. As if an alchemical process, physics pushed forward the revelation that the ostensible rigidity of matter has actually an almost metaphysical fluidity closely related to mind. That was a major conceptual transformation, which brought a revolution in the natural sciences; a revolution that has not yet displayed its radical influential power to make a breakthrough in the epistemology. That is either because few scientists cultivate an interest to keep up with the advancement in knowledge to physics or because they do not spend time to really understand the implications with an open and critical mind.

The Western world had to retreat and in the religious dimension apart from the philosophical. Christianity loses ground, while Eastern religions (apart from Islam) gain the interest of westerners due to their softer dogmas and their tolerance. Unfortunately, Christianity has proven to lack the adjusting balance with the real meaning of its real teaching and, hence, unforgettable crimes have been committed out of bigotry and refusal to accept the beauty and the necessity of multiplicity and variance of cultures and their beliefs. Those very mistakes together with the present insufficiency and utopianism of European religions, forced the people of this formerly supreme continent to seek for better solutions and salvation from distant cultures that once humiliatingly succumbed under the threat of the sword and the gun of the European conquerors. Buddhism, shamanism, Taoism, Yogic, and Tantric practices, gradually, take a central position in the stage of our cultural interests. The Western world opens the doors to a colorful parade of foreign ideas and habits. Actually, it did opened the doors from the very beginning of the colonization but not in the way it does today. Yesterday this opening was mainly towards to trade and philosophies, although they never took them seriously. Today this opening is a more significant one, since we do not only accept foreign influences, both in the USA and in Europe, but we renounce most of our own philosophies, religions, and cultural ethics.

As I did paralleled the European imperialism with the prevalence of rationalism and positivism in the field of science, I have no choice but to do accordingly and with the veering of these eventful historical circumstances. Indeed, what any reader of popular cosmology and physics recognizes is the stunning meltdown of the western rationalism. Almost forty years ago, this amazement was coupled with the announcement of the resurrection of the transcendental experience via the use of hallucinogenic agents. In the beginning of the ‘60s, famous ethnobotanologists rediscovered in the mountains of Mexico and the rainforest of Amazon the properties of hallucinogenic plants and excited claimed that, at last, we found the keys to open the Pandora’s box. The secrets of consciousness and mind were no longer inaccessible to our introspection. According to them, the hallucinogens offer an incomparable shortcut to the reaching of our existential truth. The far-fetched statements and reports of people who experienced the psychedelic ecstasy were falsifying many of the rationalistic assumptions to which science is build on. Of course, they were never taken any seriously, but that does not prove their lack of validity, as the criticizers of the psychedelic experience were people who did never considered to see by themselves what it is all about. Hence, their criticism was and still is sand-boxed.

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With all that, in the first light of the 21st century we find ourselves among new trends, new remedies, and new visions about reality and life. How much the study of consciousness will be influenced by this imperialistic undertow? This reverted intrusion seems to take place in an ever-accelerating way and the mingling of diverse philosophies and practices lead unavoidably to a new world, to a new science, to a new religion. In this transitory age, we walk upon a path that leads to new astonishing insights. Put quantum physics next to the Taoist and the Buddhist teachings and you will be surprised on how many similarities there exist on the nature of reality and mind. Consider deeply the implications of the psychedelic experience and you will be ready to salute an adieu to the rigidity of rationalism in the study of mind.

It is tacit, it is adjudicating, and it is happening. The Western world and the rationalism witness the intrusion of more flexible and imaginative currents against them, coming from all over the world.

If we wish to be up-to-date with the progress of occurrences and if we wish to study consciousness on a historical perspective, we cannot but kick off this paper with this very prelude and continue accordingly.

* THE COGNITIVE APPROACH

1The

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Cognitive Battlefields

“Lalande, or whoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and could find no God, would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.”

-George Santayana

“A philosophy whose principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism…That is why

materialism will always fail of universal adoption.” -William James

INTRODUCTION

A Definition of Consciousness

Consciousness is not a phenomenon that easily can be studied. If we consider that the presupposition of the study is the possession of consciousness, then what we really have is consciousness studying consciousness. That, as we will see in the next pages, is not an easy enterprise. It brings us to all kind of paradoxes and mysteries. Or then again, when we decide that we can do a more coherent study by probing the physical brain, then we end up with a deficient theory, which are poles apart with the answer that we actually seek. Thus, the mind-body problem places us in between of a forked theoretical pathway and the result is to get even more perplexed when we accumulate more knowledge on this disputed issue. The phenomenon is so difficult that even experts, devoted to its resolution, like neurologists, seem baffled by it.

Before beginning piercing deeper in the problem, it would be much helpful if we make a first and rather simple definition of consciousness. First, the most general portrayal would be the fact that all consciousness is consciousness of something; it always has an object. Experience and behavior intend, or are directed toward, an object, a goal, or a complex

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situation outwards in the world. Although, simple this description as it seems, Husserl, the founder of phenomenological philosophy, regarded consciousness “that wonder of wonders”. That conclusion was generated by the indefiniteness of the question. It is much easier to answer what an atom, a cell, or even an organism is but when we question the nature of consciousness, we marvel among slippery notions. We confusingly come upon the kernel of the experience of our question, the source of our curiosity itself. Consciousness is never merely a thing or event in the research field of the scientist; it is rather the condition for the possibility of research itself. It is that by virtue of which we can observe, classify, and interpret. The consciousness of the researcher establishes a field of intelligibility within which observable facts emerge.

The next question that comes to mind is: Is consciousness a thing or an idea? The response of phenomenology is neither! Consciousness seems to be a third kind of phenomenon, for which our intellectual tradition does not prepare us to understand. Such an idea is not always bad even for the cognitive scientists, regarding that they too accept that matter is not sufficient to generate consciousness without a certain kind of complexity, which assists to exceed its dullness. Nevertheless, phenomenologists and cognitive scientists differ enormously on the further details of their study.

One meaning of possessing a conscious mind, however, is simply the non-automatic responsiveness of an organism to its environment. Anyone reading such an explanation, though, would find it somewhat flat and scarce comparing to the whole of the human conscious experience. Therefore, in a different sense, consciousness occurs when we not only see but see what we see, or have knowledge of seeing, inspected even more by metaknowledge of having the knowledge of seeing. The phenomenon is considered as such when we are in a multilevel way self-aware of what we are about to do (intent) or of our preparation of events (expectancy), or of our motivational or emotional conditions (“wants” and “feelings”). Additionally, this complex reflection is not always directed towards the self but, most of the times, it is directed towards the outer world, as it is obvious from its openness. To become conscious, ultimately, it means to have a world, to find oneself thrust into a macroscopic world of people, things, and events.

Apparent as it is by now, the problem remains unsolved. We say that consciousness is the perception of the world and the self, the responsiveness to outer pressures and the willful settling of the behavior towards the environment. Somehow, we are still to scratch. Somehow, we have not walked even a meter away from our initial position. The perplexion still remains, as we have not really grasped the fundamental essence of the phenomenon. What we rather described is the surface of conscious experience, something that even an idiot can accomplish quite easily. At such a moment, we do not have a better answer to the question than Louis Armstrong had when a reporter asked him what jazz is.

Naturally, this intricacy of the issue incites an analogous complicatedness in the field of psychology, which is the main science that has undertaken the solving of the problem. Psychologists and cognitive scientists are often daunted by many of the exasperating questions that concern this basic phenomenon. When they work out to give answers only by a phenomenological perspective, they are accused of inconsistency to the physical part of causalities; they are supposed to take a fictional position on the problem. On the other side, when others devote their researches to a purely physical investigation of consciousness, they are regarded as missing the point of the wondrous experience of the human individual. Thus, cognitive science has bridged those two extremities to the so-called heterophenomenology, in hope of a more in-depth probing of the mind and its qualia. Unfortunately, this position is also among inextricable problems that drive us away from the actual matter. Because it is not enough to know how consciousness is channeled and exploited in the physical brain, we need a more pragmatic exemplification that will validate our meaningful existential experience. Those are issues that we will have to trace in detail at the following pages. The bewilderment of science has a reason, no doubt, but it is not going to last for long. New perspectives are coming stormingly from various fields and once we will take decision to usurp them and interconnect them, perhaps we will elevate psychology and consciousness studies to an appropriate position for giving its real definition.

To understand this variability of opinions we ought to mention Julian Jaynes’ speculation that proposes us a new way of seeing things. This is a proof of how radical theories can join the battlefield and inspire us with entirely different orientations. Julian Jaynes claimed that consciousness is a recent invention. The people of early civilizations, including the Greeks of

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Homer and the Hebrews of the Old Testament, were unconscious and that the sense of ego is a new trait acquired in the last two three thousand years. Even Daniel Dennett is sympathetic to such, phenomenically, preposterous claim; he believes that consciousness might be a product of cultural evolution that gets imparted to brains with early training, something which is closely related to the above speculation.

Given this fluctuation and instability, we should outline the major theses that flirt with the solution. Starting with the argument that consciousness is synonymous with its contents (qualia), cognitive scientists have initiated a thorough study to understand how mind represents those contents and how conscious cognitive experience arises. It is a fact that they do a good job, but they seem sometimes, as we said, to walk through a wrong territory. Conversely, another argument supports that one must address a more basic and fundamental pre-reflective level in order to truly understand its actual nature. Here there is a bursting of theories, not all deserving our attention since they bear the spirit of vagueness inherited by old disoriented theories. However, there are some suppositions coming from transpersonal and folk psychology that do have to be scrutinized, as they are in compliance with new theories from other disciplines like physics.

Sartre refuses to consider consciousness as a function of character or of a person. Thus, Sartre insists that consciousness is responsible for the totality of human experience, and hence, it is the bedrock rather the epiphenomenon. That is not a fortuitous view. It is elicited by the genuineness of the conscious experience and a philosopher who adapts an existential approach has no choice but to embrace it. The foremost point of this research will be to validate such an assumption. Even if currently the wind is blowing opposite to an endeavor like this, as cognitive science progressively gets attached to a conservative mentality (if we neglect doctrines like emergentism), I express my confidence that a surprise is around the corner. Not only statements like Sartre’s are closer to the truth, but I bet ones that are even more radical.

So, now that we have given a first definition of consciousness and its epistemology, we can begin the dispute between rivals, seeking for the best candidate to explain us what consciousness and mind is beyond simple designations.

DUALISM VS. MONISM

A Bridgeless Gap

As far back as we can recall in history, humankind was perplexed by an extremely hard to tackle problem, over the issue of mind and consciousness. A problem that is permitted, by all kinds of logical deductions, to figure as almost not viable. It is not feasible to give an answer without boggling your mind, as it contains several contradictions or, simply, explanations that are derived without an exhausting thinking are incompatible with the consciousness-experience. That is the old mind-body problem, which occupied philosophers for millennia, whom most of them end up with fruitless explanations. The range of their opinions begins from vain dualistic notions, like the embodied soul and end to strictly and hyperbolic materialistic monism of the contemporary predisposition. The explanation gap between mind and body remains as a chasm, a big ravine that separates, and yet connects, two essentially diverse substances: the mind and the body. A bridge needs to be build, and many have attempted to do so; but many failed and thus confined themselves on popular elucidations of no practical value, of no experimental consistency. The ghost in the machine is an idea that should be left in the museum long ago; we should be able to realize that the phenomenal gap between mind and body is a conceptual misunderstanding and nothing more.

This problem has both a metaphysical and an epistemological side. On the former, there are arguments that purport to show that mental states could be reduced to physical states, and hence, some form of dualism must be sought in order to justify this assumption. However implausible this direction seems to the modern science, I do not intend to reject this side of the problem, as it is not completely erroneous and if it is exploited in the right way, there are many chances that it will stand as useful to the exploration of consciousness.

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On the epistemological side, there are arguments that even if in fact mental states are realized to physical ones, there is still a big problem about how we can explain the distinctive features of mental states in terms of their physical properties. Therefore, this incapability of epistemology to suggest a powerful clarification, feeds even more the metaphysical side, inspiring various a decentralized and dissipative condition of consciousness theories, until now.

But lets focus on the nature of the problem per se. The craze is caused to all of us when we come to the critical point to think what affiliation joins the physical brain with the empirical mind. In other words, we do not really know why our systems give rise to conscious experience of any sort. How a firing neuron can trigger a part of the thriving conscious experience? How the cluster of neurons can generate the experience of admiring a beautiful lady or of listening pleasantly to the Beatles’ songs? What is the intermediate that filters the dull physical motion to the elating mental experience? Considering these questions, it is not weird the fact that the gap augments and the bridge is becoming more difficult to be build on such a large ravine.

There are various responses to the explanatory gap. One view (McGinn, 1991) is that it reflects a limitation on our cognitive capacities. Others argue that the gap is real but that it is to be expected given the peculiarities that are associated with our first-person access to experience (Lycan, 1996). However, no theory has achieved to penetrate deeply into the problem. They only assume, hypothesize, and make judgments just as if a person would make them about a far mountain in the horizon. Unfortunately, we have a long distance of anguishing efforts to cross before we are ready to say the long expected: ‘Aha!’

A Critical Dissension

Many features have been cited as responsible for our sense of the problem. Here I will concentrate on two: the apparent causal interaction of mind and brain, and the distinctive features of consciousness, which motivate us to believe that it is a separate substance. From this dissension begins an old debate, a fluctuation that drives us between monistic and dualistic conceptions, unsettled yet to a definite conclusion. A long tradition in philosophy has held, culminating with Renè Descartes, that the mind must somehow be a non-bodily entity: a soul or a mental kind of substance. This thesis is called substance dualism or, most popularly, Cartesian dualism because it says that there are two kinds of substance in the world, the mental and the physical. Belief in such dualism promotes the metaphysical idea of the immortal soul and the free will, which seems to require that mind is a non-physical thing and thus it is not affected by the laws of physical nature, like decay.

To say that mind is a substance is to distinguish it from the physical world. The term substance is used in the traditional philosophical sense: a substance is an entity that has properties and that persists through change in them. If we accept this notion, though, then we postpone the trouble and we find it a bit further when we ask ourselves: If there are such non-physical objects, how do they interact with the physical ones? Some philosophers have thought that mental states are causally related only to other states, and physical states are causally related only to other physical states. In other words, the mental and physical realms operate independently. This “parallelist” view has been unpopular in the 20 th century, as have most dualist views. We can rather say that the mental states have effects in the physical world precisely because they are, contrary to the appearances, physical states (Lewis, 1966). Considering this option, we depart from the dualist version and we arrive to the monist view because it holds that there is only one substance and that is the physical one.

In the divergence between those two views, we prefer to go after, for our understanding, the monist version, and that is because it is the most efficient way we can follow. We do not progress when we explain the mind by an ever-shrinking continuum of homunculi. For one who has gained an elementary comprehension of the scientific thinking, this option to explain things is close to idiocy. It does not lead us anywhere. Therefore, it should be stressed that mind is one and the same with the brain; mind is indeed physical in nature, albeit its phenomenal deviation from matter. Nevertheless, the reader should not rush to jump to conclusions about the orientation of this paper. In the accumulation of more data, we will establish a different estimation on the dissension between the dualist and monist. This quarrel

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is about to end, we are about to reconcile them and make them drink this glass of wine, at last, with a mutual toast.

To accomplish that, we ought, to vindicate, in some points, the dualist, and accept that he too has a kind of superiority over the monist. According to many philosophers, physicalism is not the solution to the mind-body problem, but something that, actually, gives rise to a particular version of the problem. Because we know that the world is completely physical (at least, to the limited perceptive spectrum), if the mind exists, it too must be physical, as any monist intransigently claims. However, it is inconceivable to understand how certain aspects of mind –notably, consciousness- could just be reduced to physical features of the brain. As McGinn (1989) puts it, neurons and synapses seem the wrong kind of material to produce the miraculous consciousness. So here we face a grand-scale problem of intelligibility. Because we evidently know that the mental is sourced by the physical, consciousness must have its origins in the brain. But once we acknowledge that, we turn again against it by clinging to a more dualistic account, because we cannot make sense, in any way, of this mysterious fact.

Jackson (1982) successfully says that even if we knew all the physical facts about pain, we would not ipso facto know what it is like to be in pain. Experience of pain, or any other, emotional response, is not enough to be gained by the gathering of its causal properties, in any detail. There is some knowledge of what it’s like which transcends the physical facts. Considering that, then if the mental is not physical then how can we make sense of its causal interaction with the physical? But if it is physical, how can we make sense of the phenomena of consciousness? These two questions define the dissension in the maddening mind-body problem. God, help those the dualist and the monist to reach an agreement, before we end up in infinitudes of new masochistic problems.

Towards a New Type of Dualism

In the call for to accommodate both views, the monist and the dualist, psychologists and cognitive scientists seek out to find a more appropriate theory on mind that will encompass both requirements that dwell up from neuropsychology and phenomenology, in respect. Numerous journals, the last decade, focus increasingly on the approval of a new type of dualism, which is flawlessly permitted by the austere physicalist criteria. Even some of the hard-core scientists begin to feel that they should not cease their partial engagement with the dualist view. It is not entirely comforting to advocate for a wholly physicalistic and monistic analysis, since the unreciprocated explanatory gap on the mind-body problem seems to demand a new viewpoint. More flexibility is needed and less fixation to observable specifics over the physical brain.

Before we begin to scrutinize such a new type of dualism, the obsolete Cartesian kind must be discarded. The idea of a ghost in a machine is ridiculous. It is shameful in the dawn of the 21st century to adhere to Cartesian dualism, given all the epitomized knowledge we have acquired in the microcosmos of the brain. The information we have stored in the field of psychology, certainly, averts us from preserving our belief that inside our heads there is an even smaller self, a kind of homunculus that navigates us. Neither we are allowed anymore to deem in the belief of a soul, which is encapsulated inside the machinery of our bodies. At least, not in the way we are used to, traditionally. In fact, my own policy in this paper will be to hang around this notion, that is, the sense of having a soul inside a body, but in an essentially different fashion. I do not recommend, as many cognitive scientists do, to abandon totally the idea of the psyche. The admonishment that I promote is that of revaluating old and new viewpoints by the assistance of novelties that come out from different disciplines.

If we fail to conceive a new type of dualism, an example should work as a base for the further portrayal. Imagine that the brain is a guitar string and the mind is the sound waves that vibrate from the its bending. The string is concrete and tangible, just like the brain. The sound, though, is abstract and elusive, very similar to the mental emergence. Obviously, here we are talking about two substances, or objects. Two very different to each other, albeit originated from the same source: the string. Regarding this, we are faced a kind of “dualistic monism” or an “anomalous monism”. It is strange and difficult to conceive, since we are not used to such ambiguous concepts yet. However, this is what is really happening between mind and brain. Mind is generated (or filtered) by the brain, both the same, identical but, nonetheless, very diverse in nature. Still vague?

If yes, then it is time to suit the explanations to more concrete definitions.

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It is not a surprise the fact that even the most down-to-earth cognitive scientists, like the famous Daniel Dennett, support such a kind of dualism. In his book Consciousness Explained, he recognizes that it is quite natural to think in a twofold way about the self. It is the brain and the self. My brain and me. Two distinct things, with different properties, no matter how they depend to each other. Therefore, if the self (the very me), has the sense that it is distinct from the brain, then it must be made from mind-stuff (Dennett, 1990). Although, Dennett readjusts his opinion as one goes on with his book, and he ends up decisively to a purely physicalist view by neglecting important and unusual features of the mind, his indication of mind-stuff is quite right. However, his indication was based on a crude consideration of the matter; that is why he failed to see the importance of the quickly passed argument.

The fact that there is an abstract kind of mind stuff can be pointed out by the following deduction: The sleepwalker, although, unconscious of his movements and his deeds, he is involved in various activities that could be performed by him consciously. He might kill somebody, if he subconsciously has suppressed a lot of anger and still be regarded as almost innocent, since his consciousness was absent during the murder. Thus, quite confoundedly, we realize that consciousness is something additive to the brain activity. It is not simply the resultant of enlivening activity in the neuronal level. The example implies that, although triggered by the physical brain, consciousness must be something different from it. This assumption leads one to think, literally, that mind is not after all totally reducible to the brain. So, as Daniel Dennett correctly believes, the conscious mind is not just the place where the qualia and thought are projected, but it is the place where supplementary appreciation begins and verifies the projected phenomena. This sounds as a kind of dualism, indeed. Yet, as we strongly supported, a diametrically opposed dualism to the Cartesian one, since it prerequisites the physical source before the splitting.

At this point, I will make a step further to introduce another aspect of this new type of dualism that science and philosophy only the last decades start to recognize as substantial. The extension of the above consideration is to concede that this dualism has different counterparts than the traditional one. In this dualism, the separation is between the physical brain, meaning the neuronal activity, and the symbolic mind, meaning the “software” of language and ideas that are encoded in the synaptic level. In its broadest sense, in the brain we just do not know how to find the high-level structures that would provide a read-out in English of the beliefs stored in the brain. Or rather, we do –we just ask the brain’s owner to tell us what he or she believes. But we have absolutely no way of physically determining where or how beliefs are coded. Hence, we have the undeniable sense that we are different from our brains, as if we are rooted elsewhere. How outlandish would it sound that we are mere language, our ideas, and our symbolic realm that inhabits the brain? It might be still early to give an answer. However, though, we will see that this is exactly what cognitive science seems to argue by the meme-theory.

To those that this idea is not any progression for the improvement of the soulless mind, then I bet that the next aspect of the new dualism will be much satisfying, although to be grasped one needs to follow with the paper and see the direction that I actually suggest. It is not going to be evident from the first part. We need to pass throughout if we wish to ascertain the kind of suggestion that I signify.

There is empirical evidence that the stuff of consciousness is the interpenetration of its rich content, that is, the perceived external world, and the hierarchy of cognitive and metacognitive conceptive judgments that established over it. The stuff of consciousness is nothing but the properties of the Newtonian in one level, and the Quantum space, in another, channeled by commenting systems of the brain. Therefore, presumably, we are both the external environment and the processing filtering of the brain over it, something that is broadly supported by the doctrine of supervenience, as we will see. This aspect of the new dualism brings together the environment and the receptive brain, in a sense that we are sited on both. This idea remains largely unexplored, due to the reluctance of psychologists to consider exogenous features in the study of consciousness. They turn their back when they are pressed to adapt a position that gives a noteworthy importance on the environment to the origins of consciousness. Patience and the paper will prove that the environment and, generally, space, is the major generator of the controversial phenomenon.

The implications of some very important data suggest that there is first scientific evidence for a dualist kind theory of consciousness. It is a theory that has a “mind” or “life” component that is of a very different nature than known physical systems, and thus implies that at least

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some transpersonal experiences are not merely interesting illusions, unusual patterns of neural firing, but actually give us confirmation about the potentiality for truly transcending our ordinary physical limits. I reiterate, though, that those assumptions are not related to the outdated Cartesian dualism. They are forcefully verified by novel theories of the physical sciences.

Andrew Greeley in his experiments found that 58 % of his sample believed that they had experienced telepathic, mind-to-mind contact with someone at a distance at least once in their lifetime. Many other kind of paraconceptual phenomena or ESP occur, undeniably, in everyday life. These kinds of ESP seem to fit with this type of dualism that I promote, and they are possibly very important in deciding between a monistic and dualistic view; but as we know, the scientific investigation of ESP and related phenomena is not only not exactly in the mainstream of world psychology, it is an extremely small-scale activity.

Evidently, what consciousness requires, in order to become a more accessible issue for a suitable study, is some basic enlargement of the ontology of the physical sciences. Auspiciously, this will be the bumping of our finger onto to the light-switch. Once the light is on, the new type of dualism or a rather mentalistic type of monism will be fully exposed beyond mere speculations. But before we get deeper to this issue, we need to pass by the essential evolutionary theory, if we want to walk on a stable ground.

THE EVOLUTIONARY SPECTACLE

The Evolving Consciousness

Nowadays, the theory of evolution is the prominent choice for the research of every conceivable phenomenon in the universe. The biblical creationism has been substituted by a new breadth of understanding that has been set off after Darwin’s book The Origin of Species was published. His deduction inspired, the following decades, the natural sciences, as they proved to be much more reliable in comparison to the previous immature beliefs on the nature of life. Although, Darwin has not been faultless in his theory and much had to be revised, he did brought a new landscape in the marathon of science. A new era begun, as the mysterious complexity of life, which discouraged many intellects for centuries, became more approachable to a consistently rudimentary analysis. Consequently, an increasing number of living organism’s aspects are scrutinized and perhaps accurately explained.

From this development of evolutionary knowledge, consciousness would not be an exemption, albeit, it is an impregnable phenomenon to any inquiring approach. Especially the last century, evolutionary psychology has defined the role of evolution in the emergence of mind. If we disregard the fact that most of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology are based on yet unfinished data on the nature of reality, which should be considered as prerequisite on any verdicts over the issue, the range of its light illuminated several basic questions. The doctrine of evolution has given critical answers and has offered valuable outlets to psychology. In a way, we now possess the guideline that guarantees an appropriate understanding of mind and consciousness. We no longer have to make far-fetched guesses that involve nebulous and impeding assumptions. We no longer walk in a dark territory. The more knowledge we gain on evolution, the less indefinite the question becomes.

Human consciousness, the one of the great reflectivity, is an emergent property, arisen from the exceedingly complex edifice of the physical brain. The brain-hardware is the vestige of the millenarian process of natural selection’s sculpting. To reach this almighty convolution and sophistication the Earth had to spin around the Sun for almost a billion times. The human brain is the actual depository of primordial memory, collected by reptilian, amphibian, mammalian, and hominid designs. Through the generations, the flower of human consciousness advances on the bedrock of brain due to the ever-growing richness of the surrounding environment, both physical and linguistic. Therefore, it is hard to avoid the inference that consciousness is the cherry on the ice cream, a cherry that gets sweeter and sweeter as time unfurls.

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From Hardware to Software

Before we cover any further the evolutionary theory, we ought to make an important distinction between the brain and the mind with the help of an important analogy. The computer provides a supportive illustration of how to envisage the mind-body problem, since it is generally accepted that it is an approximate simulation of our brains. It is a brain machine, which functions in a very relevant way to the object of its simulation, nevertheless, with some crucial disparities.

We all have used computers and we must acknowledge the difference between hardware and software. The former refers to the arrangement and configuration of the apparatus, the interconnections of the cables, the capacity of the hard disk, the selection of the chips in the motherboard, etc. On the other hand, the latter refers to the programs, structured by information that can be installed on the hardware without having any physical body, apart from its device. They are actual bits of information that can be imparted on the receptive division of the material equipment. Unlike hardware, software is defined by its flexibility and its mutability of usage. Comparing them one realizes that their relationship is akin to the relationship between mind and brain. The brain is the unchangeable, in one’s lifetime, hardware where the patterns of neuronal arrangement are stable no matter how much the mind adheres to new habits. However, mind, albeit closely related to the neuronal architecture, is the one that can turn the experience from green to red, from tears to laughter, from arousal to dullness. Just like the software can make the hardware play a song, or play a good game of chess or process pictures, or write a text.

As Daniel Dennett puts it, computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but by now, their number-crunching has been harnessed in thousands of imaginative ways by the installment of the software. Similarly, our brains were not designed for the activities we are now involved. Language, extra reflectivity, poetic prose, visionary planning were not promoted in the level of the hardware, as much as in the software level, which has enriched the former in undreamed ways.

The reason I encompass this analogy on the section of evolution is that, perhaps, we require a better understanding of the distinction between mind and body. We need to deeply comprehend that mind is, primarily, information and that it is the fruit of a long and “expensive” evolutionary process that took place over the physical brain. Now, if we inspect the coalition of evolutionary knowledge together with the above analogy, we will come on a vital supposition. Beyond the discursive methodologies of neo-Darwinian deductions and estimations, there is hanging a realization of a strange emergent structuring, which is amenable to daring considerations.

From Biosphere to Noosphere

Evolution of organic matter began millions of years ago literally from the soil. Rudimentary life forms, like bacteria, amoebas, and protozoa were the only inhabitants of this primordial world. There was utter simplicity on a dimensionless plane; there was no perception, no sensation and most basically, no consciousness in the form that we know. The first multicellular organisms were lacking even of the simplest functional properties that define the possession of mind. They were not moving by any kind of judgment. They were, in a way, “lifeless” life forms. Whatever food was on their way, they were absorbing it and if not, they would not bother to search for any. As the organic matter formed, by the millennia, complex organisms, this “lifelessness” turned to an animation of a more responsive type. The fishes, the reptiles, the amphibians were possessors of a brain that was filtering, in a way, perceptually the environment for their own uncomplicated experience. At that point, the biosphere was dressed by a faint first light of some kind. This is the so-called noosphere, which by years got more vivid and more functional over the bedrock of the biosphere, due to the emergence of mental reflectivity. We will keep compunctions for the hypothesis that mind emerged subsequently of matter, because an important part of the paper’s intentions is not

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yet been exposed. For now, I can only tell that there is a possibility that mind and matter, noosphere and biosphere might be identical. Therefore, the designation of noosphere might be just the emergence of high and complex reflectivity, rather than the raw properties of mind and sentience.

Anyway, as centuries went by and the hominid line passed to the point of super-complexity, as the Homo sapiens began to communicate to each other with symbols and the fructification of culture started to emerge, this noosphere became increasingly more crucial to evolution. Mind, consciousness, language, all concretized its essence and advanced it to the actual realm of human experience.

Today the noosphere is passing to another level, that of the electronic dimension, where information travels all across the world in the speed of light and mind is been channeled to the digital realm, which is gradually growing in magnitude to our mental lives. It is not exaggeration to say that the noosphere is swiftly in the process of a kind of “materialization”. That is not something we would overlook; it is actually a very significant twist of evolution that concerns in a swamping way the human consciousness. Already we can make guesses of the evolutionary track. Technology, increasing mental agility, the coiling of the abundant information, scientific progression, they all lead to an ever-accelerating advancement of the noospheric field and, possibly, the transmutation of human consciousness.

According to Terence McKenna (1991), the famous American scholar, the noosphere is a kind of an emergent platform, a structure destined to support an even higher dimension, which is assumed atopical. Without becoming unacceptable mystical, this is perhaps of what it most can be said at this juncture regarding the hypothetical function of the notion of noosphere and its evolving ontology. Whatever the true implications of such an emergent structuring and the hypothetic further emergence over the noosphere, via maybe the utility technology, it would appear that under its enormous shadow life on Earth and conscious human life becomes but a substructure within some awesome pattern of growth, which is grasping and extending itself to realms never dreamed of in traditional philosophies. This is something that we will revisit on the issue of emergentism and there will still more left to say in my speculative approach of the assemblantism.

One thing that we should have derived from such a hypothesis is the anchoring idea that consciousness, even though, perhaps, a subsequent property in the richness of the planet’s biome, is superior to matter. Noosphere is superior to biosphere. The focal point of human and non-human experience is on the mental emergence. That assumption is already in undisputed verification from the cognitive sciences through the meme theory.

Indeed, evolutionary psychology regards that the complex of information digits, called by Richard Dawkins memes, are the new genes of the noosphere. They propagate mind in an epidemiological manner and they are regarded as possessing their own independent purpose, which is the increase of their replication and, hence, their influence on the human minds. Their policy is to expand in culture, by building their own structures that find their nest in our brains, in the form of ideologies, attitudes, songs, recipes, religious beliefs, etc. Dennett has asserted that the human consciousness is formed by their influence, in a way, that what we are is the entirety of their organization in the brain. Therefore, just as genes are the kernel of our physical bodies, memes are the kernel of our mental experience, the spinal cord and the flesh of our personalities. Memes are superior to genes and that can be proven by Dennett’s following example. There are memes that push their carriers to their physical elimination. That seems as paradoxical, since as we know from genes they promote the fitness for their survival. However, memes seem not to be depended on the fitness and the survival of the physical vehicle. A meme, for instance, that would tend to make bodies run over cliffs would have to be eliminated from the meme pool. However, this does not mean that the ultimate criterion for success in the meme pool is gene survival. Obviously a meme that causes individuals bearing it to suicide has a disadvantage but not a fatal one, since the suicidal meme can easily spread, as the well-published martyrdom is regarded virtuous and, thus, inspires others to die for a loved cause, and this inspires even more people, and so on (Dennett, 1990). This seems as a first class proof of the superiority of memes over the genes and of mind over matter.

At last, one more thing that we cannot pass over is the strange change of usability of traits in our species with the progression of the mental evolution. Part of the critical necessity of survival turns, auspiciously, to the enjoyment of the experiential aesthetics. The civilized Homo Sapiens is no longer struggling in the theater of natural selection, as many features of

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our culture, like advanced medicine, have build a protective wall around us. By the years, we become more independent and more privileged against the environment. In contemplation over that, we come to the unavoidable conclusion that evolution is a voyage to greater degrees of freedom. At least, to our species and our culture we witness a constant increase of leniency towards the decisiveness of survivability. Of course, fitness and fitness maximizers will never become obsolete in the evolutionary development, but by time, they turn out to be less “expensive” to be obtained and their usefulness in the repertoire of our species clings to a rather aesthetic value, comforting away from the breathtaking game between life and death.

That should be considered as very relevant to the evolution of consciousness, because many, if not all, of its features have been shaped by natural selection through the millennia. By that spectacle, we have to concede that the modern man uses relics of old weapons of survivability for mere benefit from pleasure. The significance of staying alive has transfigured to the significance of staying happy. For instance, what we want when we sip a glass of wine is not the analysis of its chemical substances but rather the pleasure, which can be acquired from those substances. Our preference is based from those biases that are still wired in our nervous systems, which their ecological significance has lapsed long time ago (Dennett, 1990). Their role was to inform our primates to avoid inedible foods, but now this function has degraded (or upgraded) to mere channels for hedonic labor. The same is valid and for the colors. Once they were in service for our survival in the massive forests of the prehistoric era. The first signs of danger were perceived by the alarm of colors. Yellow for a tiger, emerald green for the serpent, red for the poisonous mushrooms, and so on. Thankfully, today we have became skilled at avoiding such dangers and, besides, our environments are more appropriate for a comfortable life, and hence for many centuries now the evolutionary usability of colors has digressed to mere aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, we do not need a second thought to realize that our world from a terrain of survival-battles has turned to a world of art.

What does this mean for consciousness? We should not underestimate this emancipation of evolutionary necessities. It is not accidental the fact that freedom is the crowning aim of the evolutionary teleology. Therefore, our species advance and reach a plane where evolutionary pressures decrease, rocked down by the counter-weight of the gratuitous gratification. From that viewpoint, surely, we should expect a radical surprise in the future of consciousness, an emergent which hatched among threatening forces, where it had to shield itself, and its evolutionary course, currently, seems to proclaim a forthcoming fundamental change on the rules of the game, where consciousness arises in an Elysium of freedom and omnipotence, high above from any physical peril.

Next to such a potentiality, cognitive theories appear too conservative. They strive to explain consciousness by reductionist methods, which are highly interdicting to such holistic postulations. However, I suggest that once we will bridge opposed theories, in an attempt to wed them, the wish to bridge the gap between mind and body, phenomenology and physicalism will be, triumphantly, carried out.

DIGGING IN MATTER

On the Constellation of Physicalism

The heyday of science, which took place in the 20th century, is closely related to the repose in reductionism and physicalism. Those two doctrines were, and still are, regarded as the only reliable methods for practicing the right investigation in any kind of research. Eventually, this attitude suspended the vitalism and the essentialism that were influencing previously, mainly, the approach of any technical knowledge. Once we penetrated our observation toward the microscopic scales and we accredited the causalities that function from a bottom-up way, the epistemology rushed to conclude that any knowledge that is not obtained from a reductionistic scrutiny and, therefore, is not concerned with the manifestation of the matter, is doomed to failure. This dogma presides over any endeavor that begins the trip to give an answer in the perplexities of consciousness; in a way, that belief in an immaterial substance

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as a soul most possibly is a ludicrous idea. In the vocabulary of psychology, there are no longer concepts of immaterialities. No one disagreeing with this would be considered a scientist. However, albeit the route of matter is not an erratum, there is still an immaturity in the deductions that have been postulated… there is much work undone and many surprises that can turn upside down the present conditions in scientific thinking.

Physicalism is the doctrine that everything that exists in the space-time continuum is a physical thing, and that every property of a physical thing is either a physical property or a property that is related in some intimate way to its physical nature. Ontological physicalism denies the existence of things like Cartesian souls, supernatural divinities, entelechies, vital forces, and the like. Physicalists, though, as we will see later, differ widely when it comes to the question of properties of physical objects. The kind of properties that concern the research on consciousness, are the so-called cognitive/psychological properties, which are the higher-level ones, like the biological and the computational. This broad sense of physical property seems appropriate to the discussion of the question how psychological properties are related to physical properties –that is, the mind-body problem. In its broad sense, therefore, “physical” essentially amounts to “non-psychological”. This leaves our previous question unanswered, though. What is a physical property? Mass, energy, charge, and the like are of course important properties in current physics, but the physics of the future may invoke properties that are quite different from today’s physics. How would we recognize them as physical properties rather than properties of another sort? That is, how would we know that future physics is physics? This is something that we will face quite extensively in the last section of the paper.

As noted, physicalism differs to higher-level properties in relation to lower-level, basic physical properties. Reductive physicalism claims that higher-level properties, including psychological properties, are reducible to physical properties and hence they turn out to be nothing more than matter. Opposed to this view is the non-reductive physicalism, also called property dualism (Kim, 1995), which regards the higher-level properties as independent from the lower-level properties that form this irreducible autonomous domain. This type of physicalism is related with the new type of dualism that I commenced in the previous pages, and which will become more explicit as we carry on. In respect to this physicalistic dualism, we can presume that psychology must be a special science whose object is to investigate the causal/nomological connections involving the irreducible psychological properties and generate distinctively psychological explanations in terms of them. In this view, these laws and explanations cannot be formulated in purely physical terms. Any dogmatic physical theory of consciousness and mind would leave out something important.

In short, there is a kind of a “civil war” between physicalistic doctrines. The controversy is hot and the final victory is still not visible. However, we ought to make an estimation of the winner in this cognitive battle by the help of the context of the other components that are used in the investigation and exploration of consciousness. But before we do that, let’s have a laugh with the hopeless incipient enterprise of physicalism.

Behavioristic Blunders

The thirst for reliance that took place in the last two centuries in the scientific pursuit did not left unaffected the discipline of psychology. Positivism and objective assessment eradicated the haziness of the juvenile methodologies. Introspection was distrusted as a disorienting means to gain access to the functions of the mental machinery and, hence, to the true essence of the conscious manifestations. Thus, early psychologists sought a method that would give them the power to probe objectively the mind, so that they could come up with trustworthy results with a status that could fit with the objectivity of the natural sciences.

Behaviorism, which ignores mental processes and declares that external behavior that can be observed more easily and reliably, should be the main tactic of psychology, flourished for a short period. Many psychologists, however, still accept that position and define their science as the study of the manifestation of behavior, rather than the study of mind. The appropriation for such a stance was given by the survey, which declared that 100% agreement among observers is possible, at least for simple behaviors, and therefore, this determined the fortune of the approach, which was widely preferred among other nebulous philologies over the nature of psyche.

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Those familiar with Skinner’s radical behaviorism are well aware that he has provided a means for analyzing the private events or experiences of people in the context of a non-dualistic, naturalistic science. The object was to show that subjective behaviors and experiences are just like any other behavior, to demystify the problems of consciousness, and to remove consciousness from a separate realm of the mind with which science is not supposed to be able to deal. Skinner, in a manner, has laid the ground for a revolutionary behavioral semantics capable of providing a behavioral account of cognitive functioning without mentalistic terms.

But how well placed was this approach? Whoever believes that behaviorism is the eureka of the nature of mind, is a laughing-stock. We should not lose time on grasping the fact that consciousness is widely different from any other subject we study. Its idiosyncrasy demands an approach that varies from purely materialistic methods of assessment we use to probe matter, in the natural sciences. Consciousness is a matter of experience, of emotional vigor, of visions, of beliefs and desires, of the relentless stream of thought and of the peculiar I-ness. It appears that it is highly unsuitable to investigate this prominent phenomenon mainly by the equipment of other physical sciences. What behaviorism achieves is merely the analysis of its expressive surface. A third person approach ignores fundamental features of its reality, which are invisible to an external observer. Therefore, one of the greatest blunders of the last century, was the naïve belief that behaviorism is the antidote to the inexorable mystery of consciousness and that we are behavioral robots, automata that are identified wholly with their external behavioral manifestation, and hence lacking of any psychic depth. This absurdity still pertains, partially, the cognitive sciences and psychology, in a powerful contrast to the sense of everybody’s personal experience of consciousness, which is, actually, deliriously deep and rich. The next step is to go for shooting any such blunders in cognitive doctrines, which haunt the vital study on consciousness.

Reductive Physicalisms: Eliminative Materialism: The Illusive Mind

The most extreme doctrine of physicalism is the eliminative materialism or “eliminativism”, as it is sometimes called. It is the claim that one or another kind of mental states invoked in commonsense psychology does not really exist. Eliminativists believe that mental states are classified in the same category to the gods of ancient religions, witchcraft, alchemy. They simply deny the existence of purely mental phenomena as ludicrous and superstitious. However, far-fetched this thesis is, it has been accepted to a large number of psychologists the previous years. Mind, they think, is a non-existent posit of a seriously mistaken theory. The most widely discussed version of eliminativism takes as its target the intentional states, the beliefs, the thought, and the desires (Churchland, 1981). The existence of qualia such as pain and visual perceptions has also occasionally been challenged. Obviously, this premise leads us to the conclusion that all those states that pass from the spotlight of consciousness have no validity, no essence, and no meaning. Therefore, we are pushed to accept that consciousness is nothing but a fictional experience without any particular significance on its content and on the “illusory” self. In other words, eliminative materialism is blind on important ingredients of conscious experience, due to its preoccupation with the confirmistic physiological probing, which, as we mentioned before, are poles apart with the empirical facet.

The cognitive sciences that ultimately give us a correct account of the workings of the human mind/brain will not refer to commonsense mental states as beliefs and desires; these states will not be part of the ontology of a mature cognitive science, as eliminativism wants to believe. One family of arguments, which tries to bridge this chasm, follows Wilfred Sellars (1956) in maintaining that folk psychology takes thoughts and other intentional states to be modeled on overt linguistic behavior. According to this account, common sense assumes that beliefs are quasi-linguistic states and that thoughts are quasi-linguistic episodes. But if this is right, one eliminativist argument continues, then either non-human animals and pre-linguistic children do not have beliefs and thoughts, or they must think in a kind of inner language of thought. Another argument, though, notes that neuroscience has thus far failed to find syntactically structured, quasi-linguistic representations in the brain and predicts that the future discovery of such quasi-linguistic states is unlikely (Van Gelder, 1991).

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Nevertheless, there are many cognitive scientists who support the view that semantical properties, and thus mental, cannot be reduced to the physical properties and, thus, cannot have a causal connection in between them. If this is true, here again we are taking a taste of a new dualism, thanks to this causal irrelevance (Van Gulick, 1993). Some authors have urged that the deepest problem with the folk psychology is that semantic properties cannot be “naturalized” –there appears to be no place for them in our evolving, physicalistic view of the world, and that is something we should stress because it troubles generally the ambitious enterprise of physicalism, in important conceptual ways. The problem seems to require a completely different approach -a crucial approach, which takes its chance in this paper.

Epiphenomenalism: The Brain’s Shadow

The traditional doctrine of epiphenomenalism is that mental phenomena are caused by physical phenomena but do not themselves cause anything. Thus, according to this doctrine, mental states and events are causally inert and impotent; their role is that of effects rather than causes. Huxley (1874) earlier discussed that the implications of epiphenomenalism is that consciousness is an automaton because it lacks causal efficacy on the physiological generator. On that assumption, Huxley added his claim that epiphenomenal properties, like the mind, cannot be explained in terms of natural selection, since they are non-functional and, therefore, invisible to the forces of evolution. The standard philosophical meaning of the concept follows as such: “X is epiphenomenal means X is an effect but itself has no effects in the physical world” (Broad, 1925).

In understanding deeply the doctrine of epiphenomenalism, we cannot but complicate our research in silly speculations. It is a doctrine that entails the insignificance or irrelevance of mind in comparison to the brain. Roughly, this pathway leads us to believe that mind is nothing but the brain’s shadow, with no influence on it. It is simply the passive subordinate of matter, powerless to impose any causality towards it. Dennett, who strongly disagrees with the doctrine, sums up his allusion by saying that if epiphenomenalism is absolutely true, in principle, then that would mean that a zombie is indistinguishable from a conscious person.

Indeed, epiphenomenalism is a shocking doctrine. If it is true then a pain could never cause us to wince or flinch, something’s looking red to us could never cause us to think, it is red, and a naggy headache could never cause us to be in a bad mood. Epiphenomenalism, vainly, suggests that although one thought may follow another, one thought never results in another. If thinking is a causal process, it follows that we never engage in the activity of thinking. Apparently, this view suggests that there is no gap between mind and body and that mind is identical to the brain processes, in a way, that its intuitive difference to it is fully plasmatic. One critical response, though, to this argument is that physical events underlie mental events in such a way that mental events are causally efficacious by means of the causal efficacy of their underlying physical events. Therefore, if the two states, physical and mental, are causally related this is so because they are absolutely identical. Given that causality, then mental states and events are causes and, thus the above version of epiphenomenalism is false (Davidson, 1993). C. D. Broad (1925) characterized the view that mental events are epiphenomena as the view that “mental events either (a) do not function at all as causal factors or that (b) if they do, they do so in virtue of their physiological characteristics and not in virtue of their mental characteristics.

In rejection of epiphenomenalism, some philosophers argue that sensory concepts are rather equivalent to functional concepts (White, 1991). And some argue that although sensory concepts are not equivalent to functional concepts or physical concepts, nonetheless, sensory properties are identical with neural properties (Hill, 1991). That a nagging headache can cause a bad mood and that the scratching can cause one to itch seem to be intuitive cases of mental causation as one can find. Epiphenomenalism in comparison to our mental experience seems to be out of tune. Its functional version is more intimate to truth and any attempts to explain the mind should begin from that avenue. If we wish to avoid the devaluation of conscious experience and, thus, the devaluation of the human existence, then either we must eschew the traditional version of epiphenomenalism or to reform and extend it to a more functional version as White suggests, because it is not objectionable the hypothesis that mind can be accurately “translated” to the brain processes, but rather the implication that the mind is

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nothing more than the brain. Perhaps, the functional factor is the essential device where consciousness arises.

Supervenience: The Floating Mind

Here we have a more suitable explicative version of the problem, to the orientation of the paper’s approach. Supervenience is a determination relation, often thought to hold between physical and mental characteristics. In philosophy of mind, the concept of supervenience is sometimes employed as a way of articulating the metaphysical thesis of physicalism. This concept was first formulated by Donald Davidson (1973): “It is impossible for two events (objects/states) to agree in their physical characteristics… and to differ in their psychological characteristics” (Davidson, 1973). This supervenience claim is weaker than certain other claims about physical-mental relations sometimes advocated in the philosophy of mind. However, my belief is that this is so because we have a low appraisal on the functional role of the environment and of macro-temporal relations on the genesis of consciousness. Albeit the concept of supervenience is a bit generic and lacks the focal consistency of other doctrines, it is more viable to new pioneering approaches that are offered from physics, due to its relation to the environmental influence.

Supervenience inspires one to think that the environment is an actual extension of the brain. It is the extra space where information is stored, of an important functional role to the properties of consciousness. In short, the thesis includes certain relational connections between the person and the wider environment. For instance, the supervenience base for an intentional mental characteristic like wanting some water involves not merely the current intrinsic physical properties of the person who currently has this mental property, but also certain relational connections between the person and the person’s physical, social, historical, and evolutionary environment. Such mental properties are said to have wide content, because the supervenience base for such a property extends beyond the mere physical characteristics of the person. From that perspective, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on, are floating almost independently on the physical processes. In other words, the phenomenon of conscious experience is only partially depended on the events that take place in the neuronal web. The stigma of supervenience is the proposal that mind is something much more wider and extensive from the machinery of the brain; something that in order to be understood we have to expand the guiding field, in search for historical, environmental, and evolutionary causalities that supervene the frantic micro-processes of the brain. All in all, we are one step closer from epiphenomenalism to the desired aim.

Non-Reductive Physicalisms:Functionalism: The Springing Processes

Comparing neutrons and neurons to pendula and planets, we, inevitably, confront a categorical distinction. Whereas neurons and neutrons must be composed of distinctive types of matter structured in ruthlessly precise ways, individual planets and pendula can be made of widely disparate sorts of differently structured stuff. Therefore, neurons and neutrons are examples of physical kinds, while planets and pendula exemplify functional kinds. Functional kinds are not identified by their material composition but rather by their activities or tendencies. They are about the state and direction of motion, the effect of kinetic states. Under that category, cognitive science puts the mind. That is because the mental experience arises not from merely the neurons and the synapses but from their mutable activity. By virtue of this dictum, we must accept that the conscious experience can be reproduced or replicated in a device that is not organic. Since the function of the brain is the ground of consciousness, then it would not be an unrealizable dream to purport the carrying out of artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness. From that we infer that the mental experience can be made virtually from any kind of material as long as it is organized to process information and support the sort of performances that are indicative to minds.

Concerning the fact that mind is a functional kind, the significance of functionalism is profoundly significant, for it liberates cognitive science from the question of how mind is embodied or composed by matter. The study of consciousness passes to another level, which is more facilitating to the deductions that rationalism gives confidence to. Regarding all the

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interconnectedness of the brain modules and their resultant complex power, it is not an overstatement to note that cognition’s most general features cannot be reduced to mere neurology.

Before, though, we rush to jump in conclusions and postulate that functionalism is the mature resolution on the problem, it should be stressed that there are some serious flaws on the argument. Its explanatory power is not entirely satisfactorily, something that is proven by virtue of the skepticism that tested its faultlessness. Objections against functionalism indicate the disturbing inconclusiveness on its plausibility, especially on the matter of artificial intelligence. For instance, how could be possible that consciousness could arise by merely mechanical processes? There are misgivings on the idea that we will be able to concoct a machine that will be sentient, simply because we lack the knowledge of how exactly this reflectivity comes to place. Furthermore, the objections are focused especially in the ignorance of the doctrine against the centrality of consciousness in cognition. As a successful argument has claimed, two functionally identical persons could differ in how they feel, that is, in their conscious, qualitative, or affective states. For example, two isomorphic persons in the presence of a stimulus could react widely different, and that would express the variance between of the two conscious experiences. If the conscious qualitative differences differentiate our mental states, functionalism would seem unable to recognize them.

Despite the persisting debate, though, over the doctrine of functionalism, it figures as the most usable in cognitive sciences and in the research on consciousness. That is because it is certainly more open to a computational theory of mind, giving an impetus to the dream of artificial intelligence. In addition, it skips the overwhelming problems of how consciousness could be one and the same with the brain. The idea that organized functions spring up the conscious experience appears to cognitive scientists as the boat that will help them cross the river of uncertain thinking. However, here again we are confronted with the same problem. How is it possible for functions to generate awareness and consciousness? If the problem has been surpassed in the leap we made with functionalism, it is, nevertheless, waiting us a little bit further. Is mind, in a way, the sparks from the “heat” of the brain processes? The question will be left open, as still the ace in the sleeve have not been exposed. For now, we partially discard the absolutism of functionalism and keep it back, until we put on the table more ideas about consciousness and gain a spherical view. Perhaps, then functionalism will find a place to serve us for an ample comprehension.

Emergentism: Natural Magic

The doctrine of emergentism is very different from the rest theories that outsmart the study of psychology, although it is quite relevant to the theory of supervenience. What makes it distinct is its genuine version of reality, which we never met before in previous conjectures. We do not have a long history of focusing on the self-organizing and non-linear systems. The thorough study on ant colonies, societies, cities, software, and brains has bred new unexpected notions, which enlarged the field of causalities. The first British emergentists declared that the complex interaction between units that form a collectivity, under some conditions, tend to emerge a higher-order phenomenon with its own distinct superorganic properties by possessing a sort of independency. The most famous example of an emergent phenomenon, which stimulated the interest of many philosophers, is that of the ant colony. It was a confounding realization the fact that an ant colony exhibited a behavior of its own, widely different from the individual ants. There were some resonant conclusions from observations that evidently indicated that a colony is an entity with its own volition, its own will, its own intelligence, and its own life cycle. Despite the fact that such a postulation came out of the blue and was not assorted to the traditional expectations, both in philosophy and epistemology, however there were not few who embraced it and began to formulate the doctrine of emergentism, confident that they just stepped on a new peninsula of knowledge.

As with the ant colony, which is now regarded as an individual organism, the same is valid with cities, nations, the Internet, and, of course, the brain. It is shockingly true that emergent behaviors are autonomous and alive. We have just faced the manifestation of the rest of the spectrum, where individual agents of any kind are no more self-contained, but they are components of emergent phenomena that, in their turn, function and behave as units, in a higher-order.

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A better designation of emergence can be understood by the movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication. A system with multiple agents dynamically interacting in multiple ways, following local rules and oblivious to any higher-level interactions. But it would not truly considered emergent until those local interactions resulted in some kind of discernible macro-behavior. The emergence is defined by a higher-level pattern arising out of parallel complex interactions between local agents. Out of low-level routines, a coherent shape emerges. Alexander (1920) spoke of levels of qualities or properties, maintaining that “the higher-level quality emerges from the lower-level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower level, but constitutes its possessor a new order existent with its own special laws of behavior, that in turn have some influence in the form of downward causality. For instance, Morgan maintained that through the process of evolution, which is also an emergent process, genuinely new qualities emerge that generate new fundamental forces that effect the “go” of events in ways unanticipated by laws that govern the lower levels of complexity. However, the kind of causality that takes place in such systems is the so-called bottom-up causality, because it begins by the individual agents who determine by their complex interaction the collective behavior. In this way, local turns out to be the key term of any emergent superorganic properties. We see emergent behavior in systems like ant colonies when the individual agents in the system pay attention to their neighboring ones rather than wait for order from above. They “think” locally and act locally, but their collective action produces global behavior of an entirely different kind, which is superior to its components. Simply put, in any non-linear self-organizing system, the total is greater than the sum of its parts.

Consequently, the brain seems to satisfy the criteria to be categorized in the list of emergentism. It is composed by billions of neurons, each connected with thousands others and they interact frantically. While the individual neuron communicates in a simple language, by means of their firing state, the result in the bigger picture is quite astonishing. We observe multi-complex patterns that carry signs of a higher-order. The local interaction of neurons generates language, cognition, behavior, and –why not- consciousness. If a single unsuspecting ant, which is so simplistic, can co-create with others the admirable collective intelligence of an ant colony, then why should be absurd that a neuron in collaborations with others can co-create a conscious intelligence? Cognitive scientists, currently, consider this doctrine as very promising for the improvement of functionalism’s flaws. Although, most of them are positive on the potentiality of gaining knowledge in the secrets of emergence, it is still a field that has not progressed at the level where we can confidently use it to such demanding issues, as the matter of consciousness. Perhaps, the natural magic of emergentism is not enough to give a complete answer, but nevertheless, it is the most futuristic theory that could upgrade our notions of what is intelligence, what is collective behavior, in a way that could smooth the progress of consciousness studies. For now, we can only draw extensions from emergentism’s standpoints, by daring speculations that will open up the horizon for further accomplishment.

At last, it should be noted that emergentism is the funeral of reductionism, since it proves the insufficiency of the dogmatic study on the isolated parts of a system. We rather have to adapt a more panoramic viewpoint because a system, primarily, functions in the basis of the complex interactions between its agents. The quantum mechanical explanation of chemical bonding and the ensuing processes of molecular biology (such as the discovery of the DNA structure) led to the almost complete demise of the antireductionist, emergentist view of biology and chemistry (McLaughlin, 1992). Therefore, the new cognitive approaches seem to draw their bias towards a more holistic approach, something, which should be kept as the insinuation against extreme physicalisms, like the eliminative materialism. In a sort of way, an emergent phenomenon is an additional part to its components, no matter how much physical it is, it is characterized by a kind of an “ethereal” quality, since it is triggered by states of events and processes, instead of states of matter.

The resulting picture we have from the doctrine of emergentism is that cognitive science, after all, however difficult it might be, can leave behind obsolete strategies of deduction to embrace new unfamiliar concepts that can show us the way to a new code of thought, much more adjusted to the “irregularity” of consciousness.

Critique on Physicalism and Reductionism

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As we passed through the most outstanding cognitive doctrines, which allege the explanation of consciousness, we must have noticed the weaknesses and the limitations that obstruct their full-fledged declaration of victory over the mystery. Apart from emergentism, the rest of them are too incongruous with the subjective sense that we get from the experience of consciousness. The reason that I differentiate the doctrine of emergentism is because it offers the margin to be less restricted in materialistic concepts. As a matter of fact, it opens up a new horizon of conceiving the relationship between matter and mind, where new ideas taken from chaos theory, as we will see in the next part, can makeup the way for an exotic understanding of consciousness in conjunction with cosmology. Nevertheless, emergentism is still not studied as deep as to become familiar enough to psychologists, so that they can illuminate themselves in the desired level. The implications of such non-reductive physicalisms is that we begin to entertain further the new type of dualism, the idea of anomalous monism, a thesis that mental entities (objects and events) are, indeed, identical with physical entities, but under their mental descriptions mental entities are neither definitionally nor nomologically reducible to the vocabulary of physics. In that respect, we have the partial devaluation of the materialism’s intransigence and the indication of the futility of reductionism, at least in the investigation of mind.

At this point I will reinforce this argument and I will seek to prove that physicalism and reductionism might not only be the not exactly right approaches to probe the subjective mental states but the wholly unfortunate ones. The thesis that I take is grudgingly opposed to this camp of potential cognitive solutions. Beyond doubt, any attempt to unravel the deep mystery of consciousness by merely materialistic methods is on the wrong way, with no chance to encompass the facets that, in principle, become manifest to empirical inquiring only by introspection. Unfortunately, there are many brain researchers today who pretend that the brain is just another organ, like the stomach and the pancreas, which should be described and explained securely in physical terms. The actual essentiality of mind is exempted as nothing more than an irrelevant and extraneous shadow to the brain, or in the best case, an additional semi-functional floating emergent property. I counter this meager approach with the vitalist version of what mind is, in dealing with the blindness of materialism toward the rich depth of conscious and subconscious experience. Perhaps, it is about time to leave behind our reluctance to dive deep, beyond the superficial appearance of mind, which happens to be objectively observed. Materialism is like a language that recognizes only nouns; but reality, like language, contains action as well as objects, verbs as well as substantives, life and motion as well as matter.

New evidence from physics drives psychology to underemphasize the need to be limited in concepts of matter. The theoretical development in physics in the last decades shows the beginnings of a change in direction. In the concepts of space and time, mass and force, action and reaction, as defined once by Newton, the basic framework of physical reality seemed to be established once and for all. Today, though, the immanent progress in natural sciences has opened up new destinations, radically different from what we were used to. In the place of a rigid ground of reality, we now have a flexible and mobile one that does not allow the founding of rigid materialistic theories in the field of psychology. That change has brought the recalling of the independency of the concept. The new perspective of physics, as we will realize in depth in the third part, has given back the importance to conceptual meaning. The relationship between a physical object and its conceptual copy have been examined and it showed that there is a necessity to evaluate the conceptual part as more significant than the object, because it is that which mind lives with and that which mind is filled with. To that view, Mach, a physicist, psychologist, and epistemologist altogether, added that matter must be no longer regarded as a substantial something –it should be understood as a complex of simple sensations and defined as their mere juxtaposition. This was an attempt to correct the dogmatic materialism of Newtonian physics by the help of psychology. Thus, in a way, the atom was replaced by sensation. Apparently, those were the juvenilia of a more mental-oriented science, in the study of mind and consciousness. It is a slippery topic, indeed, and it is quite easy to blur the distinction between mind and matter or to neglect mental terms altogether in mind’s exemplification. However, this separation must be drawn when we want to examine and analyze the composition of mental phenomena, in their own right.

If physicalism is to be defended, the phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account. But when we examine their subjective character, it seems that such a result is impossible. The reason is that every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected

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with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that view. As Nagel maintained, there are things about the world, life, and the self that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint, because a great deal has to do with a particular point of view and the attempt to give an account of consciousness in objective terms detached from these perspectives inevitably leads to false reductions or to the outrageous denial that certain phenomena do not exist at all! That is, the least to say, madness with the license of rationality; a dead-end in the understanding of mind, a suspension in the attainment of the skills to face the mystery of consciousness.

Most physicalistic theories are entangled with the methodology of reductionism. It is the position that holds that theories or things of one sort can exhaustively account for theories or sorts of another kind. So, for example, reductionism within the cognitive sciences holds that neuroscientific theories will explain the psychological theories and, therefore, will reveal that psychological states and processes are nothing but bodily states and processes. The reason that reductionism is used to be so thriving in the last decades is because, in its traditional form, it promotes a theoretical and ontological unity of science based on a series of reductive explanations of the theories at each level by the theories at the smaller scale level so that all theories in science, finally are reducible to the theories of physics.

Conversely, this facilitation in the deductive systems of science should not stand as an obstacle to realize that, ultimately, reductionism is a curbing methodology, an unsubstantial way for any kind of synthetic deductions. The analytic manner of making reductive theories about objects locks away the holistic part. Subsequently, reductionism is a dangerous view, since the way we respond to our fellow human beings is dependent on the way we conceptualize them in the our theoretical formulations. If we fell in the bad temptation to envision our fellows solely as animal machines, we lose the essential human richness and we turn to meaningless robots. Radical reductionism offers very little in the area of morality. Further, it presents a wrong glossary of terms for a humanistic pursuit. Someone who wishes to be conscientiously scientific and keeps an anchor to the humanistic foundation of research, must have already postulated that the study of physiology in the issue of consciousness reduces it to absurdity, undermining itself.

The results that loom are not positive. The most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Therefore, a new theoretical form is expected in the future to be devised for that purpose. The way to escape this impedimental state of the consciousness studies is the adapting of a more holistic approach, which will be mainly supported by phenomenology. The most adequate, the most promising way to correspond to the high complexity of the higher-level phenomenon of consciousness can only follow such a route. While reductionism is the idea that of predicting the future from the past without regard to the “goals” of organisms, holism is the idea that only inanimate objects can be so predicted. In contrast, in the case of animate objects, purposes, beliefs, goals, desires, and so on are essential to explain their actions. This view is often called “goal-oriented” or “teleological” (Hofstadter, 1992). Consciousness belongs to this class of phenomena, since it moves toward goals in the future. Now, if we apprehend mind from that perspective then surely soulism is not the naivety that reductionism and physicalism preaches so arrogantly. The contemporary psychology and psychiatry maintain an absolutely negative attitude against any reports of extraordinary and supernatural mental phenomena. Radical physicalism and reductionism declares that such ideas are the apotheosis of ludicrousness, unworthy even to investigate. However, the truth must be somewhat reverted. It is the state of contemporary science, which is ludicrous due to its obstinacy on refusing to embrace the abstract, which is so much intertwined with the reality of consciousness. Cognitive sciences and the philosophy of science on the materialist and reductionist inspection of mind, the identity, and the sense of I-ness, fall in the hazardous trap to disregard the holistic, soulful meaning of our conscious existence and experience. In respect to the triviality and mechanical nature of the lower scales, we presume erroneously that this should be, analogically, the criterion for conceiving our macroscopical experience. This trap is dangerous because it devaluates our moral sense of selfhood by promoting a model devoid of meaning.

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PHENOMENOLOGY VS. NEUROPSYCHOLOGY

The Divergence

Introspection and phenomenology are the oldest techniques in the use of exploring the contents of consciousness. It has been practiced as long as our species arose in the light of self-articulation. The observation of the inner landscape has been practiced by all classes of people and the personal conclusions vary from the reports of Socrates’ inner demon to Gurdjieff’s mental maze. However, despite the millennia of involvement with phenomenology, we did not agreed on a common map of mind, something that fed the misgivings of contemporary science and led psychology to the objective security of neuropsychology. The subjectivity of inner experience fluctuates enormously between individuals and thus introspectionism is considered as a multidimensional method that regardless of the insight that it offers, it leads us, exceedingly, astray. According to cognitive scientists, who dream a psychology that will be based on a purely physiological model, the inner universe is full of deceptions and the experience of consciousness is nothing more than fictional. Apparently, we have a divergence between phenomenology and physiology, a gap that is as difficult to bridge as the gap between mind and body. The dissension will keep on triggering opposed views, as long as we remain speechless on the issue of the mind-body problem. The cognitive theories that grow like mushrooms on the field of research reproduce themselves blocked by the same obstacles and obscurities. Therefore, phenomenology is for once more in the focus, no matter how nebulous and deceptive. Perhaps, the reason that we disclaim the assumptions that come out from introspection is because we, really, have not grasped yet the essence of mind. Perhaps, we are still blundering as we distance our methods and our science from the long-desired destination: The source of consciousness.

The single most significant divergence is the tendency of existential-phenomenology and neuropsychology to emphasize different levels of analysis. They misinterpret each other. Existential phenomenology involves a passionate dedication to the phenomenal world, the macroscopic level, the primary level of everyday life. Neuropsychology, by definition, is concerned solely with the microscopic brain processes. Even if, though, we acknowledge that a behavior is neurally structured, that does not explain away or refute the significance or meaningfulness of the behavior as a response to the macroscopic level. Hence, the two opposed methodologies work on a completely different ground, and there is no hope that they will ever come in concurrence. Some think that phenomenology serves the same corrective function for the psychology of consciousness that ethology plays for the experimental psychology of animal behavior. Unfortunately, though, even this is a bad metaphor of the actual role that phenomenology can play if understood right. In condition of realizing the abyssal nature of mind, then phenomenology might not only play a corrective function to physiological probing, but much more than we can currently imagine.

In cognitive science, the study of phenomenological features is regarded as a mere “bubble”. They believe that it is not worth to develop a science that is engaged with only mental phenomena, released by physiological parallelisms. To put it loosely, they see mind as abstract as the centers of gravity or the Equator. But why should those abstract phenomena be disregarded from concrete scientific analysis? Even Dennett admitted that in the future empirical science might reach the level that the abstract will turn to concrete, if we manage to find methods and gather knowledge that will allow us to do so. For such a thing to be achieved we need first to reexamine and revaluate the fundamental nature of mental phenomena. We need to reconsider the tools of our probing and supply ourselves with a new terminology. But the most axiomatic prerequisite is to cultivate conceptually ourselves to have a sense of separation and independency between the mental and the physical realm or, in another way urge the supremacy of mental against the physical.

Purporting to explain the problems at the phenomenal level, the biochemical terminology at best displaces the problem to another level, without resolving them. So it is actually a nonsensical transportation of the problem to an even more hard to tackle dimension. Do the basal ganglia truly serve as intentionality mechanisms (Pribram, 1976)? Perhaps, but the clarification of the modalities and forms of the organism’s intentional relationships to a field of events and others remains to be investigated, as does the topography of that field. Yes, it is important to know which brain areas and functions are the conditions for the possibility of

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intentionality and consciousness, and, even more importantly, how they contribute to the total structure of intentional consciousness… but the question remains: “What is intentionality in its own right?” To inquire about intentionality in its own right signifies, first of all, the suspension of all questions about real causes at another level of analysis, meaning the objective environmental determinants or the relevant features that dwell in the same level, that influence it. It is very vital to take up conscious life without prejudice, just as it presents itself.

In Dennett’s book, Consciousness Explained (1990) one witnesses the best possible advocating on the persuasion of the powerlessness of introspection next to the cognitive probing. It is a book, which its main aim is to argue against the confabulations that entrench the issue of consciousness. Although, it has been accepted by critics with great enthusiasm and it has been declared as the initiator of a new scientific revolution in mind, there are not few vociferous omissions that lead us far from the explanation of consciousness. Perhaps it is not the erroneous attitude of Daniel Dennett in his approach but the completely fallacious interpretation of the whole scientific mentality against the ambiguous phenomenon of mind. Dennett’s effort is to concretize scientifically the reductionist workings of the brain and, subsequently, to attain a more precise understanding in the nature of consciousness. What would describe best his ultimate intentions is the dispatch of a more sophisticated analysis on the physiology of the brain in order to gloss over any naiveties, such as the Cartesian Theater and the Cartesian Dualism. Yet, this should not stand as an obstacle to appreciate the mental emergence as a mysterious property, still grossly undiscovered, despite the fact that we acknowledge its originating workings, at some extend. The thing is that this progressing sophistication and preciseness of cognitive sciences on the study of brain can breed even the verification of some old intuitional guesses on consciousness that in the beginning of the cognitive sciences course seemed preposterous.

It seems that while he fires unceasingly against naiveties and mistakes other scientists have committed, yet in his own account of consciousness he is not any better from them. His efforts are focused on the understanding of how consciousness is channeled in cognition but that does not explain the nature of consciousness, in any way. Therefore, the irony is that his endeavor starts with an impressive mistake, and that’s the very title of his book. So let’s mark out some of those lavishly accusations of cognitive science against phenomenology and try to establish its vindication, where it is deserved.

First, Dennett identifies the introspective mode with fictional sets. Obviously, he does that in accordance to the actuality and concreteness of the brain processes. Introspection, in this way, can be regarded as fiction only in a clearly physicalistic view. However, the qualia do have their own reality and that realm, which sets in consciousness, has its own (non-fictional) interpretation. That is because no matter how inexistent they are taken from the side of neuropsychology, they are the ingredients of our very alive and undeviating conscious experience.

In that sense and prose of thinking, we are driven in a psychology that becomes something different from the study of mind. It becomes a kind of brain physics and, hence, it gets blind in the rich variety and significance of the experiential events of consciousness. People like Dennett believe that phenomenology is not to be trusted and that the essence of mind wholly can be found on the underlying mechanical level of the physical brain. Just like Darwin did with evolution and Newton with the Cosmos. Albeit, it is not wrong to adapt an analytical attitude, to discharge phenomenology from meaning, is to support the strictly reductionist approach, which denies all meaningful interpretations that structure the phenomenological methods. In short, meaning is alien to the microscopical levels.

As William James said, we need to be pragmatists in our scientific examination. That is, we ought to look away from first things, principles, categories and try to look towards last things, fruits, and consequent facts. Beyond scholastic and hyperbolic positivism, there is the question of pragmatism on the issue of consciousness. What are the effects, the consequences, and the implications? What is mind for? Where do we go from here?

We should not set our watches according to the cognitive view. Not to the nature of consciousness. The best argument that forcefully rocks down accounts like Dennett’s is that if we follow him and accept that most of our conscious performances are a trickery illusion, devoid of meaningful teleological functions then we are becoming non-existent. No matter how he tries to persuade us that our experience should be left intact from those cognitive assumptions and that the richness and meaningfulness is still the hallmark of consciousness, he, nonetheless, swings down such an assertion when he proposed that mind is fictional. Is it

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that kind of consciousness what we really possess (or consciousness possess us)? And why to discard that which is phenomenal to us as meaningless? Dennett here makes me feel as a helpless resultant of my brain processes, constantly diluted. Is that petty our first-person role in consciousness? To which facet we are acquainted more, to the backstage process of fiction movie or with the movie itself? To what use is our knowledge of the film quality, camera-hardware, and the budget to the projection of the screenplay per se? Well, some might say there is an enormous relationship but not when we wish to probe consciousness in its own right. We simply do not care about the hardware stuff when we watch the movie. All our attention is concentrated on the plot, and that is the crucial distinction that one has to make when compares phenomenology from mere physiology.

Testing Out Heterophenomenology

The recognition that physiology by itself cannot offer the insights that we expect from consciousness and the qualm against purely introspective approaches gave the impetus to cognitive scientists to bethink themselves on a better solution that would cover both phenomenology and neuropsychology, without consenting to either side. The basic matter was to keep the balance between the two in order to avoid the vagueness of phenomenology and the deterioration of the consciousness’ content that characterizes the physiological probing. Thus, the hybrid-doctrine heterophenomenology was born in proposition of an all-encompassing method.

What triggered the inclination of cognitive sciences to heterophenomenology were some indications that were inspiring one to think that, in a sense, there was no chasm as such in between the neuropsychology and phenomenology, after all. The phenomenal divergence is only a matter of misinterpretation of the relationship between the brain and the mind. Or probably it is a matter of our misunderstanding of the nature of the relationship. The fallacy was to think that mental phenomena should be exemplified by the assessment of physiological phenomena. Now psychologists recognize that the parallelism should not be taken literally but in a rather complementary way. This means that heterophenomenology’s assistance is to explain a mental phenomenon not in its entirety by the cognitive probing but only where it is required to be verified and attested. In the same fashion, a cognitive physiological phenomenon should not be probed without any verification, in a sort of parallelism, from the accompanying mental phenomenon. Consequently, heterophenomenology shed light on the points that relate theoretically the two very dissimilar levels. Phenomenology and neuropsychology proved to be complementary and compatible and, therefore, a breakthrough from either school is now considered as enriching for both sides’ research.

The difference between classic phenomenology and heterophenomenology is that the former is a first-person and the latter third-person investigation, neutrally extracted information from a subject’s report. For example, the researcher queries the subject’s mental states and he elaborates them over the blueprint of the objective information that has been acquired from the underlying physiological factors that took place during the performance of the mental phenomenon. This method has boosted the confidence of the researchers by offering a more stable and precise principle where any conclusion can be based. Fortunately, heterophenomenology gives us a partial solution to the uncertainty that blurs the nature of introspection in subjects. To that assists the sympathetic neutrality of the researcher that compiles the definitive description of the world according to the subjects (Dennett, 1990). This interweaving technique reasonably declares the validity of the subject’s beliefs, in respect to the objective parameter. Therefore, any mistakes that obscure the phenomenological dimension pass this semi-objective test.

However, the weakness of this new approach is that it denies the great difference between the brain events and the beliefs that we express in our introspective reports. No matter if they are related, it seems that we still neglect the fact that the functionality of brain and mind proves in some basic points, that they are parallel universes. The mental phenomena, indeed, are resultants of the brain events but that does not mean that we can understand their full nature and intention even by the correlation to the physiological probing. Despite the fact that heterophenomenology helps to attain a useful understanding on their nature, still we do not accomplish to grasp, by our dependence on the underlying brain, their intentional direction and reason for existing. Apparently, it does not serve the pragmatic analysis of consciousness.

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Heterophenomenology should be utilized, and should be held as an important method even for the most fanatical phenomenologists, but this should not imply that consciousness and the multilevel rich parade of its content can be mapped satisfactorily in this way. It seems that it is about time to turn our interest at length to introspection and try to resurrect it from the elbowing of the cognitive sciences.

The Vindication of Introspectionism

We must realize that the problem of how to approach the nature of consciousness is not only methodological but, even more deeply, conceptual. Typically, the literature of consciousness vacillates back and forth between materialistic and idealistic modes of explanation. On the latter mode, traditionally, there are attempts to suspend all kind of questions about causes or reductionistic explanations and remain with an internal, descriptive, structural analysis of lived experience. That is why, the heterophenomenologist account is not a substantial help. Phenomenology is concerned with the articulation of organizational principles which govern the relationship of the conscious organism to the world. Let us consider the paradigmatic example of visual consciousness. Phenomenology seeks to unfold visual experience from within –in its own terms- and not to categorize it as an effect of activity in the cortex, or as an interaction between photons and light sensitive surfaces (Marleau-Ponti, 1962). Human vision, in its own right, involves a particular biological, but also existential, mode of being. The task of phenomenology of visual consciousness, then, is to describe that peculiar character of relationship of the seeing individual to the visible world, no matter what the microscopic interaction proves to be. The primary concern here is the probing of the experiential synthesis.

Husserl (1921) divided the stream of phenomenological reality into a material and a noetic stratum. To the latter belong all genuine problems of consciousness and meaning. The noetic stratum is the place where consciousness maintains its importance but when we turn to the material stratum, consciousness loses all meaning and becomes a functional property, which does not bear any essential significance in correlation to the brain processes. Consciousness is not a title for psychological complexes, for fused contents, for streams or clusters of sensations, which by themselves cannot yield a meaning. Consciousness is a world apart from what sensationalism or reductionism wishes to be. It manifests properties that are paraconceptual by our ordinary concepts of space and time, and so requires a more sophisticated introspective understanding, than being reducible to physical explanatory concepts. No matter how approved is to rationalism, consciousness is not meaningless matter. Introspection and phenomenology focus on that very realm of meaning, which is structured by the totality of all the impressions and that has no resemblance or association with the physicalistic notions. The task of phenomenology is the descriptive enterprise to set a conceptual scene that is more appropriate to the mental sphere.

When a biologist observes behavior, does he automatically become a practicing psychologist? When a computer scientist attempts to simulate his thought processes on computer software, is he addressing the problem that concerns a psychologist? And what about the experimentalist who measures the electrical conduction of the skin, the heart rate, the movement of the eyes, or the electrical responses of the brain in a problem solving situation? Is he measuring behavior and if he is, does that matter to the real inquiry of an ideal psychology? Those questions should ponder us before we decide to make a better definition of psychology and its subject. However useful it is to probe the body and to make computer simulations, they do not really penetrate us into the very depths of mind. And that is the strong point of introspection, despite its non-objective nature. The shift to greater objectivity, by any means, does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon. It takes us further away from it.

As we mentioned in previous pages, the strong point of introspectionism is, unfairly, shadowed by its weakness, which is the failure to establish a single settled method that everyone would agree on and the fact that we are not immune to error on our subjective estimations. This weakness, though, would be repaired if we concede the mental nature is based wholly on the principle of uncertainty. Mind is not rigid as matter is. Mind is characterized by its fluidity and its rapid leaps of states. Therefore, we should concoct an analogous technique of probing. Moreover, the immoderation that is caused from the erroneous estimations of the subjective introspection should not be regarded as a terrible

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obstacle. In contrast, the errors that the observer commits should be apprehended as useful information on the perspective of the mental phenomena per se. But if those mistakes are misunderstandings of how the brain works, then simply those mistakes do not concern the introspection that is truly meant here. We do not practice introspection to probe neural processes on their objective appearance, but to peep in the unfathomable depths of that, which is represented by the neural processes. This important distinction should cancel out the conception of the mistakes that ostensibly distort the validity of phenomenology.

In addition, those weaknesses of introspectionism are unsubstantial if we consider that a numerically significant faction of psychologists, vicariously described as humanistic, transpersonal, and existential-phenomenologists, have decided that the ruling majority paradigm in contemporary psychology, behaviorism, is enormously deficient. The reductionistic, mechanistic, and uninspiring conceptualization of the human reality, with a robot understanding of human furnishes a caricature vision of who we really are. The turn within psychology, toward Western existential philosophical thinking, on the one hand, and toward the Eastern philosophico-religious wisdom, on the other hand, should be seen as a healthy attempt to revitalize and reform the stifling structural scientific realities and the conception of what is consciousness. This can only happen if we, like the old Greek and Oriental introspective approaches, insist on the importance of personal agency, the sense of the self, and the value of meaning. We have to emphasize the ultimate depth in the dimensions of the human experience: the peak experiences, the mystical realities, the self-transcendence, and the experience of transpersonal powers, or “theo-realities”.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the analysis of internal states by purely cognitive or reductionist methods is like asserting that you can make a pretty good impression of the interior of a house by viewing the inside merely from outside by the open windows. Alas! Someone who stands inside has a much better impression of the interior space, no matter how subjective his standpoint is considered. The warmth of the interior space, which is manifested by the complex of the important human experiences, such as happiness, love, religiousness, and intentionality are features that belong to the interior subjective domain. Cognitive probing is of a particular limited value in dealing with altered states of consciousness, since they are mainly internal. A physicalistic approach, for instance, to the study of a major psychedelic drug as LSD would lead to the conclusion that LSD is a sedative, a tranquilizer, since the behavior most frequently triggered is sitting still doing nothing. But from the internal viewpoint is just the opposite! What would an external observer say about the state of the subject? Few things compared to its surreal report. If we are to understand consciousness and its various states, introspection must become the prominent technique in psychology, in spite of the difficulties of its application. I believe psychology’s historical rejection of introspection was a token of immaturity. In the search for general laws of the mind, too much was attempted too soon. Mental phenomena are the most complex phenomena of all. The physical sciences, by comparison, seem trivial to what a sophisticated system of introspection can achieve.

A science of mental life is as likely to become rigorous and respectable as a science of behavior or matter. This does not mean that the models of psychological experience and the laws of behavior will prove to be similar, anymore than the models of quantum physics resemble the laws of mechanics. Psychology, therefore, can readily encompass both levels of inquiry. Biology, as well as physics, has its molecular and molar divisions –why not psychology?

Daniel Dennett wants to eliminate such a question by using the word fiction for the most of our theorizing perception and thinking. What is the origin of this fiction, though? Would it not be possible that there are important and meaningful factors behind fiction that bear something important about consciousness? The phenomenon of mind is founded over the imagination, the integral thought, the subconscious modality, apart from logic, analytic thought, and so on. How can we explain those phenomena by merely reductionist methods? If meaning that dresses consciousness is fiction then fiction is reality and fiction is all we care about. The framework of meaning is the experiential, biographical, historical world, the world of human topography and chronography, and not the homogenous, isotropic, space-time of geometry and physics.

I envisage that soon psychology will realize that and, consequently, it will force itself to an adoption of a more pragmatic attitude on the investigation of consciousness, by the help of traditional methods that long have been snubbed by science for many decades.

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Consciousness’ mystery will be deciphered only and if only psychology turns to understand that what we care on the issue cannot be found on the roots but on the fruits. Such a declaration of the superiority of introspection will confront us with the freedom to believe that anyone is suitable for applying straightforwardly himself to the pursuit of knowledge and can have the formal right to put his convictions to dispute, with the presupposition that he does so seriously. This results to the unique empowering of the average individual to perform his own personal science. A development like that will lead to the rapid accumulation and fostering of various systems of thought and introspective inquiries. In effect of that, I can only see the fast structuring of novel introspective methodologies, theories, and schools, and the emergence of a rich language of mental states. It will be no surprise that, if we repose all our investigative attention to phenomenology, an explosion of progress will take place. The idea is that the understanding will be global in its nature due to the easy accessibility on the probing subject (the mind) and the probing methods (armchair introspection). That will be enormously facilitated by the aid of mind-manifesting agents because they are known for their miraculous power to drive one to self-actualizing realizations.

Apparently, in the vindication of introspectionism and pure phenomenology, the mystic gains his lost status. That is because both the scientist and the mystic are involved in empiricism. Both are committed to careful, truthful, and painstaking observation of reality: in the case of the physicist, to matter and energy “outside” himself, while in the case of the mystic, to their reality “within” himself. The mystic seeks immediacy not in the things outside him but inside him. It is not the nature as the aggregate of objects in space and time but his own ego where the existential reality lies. If we wish to see reality free from refracting media, we must submit to the guidance of our inner instead of outward experience. We have to scientifically concede that the ultimate element of reality will not be found in the things but in our own consciousness. The analysis of consciousness is a bona fide ticket to the tour de force on the ultimate and original understanding of all reality. At this point is where psychology meets metaphysics to fuse indissolubly.

But what’s wrong with contemporary epistemology and we postpone this astounding rendezvous?

THE ANTICIPATION OF AN IDEAL PSYCHOLOGY

On the Autonomy of Psychology

Psychology has been considered autonomous science at least in two respects: its subject and its methods. The subject it deals is very different from the one that the subject of the natural sciences. Here we are talking about mind, consciousness, thinking, behavior. Those are entities, properties, relations, states that cannot be dealt in terms of the any other science, explicably. However, the question of whether psychology is an autonomous science is still in elaboration of philosophy, which seeks to answer if the mind can be brought under the aegis of natural science. It is true that there are inextricable difficulties to arrive safely on that conclusion. As we mentioned already, mind differs widely from the phenomena in the world that can be classified in the category of material things. Mind is something that concerns the impalpable core of the living experience, the foundation of our perplexing existence. Therefore, until today, any attempt to explain mental phenomena by the vocabulary of the natural sciences has been proven insufficient. Insofar as history has recorded, no positivist has actually succeeded in translating any psychological claims into the language of Newtonian physics. There have been many asserting that mental and physical properties are identical, and it sounds true, but they conceded that the language that we use to describe these properties has no relevance at all to the physical language.

Obviously, claims like this, the ones who assert that mental and physical phenomena are identical, no matter their difference in their descriptive nature, securely imply that there is no such thing as a metaphysical principle in the subject of mind. The question of whether mind is a metaphysical object or not, seems to be faced with a negative answer and, hence, consciousness and mind figure as a viable phenomenon to positivistic science. Conversely, there are philosophers who support that psychology is concerned with a metaphysical object. That is because mind is regarded a multiple realized object by underlying physical properties.

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This is actually the hallmark of the doctrine of emergentism. This is in contrast to the belief that mind is entirely identical to matter and results to a new type of dualism. How can the logical and conceptual instruments, which were made for the description of physical being, the spatial being of things, apprehend the reality of ego? How can we hope to come closer to the reality of consciousness when we are artificially interrupting its flow by dividing it into classes and genera (Cassirer, 1957)?

Any kind of functionalist approach implies a certain degree of metaphysical autonomy because psychological properties are multiply realized. That does not retrograde us, though, to the Cartesian dualism, neither to a primitive psychology. The autonomy of psychology from natural sciences and the acceptance that mind is, after all, a metaphysical object, does not mean that we must depart ourselves completely from the perspective of the physical sciences. It only gives the admission to adapt a more unconstraint science of mind, where all kind of creative theories can bloom. Notably, such an acceptance leads one to realize that emerging picture is of a “layered world”. Such a world allows the theories of different levels to have their independency, relatively. Whoever thinks that this “layered world” prevents psychology from having a properly scientific status, has not really registered the hidden sides of the above arguments. The only thing that such an independency implies is that a psychological explanation has its autonomy in the sense that it does not need to be reduced to physical explanation, but, nonetheless, is properly scientific.

What if, though, we have a proposal to make that will sooth down the arguments on support to the autonomy of psychology and, therefore, facilitate the wishful unity of science? What if, there is a logical outlet that leads to the actual spiritualization of physics, so that they become more compatible with the object of mind?

By now, it should be more than evident that any purely materialistic enterprise to explain consciousness is a dead duck. In an age where so much happens in science, when new brainstorming theories make their way in to the mainstream and our conceptions change faster than the weather, we try to pick the pieces and put them in an order which will match with our intuitional and optimal version of what is consciousness and how we shall study it. More or less, we are striving to get away from the label of the harum-scarum in the case we maintain the quite irrational beliefs of our existential nature. We customize the scientific theories for our profit, our exoneration from dooming postulations of reality that dehumanize us and forward us in a formidable future. No matter how daunting a theory of consciousness is (cognitive theories tend to become a thriller-series for the humankind), we have the natural inclination to modify them in a more amiable form, which will not steal away the significance of selfhood and of the psyche. Nevertheless, the good news is that nowadays we do not have to try much for such modifications since the substratum of reality, which is the universe, emerges with a new quality that betrays its devotee-theories. Matter is mind, is the crowning statement of the new physics, as we will see in the third part of the paper, and it humiliates all the materialistic theories that suspended the progression of psychology for years. In that context, I don’t see a reason for a complete autonomy of psychology from the natural sciences. We must realize that a good psychology can emerge if it is autonomous from the superseded mechanistic standards of the natural sciences or, otherwise, if it is communicated with the flux of the quantum level.

Beyond doubt, psychology is preferred as autonomous only when it is faced with an obsolete epistemology of the natural sciences. The wishful unity of science can only be achieved if we conceptually adjust our thinking and our theories to the new mentality that springs by the promotion of quantum physics, the relativity theory, the morphogenetic fields, the chaos theory and other pioneering systems of knowledge that figure as more well-matched with the nature of mind. If physics can be less rigid then what is the separation for?

A Revision on the Epistemology of Consciousness

Some of the mistakes that psychology have committed in the previous framework of conceived reality, before quantum physics become popular, was that consciousness was described in objective terms; it refuted to see that consciousness is something irreducible and ultimate. Even sensationalism, whose basic epistemological intention is to break down the

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world of sensation and intuition into separate elements, was unable to disregard this original totality of consciousness. The investigation of the nature of consciousness, which wholly reposes its trust on the cognitive probing of the physical brain, is similar to an idiot’s disillusionment to search for the fruits in the roots of a tree instead on the branches. Any effort to investigate the phenomenon to its building blocks, where microprocesses take place, is square to one. The dimension where all sensations emerge in a totality, where meaning and intuition color the human experience is the valid one to be the field where psychology can make a fortunate investigation. The main fault of contemporary epistemology is one: the endeavor to arrive at an explanation of the objective consciousness is always stigmatized by the arbitrary transposition to modify the content of consciousness in some other way. In the end, neither theory captures the pure phenomenon itself.

What we require is a new system of introspective methods that will be based on subjective reports, but they will be easily classified by objective standards. Equipped with an innovative conceptual language it will help us to dig in the very depths of consciousness. Sanskrit language has many presumably precise words for internal states that do not translate well in English. There are over twenty words for “consciousness”, which carry different shades of meaning. In a similar fashion, it is essential to develop a more precise terminology for consciousness and its states.

The philosophical argument of Leibniz indicates us that a proper research happens only under the condition that we apprehend the unity of consciousness and apperception. He came to notice that the best route to study consciousness is not from the natural sciences but from the philosophy of language (Cassirer, 1957). This conclusion can lead to a fructifying and revitalizing power. If we take the linguistic meaning, which is irreducible, as our guide and model, we gain an entirely new picture of sensibility. We then recognize that the isolated sensation, like the isolated word, is a mere abstraction. Actual living perception no more consists of colors, or tones, or neuronal firings, than the meaningful sentence consists of words, reduced to syllables, reduced to mere letters.

Conceiving all that, we cannot maintain a neglecting attitude against the metaphysical theories that surround issue of consciousness. They are undeniably closer to the essence of meaning than physicalism. Although many metaphysical and theistic enterprises to explain mind seem contrived or childish, they are not, obviously, more absurd than the popular scientific belief that the universe exists in the form that it is, reasonlessly. If we want to develop a sophisticated introspective science, and want that science to go beyond our own cultural limitations –if we want to mature the childish metaphysical theses, we must begin to recognize the limitability and arbitrariness of much of our ordinary state of consciousness (Tart, 1981). Unfortunately, until now, most psychologists are content to work within an established framework of thinking and do not usually question the presuppositions of their work. Hence, most of the times, the very meaning of their activity becomes questionable, a crisis of identity in the whole discipline sets in, and such a situation inevitably leads to a situation of doubting and questioning. This revision opens up a dialogue, and other worldviews, other anthropologies, metaphysics, and religions become interesting and important. A search for a new paradigm (Kuhn, 1962) begins.

The trivialization and marginalization of humankind is the leitmotif of science since the early postulations of Copernicus and Darwin. This existential ethos is threatening and debasing: It has alienated us from the universe that we live. Is it that the ultimate truth we are looking for by the medium of science? Far from it. We are not incidental products of blind forces. The existence of conscious beings, like us, is a fundamental feature of the universe. We have been written into the laws of nature in a deep and, I believe, in a meaningful way. Science is not an alienating activity. Science is a noble and enriching quest that helps us to make sense of the world in an objective and methodical manner. It should not be identified with absence of meaning. More likely, this absurdity is something that characterizes our age, but it is not a characteristic that will be eternally on the stage. The conceptual modifications that will happen in the future will structure the right epistemology and the right framework to explore the major and so central phenomenon of consciousness.

In the shadow of our century’s frantic scientific development, in the shadow of the rocket, the hydrogen bomb, the invention of television and the computer, the apotheosis of telecommunications, there are archaic truths about our conscious existence that remain hidden and neglected. Beyond the behavioristic horror that throbbed in the laboratories in the recent years, somewhere in the wild forests there have been nomads that cognitively know for

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millennia that mind is something appalling, something much more fascinating than a mere brain epiphenomenon. Today, there are individuals who have been influenced by them and discovered the magic of the psychedelic substances, attaining the realization that mind is truly metaphysical and titanic. A real tool for incredible things to be achieved. There are some individuals who have been practicing an awesome kind of introspection, akin to the exploration of a new universe. The inner universe, which pertains consciousness, that one that reductionistic psychology is so blind to see, is the subject of a very serious existential study for them. Call them “psychonauts”. Call them explorers of the new age. Call them makers of the future epistemology.

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**THE TRANSPERSONAL APPROACH

2Psychedelic

Quirks******

*“I feel we have the obligation to explore the psychedelic domains and pass on that

information to others interested in mapping the psyche. At this time in our history, it’s perhaps the most awe-inspiring journey anyone could hope to make.”

-Terence McKenna

“The new psychology will reveal in us a mental region incomparably wider than the intellect. To explore the most sacred and impersonal depths of the unconscious, is to labor in the subsoil of consciousness: that will be the principal task of psychology in the century which

is opening. I do not doubt that wonderful discoveries await us there.”-Henri Bergson

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AN EPISTEMOLOGICAL POLARITY

The Radical Vitalism Against the Conservative Physicalism

In the study of human consciousness, psychology finds itself in the middle of an epistemological polarity, which conditions the debate of consciousness’ issue for many years now. As noted in the previous part, the psychologist is between two very different directions. A decision for which way to go is not easy to be made –and that is because scientifically and officially we are unable to declare a final judgment on its nature. Moreover, the main reason seems to be the fact that empirical evidence is at odds with most of the physicalistic notions, which dominate its exploration. Notwithstanding the high status of cognitive sciences, there are certain experiences that challenge its postulations and lead us to question their validity and request a more satisfying trend of thought, which will be more compatible with them. Hence, the polarity is charged and the lack of a centralized ideology becomes a thorny issue that suspends the substantial facing of the mystery. Reasonable is the pondering over the perplexing matter of the transcendental experience. If the physicalistic version of mind is true, then how is it possible for an individual to attain all those paraconceptual phenomena that characterize the experience induced by hallucinogens? Beyond consideration, the idea that one can transcend himself, that one can experientially dissolve among energy waves right there where he sits, and the idea that one can communicate his fellows without any medium is outrageous from a conservative point of view. However, if we choose to maintain a more vitalist kind of perspective then, perhaps, we are gaining a more flexible attitude as we extend our vision beyond the mere physical object and unusual phenomena like these become more accessible to research.

The polarity, as it appears, is between the conservative physicalism and the radical vitalism. The former approach seeks to uncover the roots of behavior in pre-personal terms of physiological functions without appeal to the experienced reality of consciousness and personal agency. The physicalist-positivist approach is the serious attempt to simulate man as an assembly of variables and respond tendencies with general information-processing capability of an “artificial intelligence” with emergent properties. (Tart, 1981). The ideal of such a view is the complete situation of man, the creation of the android under scientific management and control.

On the other side of the psychological spectrum, there are the “soft” humanistic and existential approaches which insist on the reality of selfhood, self-realization, and self-agency, and which emphasize the importance of personal consciousness of meaning and values. The activities of each human individual require an “intentional analysis” and interpretation reading, a “hermeneutics of existence”, rather than a mere causal analysis. The vitalist emphasis in psychology stresses the reality of embodiment, meaningfulness, and intensity of experience. It is thus sympathetic with both the human potential movement in humanistic psychology and its accentuation on the experience of body, and transpersonal psychology, which retains an appreciation for man’s vital connectedness with the realities of the Spirit, of values, and ultimately with the realm of the Divine. Therefore, while physicalist-positivist psychologies aim the mastery and control by a professional scientific elite, the vitalist psychologies seem to favor the further emancipation, the self-development, and generally taking matters in one’s hands. Obviously, here the divergence is vast. How a psychologist, who is committed entirely to the conservative view, can recognize and accept the word Divine in his terminology? Introspective descriptions of mental phenomena that bear an extraordinary essence are literally invisible from his point of view. They are no more than delusional states, which have nothing to confess for the nature of consciousness. The growth

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of consciousness through self-actualization and spiritual practices is no more than a joke to them.

If one approves the conservative view of mind, where consciousness is no more than the product of the nervous system and brain, the degree of independence or objectivity of the observer can only be relative. The observer may be semi-independent system with fewer characteristics than the overall system of consciousness as a whole, but it is dependent on the operation of neurologically based structures and so is ultimately limited and shaped by them; it is also programmed to some extend in the enculturation process. In the radical view of mind, awareness is (or can become) different from the brain and nervous system. Here partial to total independence of the mind-brain can be attained by the Observer. The ultimate degree of this objectivity then depends on whether awareness per se, whatever its ultimate nature is, has properties that limit it. And indeed, we have evidence from quantum physics, already, that this is the case, as we will see in the following pages.

Unfortunately, no matter how much cognitive scientists want to believe the opposite, the conservative or orthodox view of mind has not much to offer. It does not really explain what consciousness is, but citing good evidence that physically effecting the brain alters consciousness, asks no further questions and simply believes that consciousness itself is a product of brain functioning. Conversely, in the radical view of mind, a person’s belief about the nature of reality may actually alter the reality. A fundamental part of this view is that basic awareness may have an independent real status itself, rather than being just a derivative of physical processes in the brain. And, indeed, this is one of the profound revelations of the psychedelic experience.

Transcending Conservatism

A main landmark of the paper’s content is the merit of the transcendental experience in this a research. That is because it is the most resonant aspect that can reveal at great length the essence of consciousness. It is the vibrant substantiation that mind is not limited in the framework of the brain but goes well too far and thus incites a less physicalistic attitude on the research. The fact that for centuries transpersonal experiences have convincingly been reported is something that should not be overlooked. It literally fuels the dispute against the materialistic agenda of psychology. Therefore, if we commit ourselves to such a transpersonal introspection, the study of consciousness passes to another level and the limelight falls to the radical approach, which yields a vitalist outlook in the issue.

What do we make of such transpersonal experiences? As we know mainstream Western psychology has made no particular effort to explain them. As a result, the typical psychologist unconsciously avoids coming across them and casually dismisses them if he does come across them. But why this strong dismissal among the community of psychologists?

I think an important part of the answer lies in considering the implications of transpersonal experiences. The prefix trans- conveys the idea that these experiences goes beyond the individual, not merely in an abstract sort of way, as we might say that democracy goes beyond a single person, but in a very real and important sort of way. These sorts of experiences seem to imply that consciousness may not always be restricted to the body and brain, that there may be other kinds of consciousness than human that with which we may interact. Aside from many historical reasons, such as the old conflict between science and religion, for rejecting these implications, a more immediate and formal reason is that monistic, physicalistic philosophical views about the nature of consciousness are dominant in modern science.

Of course, the reason for rejecting to adopt the radical viewpoint is the traditional reluctance of epistemology to compromise with the flaws and the limitations of transpersonal psychology. It is a fact that most people find it comforting to adhere at various psychological illusions for the sake of their psychological health, and so it might be useful to learn how to induce transpersonal illusions deliberately in order to reinforce irrational belief systems that, nevertheless, allow people to function well. Politically speaking, this is also a convenient path to social respectability for transpersonal psychology, as it will seem to fit experiences which tend to be regarded as disturbing into the physicalistic, monistic status quo. Since psychologists have always been a little bit insecure about their status as “real scientists”, we should not underestimate this political aspect of things. Moreover, my belief is that the cognitive experience of transcendence, no matter how illusive it might be considered,

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demolishes the conservatism’s rigidity at one blow. As we will see, the psychedelic experience, which is the most viable way to trigger transcendence, raises provocative questions that demand a more radical probing of the phenomenon. In other words, if we compare the conservative postulations of cognitive scientists with the direct experience of the transpersonal “miracles” then I am afraid that those very postulations will immediately become humiliated as their deficiency in their understanding of consciousness will become annoyingly evident.

An almost universal theory in Western scientific circles, sunk to the level of an implicit belief, is that awareness is a product of brain functioning. This conservatism as an implicit belief is dangerous for two reasons: First, many experiences in various altered states of consciousness are inconsistent with this theory, but the conservative’s view implicit belief makes us liable to distort our perception of these extraordinary phenomena. In effect of that, sometimes the sincere report of their manifestation makes one appear as if being at the threshold of mental derangement –something which inhibits their exploration in objectively scientific terms. Second, parapsychological data suggests that awareness is at least partially outside brain functioning, a condition that leads to very different views of human nature. The radical view of the mind sees awareness as this something extra and postulates that physical reality can sometimes be directly affected by our beliefs systems. We must be open-minded about the radical view to guard against maintaining too narrow and too culturally condition a view of mind.

As psychology increasingly deals with the phenomena of altered states of consciousness, it will have to deal with phenomena that do not fit well in a conceptual scheme that says awareness is only a by-product of the brain. Experiences of apparently paranormal abilities like telepathy, of ecstasis, of mystical union with aspects of the universe that cosmologists never dreamed of, the reception of supernormal knowledge spontaneously given in psychedelic states, fit more comfortably into schemes that do not assume that awareness is only a function of the brain. I have nothing against competent attempts to fit such phenomena into our dominant Western scientific framework by elucidating them as distorting phenomena, but the attempts I have seen so far have been utterly inadequate and seen to work mainly by ignoring in a basic way the major aspects of altered states phenomena.

I believe that an examination of human history and our current situation provides the strongest argument for the need to develop state-specific sciences. Throughout history, man has been influenced by the spiritual and mystical factors expressed in the religions that attract the masses. Spiritual and mystical experiences are primary phenomena of various altered states (Tart, 1981). Because of such experiences, untold numbers of both the noblest and most horrible acts of which men are capable have been committed. Yet in all the time that Western science has existed, no concerted attempt has been made to understand these altered states phenomena in scientific terms. Conversely, many hoped that religious thinking is simply a form of superstition that would be left behind in our “rational” age. Not only this hope, though, has failed, but our own understanding of the nature of reasoning now makes it clear that it can never be fulfilled. Reason is a tool, a tool that is wielded in the service of assumptions, beliefs, and needs that are not themselves subject to reason (Davies, 1993). The irrational, or better, the a-rational, will not disappear from the human situation. Our immense success in the development of the physical sciences has not been particularly successful in formulating better philosophies of life or increasing our real knowledge of ourselves. The sciences that have been developed up to date are not very human sciences. They tell us how to do things, but give us no scientific insights on questions of what to do, what not to do, or why to do things.

At this point, I am forced to exhibit how cognitive theories can open a channel to transcendental experience, in a way that in the future we might be in the lucky position to see a more integrative psychology. Daniel Dennett indicates how people who train themselves in music accomplish by time to attain a state where they can acoustically discover new kind of beats that would not normally perceive. Shortly, he implies that because of their training their conscious experience has changed (Dennett, 1991). More specifically, it has been augmented or even expanded: they are now conscious of things they were not previously. The case of blindsight belongs to the same class, in a sense that here too we have the accomplishment of expansive consciousness. Experimentally, Dennett notes, it has been proved that subjects suffering by partial blindsight can train themselves to make, statistically, right guesses on the objects that are not seeable. Evidently, that entails a certain capacity of individuals to

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transcend their restricting physical deficiencies in order to perceive things that normally they cannot. I wonder, if such a thing is generally accepted by such hardcore scientists like Dennett, then what indisposes them to detain the wholly transcendental experience with similar verdicts? Needless to say that mostly it is a matter of mentality. They skip those phenomena due to their fixated weakness to deal with them, as they are so overwhelmingly dissimilar to what they are accustomed to study, so that they prefer to neglect them altogether. However, this is not expected to be the case for long. Once people start to report seriously their unfamiliar experiences, and as more accounts accumulate, a general impression of the transpersonal realm will be shaped and the taboo of scientists on addressing formally their curiosity towards them will join history.

PANDORA’S BOX FLUNG OPEN

An Evolutionary Ally

Psychotropic substances interfered to the evolution of our species since the age of the australopithecine. New evidence in paleontology suggests that the hallucinogenic plants were one of the main components of our primate’s diet, something that occasioned to the change of our evolutionary development due to a number of important factors. In studying the implications of the experience that those agents induce, we would instantly deduce that, indeed, in the scale of the millennia, major changes in the biological and cognitive level are reasonable. In the minds of preliterate people, the lines between drugs, food, and spices are rarely clearly drawn (McKenna, 1995). The strategy of the early hominid omnivores was to eat everything that seemed foodlike and to vomit anything that was unpalatable. Plants, insects, and small animals found to be edible by this method were then inculcated in their diet. Such an ever-shifting diet automatically means to an ever-shifting chemical equilibrium. An organism may regulate its internal processes but, ultimately, mutagenic influences will fatally be increased and thus a greater number of genetically invariant individuals will be offered to the process of natural selection. The results of this are accumulated changes in neural organization, states of consciousness, and behavior.

The major contributor to these mutational changes in our species, due to our diet, was the psychoactive plants. Through the scrutiny of anthropological research, we have found that they used to be plentiful in the environment of our primates. Both the setting of the natural surroundings and the climatic conditions were very friendly to the emergence of abundant hallucinogenic plants, especially, among them, the psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Their outstriking appearance was an attractor to the eyes of the hungry primates, who were not hesitant to eat them. The effects of the cognitive changes that were induced functioned as habitual and hence they formed the pattern of returning to repeat the experience. In result of that, the psilocybin mushrooms were included to their diet for centuries and became a significant part of their everyday food.

Terence McKenna’s (1995) contention, a famous ethnobotanologist, is that mutation-causing, psychoactive chemical compounds in the early human diet directly influenced the rapid reorganization of the brain’s information-processing capacities. Alkaloids in plants, specifically the hallucinogenic compounds as psilocybin, dimethylotryptamine (DMT), and harmaline could be the chemical factors in the protohuman diet that catalyzed the emergence of self-reflection. Their action enhanced our information-processing activity, or environmental sensitivity, and thus contributed to the sudden expansion of the human brain size. At a later stage in this same process, hallucinogens acted as catalysts in the development of imagination, fueling the creation of internal stratagems and hopes that may well synergized the emergence of language and religion.

Such speculations should not be considered outlandish. It was very natural for our primates to encompass in their diet psilocybin mushrooms, which are still abundant all around the world, and were even more thousand years ago. Subsequently, their activity over the brain is booming, meaning that they cause major conceptual changes to individuals. Now, that considered in geological scale of time should be a prominent factor for the dramatic change of our brain and cognition. It is confounding the fact that with Homo habilis began a sudden and mysterious expansion of the brain size. I put the boot in the explication of the chemical

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interference of exopheromonic mutagens, like the psychotropic substances found in various plants and I believe the reason that biologists disagree to notice that induction is based wholly to ethical compunctions, which is imposed by the world governments. The real missing link to our evolutionary leap in the size of our brain can be found in the hallucinogenic flora, the number one ally of our cognitive progress. It seems that the most recently evolved areas of our brain, Broca’s area and the neocortex, which are devoted to the control of symbols and language processing, have been hugely influenced by the often psychedelic experience of the nomads and gatherers. That is because those compounds, as we will see further, cause transcendence at all levels of cognitive activity and transcendence leads to creative solutions of problems. Besides, this is the greatest lesson the doctrine of evolution offered us, considering the way birds evolved from dinosaurs or the way primates began to communicate with vocal symbols or even the way inorganic matter bred organic cells. It all happened in through a transcendental leap of nature. The conclusion, hence, is that the highly organized neurolinguistic areas of our brain, which were influenced by psychotropic compounds, have made language and culture possible. So, are we the offsprings of a primordial symbiosis, that one between the ape and the plant? We still cannot tell for sure, but the fact is that hardly we will find a better explanation of how we made this rapid transcendence, both from the caves to culture and from mere glossolalia to poetic prose.

Surely, our linguistic abilities and our enhanced self-reflection must have evolved in response to enormous evolutionary pressures –but we do not know for certain what these pressures are. However, what we know from undeniable evidence, like cave-drawings, petrifying tokens of digested food, and other various evidence, is that where psychoactive plants use were present, hominid nervous systems over many millennia would have been flooded by hallucinogenic realms of strange and alien beauty. Regarding that assumption, then it is simple mathematics to deduce that our change as species, and our change as conscious beings, was hugely influenced by psychedelic substances. Therefore, on the study of mind the comprising of their action and their potentialities should be deemed as very relevant to the object per se. Indeed, the kinship between consciousness and hallucinogens is great and that should be an impetus to examine this vital issue with curiosity on the profits we can gain by adopting a positive attitude against those chemical agents; especially when resonant implications lead us to realize that those very compounds used to be our evolutionary allies.

Returning to Our Roots

However, this ecstatic and much profiting symbiosis with psychotropic plants did not lasted. Scientific speculations regard that this happened due the change of climactic conditions, which brought the change in the pattern of flora-growth, which happened to become distanced by the lands of the primates. In matter of fact, this cessation of the symbiosis was the cause for enormous psychological, and therefore, cultural properties. First, the hallucinogens are known for their ego-thrusting power. They dissolve boundaries. Therefore, the break of this relationship led to the shift from partnership to the patriarchical model, which is the aegis of male-dominance, egotism, dogmatism, and animosity against the Nature. Unfortunately, even the remains of this nurturing profit got vanished by fanatical supporters of the patriarchical model. The Eleusinian Mysteries of the Hellenistic period were known of their famous portion, a somewhat hallucinogenic substance (the psychotropic ergot-beer) that was sponsored to citizens for the ritualistic worship of goddess Demeter. The enthusiastic Christians, though, regarded such events as demonic and decided to burn Eleusis together with the sacred archives of an intriguing data that was held there. Formally, they brought the end to such rituals by extinguishing forever the secrets of their mystery.

Since then, we are led to think that the psychedelic substances are a dangerous trap. The governments, as they feel menaced by them, have made an expensive crusade to eliminate them by outlawing their use. This hostile attitude was elicited after the reawakening of our interest on altered states of mind. When the lights were going out in Europe, a fundamental breakthrough occurred. In 1947 Albert Hoffmann synthesized the first d-lysergic acid, diethylamide tartate –LSD-25. His chemical invention set the cultural stage for the truly surreal emergence of society’s awareness of LSD. The extraordinary discovery of such a megahallucinogen, which is active in the microgram range, soon surfaced in the social environment. As Aldus Huxley wrote in The Doors of Perception, the cultural breakthrough of

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such a drug recalled the true dimension of consciousness and the cosmos once again. In an age when behaviorism and the significance of materialism were culminating, a new current of spiritualism was intruding the Western world. Suddenly, the youth was pushed to restore our relationship with Nature and our conception of the self. The reminiscence of our symbiotic relationship with ecstatic indoles was highlighted and the concept of consciousness quickly passed to a new level, widely different from the shadowy mentality of the scientists who succumbed to the grayness of the epoch of mass destruction and moral devaluation.

Later on, Valentina and Gordon Wasson published in their now famous article in Life magazine the announcement of the rediscovery of the psilocybin mushroom complex. This article introduced into mass consciousness the notion that certain plants could cause exotic, perhaps even paranormal, visions. That, among other promotions of psychedelics, was a shaker of the Establishment. The turbulent situation of the ‘60s in America showed that the opposition between the conservatism and the growing open-mindness of the people was, the less to say, acute.

The sudden introduction of a powerful deconditioning agent such as LSD had an effect of creating a mass defection from community values based on dominator hierarchy accustomed to suppress consciousness and awareness (McKenna, 1995). The wide distribution of LSD dissolved the social machinery through which it moved. This effect bedeviled it to the political agenda and soon became illegal and ostensible dangerous to the social stability. Unluckily, this hysteria caused as an after-effect all kinds of psychedelics to join the black list and that overshadowed the profits that we can gain from serious experimentation with them. However, the fact is that the human curiosity cannot be restricted by any means. Today, we are still, and probable even more, acquainted with hallucinogenic substances and the growing interest has much to tell about the nature of reality and consciousness. Many expect that they will be legalized again (already in some freedom-loving countries they are) and the scientific interest will be stimulated on the implications of the psychedelic experience in our psychological researches. For 40 years now, we lack of the proper ground to commit a sophisticated research on the effects of psychedelics in consciousness and, therefore, to advance our introspecting knowledge to undreamed levels. We have missed the chance thusfar but evidence shows that it will not going to last. The revolution of the 60’s was nothing but the hors d'oeuvre. The main plate will be the formal scientific and cultural recognition of the potentialities those compounds offer and that will be the set-up for the initiation of a new psychology, which will celebrate the rediscovery of the long-forgotten secrets that dwell in the abyssal depths of consciousness. The dessert? Perhaps the fulfillment of Aldus Huxley’s dream, cherished in his works: A new Eden for an ideal humanity.

Analysis on the Psychedelic Phenomenology

Before we begin the scrutiny on the psychedelic experience I ought to notify in advance that the subject is an overwhelming oddity. One has to know that the study of transpersonal experiences, induced by psychedelics, is not an uncomplicated enterprise, as they are characterized by the rupture that they cause on ordinary reality. Indeed, psychedelic substances have the capacity to elicit strange cognitive phenomena, which confound us with their unforeseen effects –effects that seem to imply dramatic conceptual changes in the notions of reality and mind. Seldom individuals can guess accurately where such an experience can lead and seldom they remain unchanged after the experience fades away. The most significant modification of such a startling event is the genesis of a vivid impression that there must be a major misinterpretation in our ordinary conception of reality. This forces one to attempt to figure out creatively a more pertinent model of reality to the revelation. Following this way and experimenting further you find yourself in unrecognized pathways, as soon as consciousness becomes manifest of its fundamental position in the universe, and as reality turns to a fluid medium which mind acts on in diametrically opposed ways as we traditionally acknowledge from science. Consequently, it does not take a lot of time to bump on the realization that psychedelics inspire us not of entirely alien notions and models of the cosmos but rather of old archaic conceptions that have been buried in the soil under the Western civilization’s professed enlightenment. The landscape of the psychedelic experience is dubious to the people who chose to keep their distance from those substances, but the ones who did embraced them, that landscape is the inescapable destiny of the humanity. They

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open up the window to the part of the spectrum that our minds cannot normally perceive. Evolution has customized us with a short-range perception in order to adjust with the needs of our survival. However, there is much more that can be comprised in our vista; the manifestation of the hidden aspects of reality can boost our intellects to the point of having, at least, reasonably the immense aspirations of realizing the nature of consciousness and the true essence of our being.

The alkaloids of psychotropic substances act directly on the neuronal synapses of the brain. They are known as pseudo-neurotransmitters, as they function in a facilitating way to the communication between the brain cells. This intensification of the neuronal firing potentiality causes some profound changes in the macroscopic level of experience. Loosely put, they act as additional vehicles of information and, therefore, a larger surface of the reality becomes manifest in the perception of the subject. The increase of serotonin-activity augments the emotional magnitude, the linguistic sharpness, and mainly the visual precision. As the dosage increases, though, those changes become even more dramatic. The emotional state turns to a sequence of epic rhapsodies, language transfigures to synesthetic visible articulation of an odd geometric nature, and vision startlingly penetrates one to a new plane where the rigidity of matter is no more than reminiscence. If up until here, the reader feels that he hardly can conserve his beliefs in the paper’s premise, if he starts losing contact with the implications of the content, then I suggest that this bizarre nature can soon become a routine of our scientific explorations, just like the weird subatomic realm became, or the deciphering of DNA. Of course, to accomplish that we nave no choice but to invent and apply a novel psychology with an open eye to altered states of consciousness, equipped with a potent terminology, which will concretize the abstract and will pour light on the dark side of consciousness. I sympathize with anyone who finds himself rejecting the radical view of mind. I suggest, however, that he honestly ask himself: “Have I rejected this view as a result of careful and extensive study (or experience) of the evidence for and against it, or because I have been trained to do so and rewarded by social approval for doing so?”

Before I start sketching the psychedelic phenomenology at depth, I have to note that while much of what I write about here is intellectual or theoretical knowledge based on reports from others and on the experimental literature, some of it comes directly from my own experience. That means that the approach clearly makes sense to me, even though many of its ramifications are beyond the scope of my personal experience.

Firstly, the psychedelic experience should not be considered as a particular predictable process. Its variability is wide, so much that subjects question themselves each time, if they have taken another substance different from last time. We should avoid terms like “the LSD state”. We should not believe that the statement, “X tool LSD (or any powerful psychedelic substance), tells us much about what happened to X’s consciousness. In matter of fact, the mind finds itself to realms that always differ, in accordance to the emotional set, the Freudian repository of personal history, the environment’s setting, and even the pulse of the epoch. Those realms, which repeatedly propel the mind, have been variously described and named by investigators, such as for Leary (1977), “post-terrestrial”, by Bucke (1970) as “cosmic consciousness”, by Grof (1976) as “suprahuman”, by Jung (1970) as an “archetypal, transpersonal dimension”, by Hillman (1975) as the “polytheistic” realm of the psyche, by Assagioli (1965) as the “super-conscious”, and finally by McKenna as the “overmind”. The exploration of this transpersonal realm with hallucinogenic agents has been conceived as a first-class proof for the insufficiency of contemporary psychology. The impact of the psychedelic experience in our rationalistic habituated ways of seeing catapulted us perhaps more dramatically than the modern scientific discovery and formulation of the unconscious toward the recognition of a profound and separate “reality”. This “reality” has been described as a journey to new realms of consciousness and as limitless in scope. Its characteristic features were the “transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimension, and of the ego or identity (Leary, Metzner & Alpert, 1964). It was the conviction of these early explorers that it was not the drugs themselves which produced the transcendental experiences, but that they acted to open our mind to experiences which were not just distortions of ordinary consciousness, but were themselves evident of human capacities that were not well understood in the framework of current theories. The experience is one in which the normal concepts of time, space, logic, and causality are relinquished, permitting the individual to explore his own “inner space” of personal and collective meanings in a dynamic and philosophical way.

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Unfortunately, the curtailing of research by legal restrictions has meant that the experimentation has gone little further than the mere explanatory stage. What research there is, however, suggests that psychedelics could open up completely new areas of psychology. It has been said that the study of LSD might provide for unification and a new orientation in psychology, in a similar way to what occurred in the biological sciences with the discovery of the DNA. In contrast to the potentialities that wait there, very little knowledge has been gained about psychedelic experiences. Indeed, it is very difficult in the present climate to write about such experiences without risking an emotional reaction.

As we mentioned above, perception passes through major modifications under the ingestion of a psychedelic molecule. It is a condition which puts you in contact with the raw data of perception, and this makes perceptions exceptionally beautiful, vibrant, and alive. By contrast, usual perception in the ordinary states of consciousness seems lifeless, abstract, with all the beauty of reality removed in order to satisfy various needs and blend in with consensus reality. Some psychologists argue that perception is the actual reality. But what does “realistic” means? We like to believe that it means perception of the real world, the physical world; but the world we spend most of our time perceiving is not just any segment of the physical world, but a highly socialized and culturally conditioned part of the physical world. The world of the cities, the automobiles, the television sets. So our perception may indeed be realistic, but it is with respect to a very tailored segment of reality, a consensus reality we have agreed as “real” and “important”. This is a way of saying that our perceptions are highly selective and filtered. Thus, the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is mainly eliminative and not productive. According to this view, my own conviction is that during the psychedelic experience the valve of perception opens and lets in extra information, which is not practical for our survival. The nature of this information varies strikingly from the ordinary content we are used to perceive in daily life. In low doses the matter vibrates and Einstein’s equation, E=mc2 becomes evident in a straightforwardly empirical way. However, once the dosage increases, mind perceives a completely different environment, which reminds of a dream-like matrix. Literally, imagination becomes visible and the rules of causality seem akin to the undisciplined and agile rules of the inner space. Therefore, one hardly can distinguish the inner from the outer, the rational from the fantastic.

Those transfigurations affect and the patterns of thought. The closer illustration to what actually happens would be that thought turns from analytic to integral. It is as if the spotlight of conscious attention becomes enlarged and thus a wider content of internal behavior becomes visible to the inner eye. With one shot, you catch hundred fishes. Miraculously, a thought-stratagem or sequence of contemplations upgrades to a geometrical-kind of conceptual representations, which are accessible for a rapid understanding. At that point, I have to say that it is not an easy business to transfer the content of a psychedelic experience. It is like struggling with an infinitude of vague assumptions. However, that should not be an obstacle to a serious enterprise of coming to grips with the phenomenon. The reason that I find psychedelic introspection so much more sophisticated than the observations of physical sciences is because of the extensive bizarreness that intrudes the theater of consciousness. The synergy of polygonic thinking and of the emerging plasticity of perception indicates that psychologists are bound to face a new subject of inquiry, and they are expected to make their best in order to give a satisfying account of those phenomena. Most likely, a good answer on these would be equivalent to a good answer on the mystery of consciousness.

The other thing that a psychedelic experience offers is the stunning metarepresentational power. By means of this facilitation, one apprehends that consciousness is a running stream and hence the phenomenal static nature of the ego is washed away from the augmented dynamic of the flow. From the cognitive and heterophenomenological perspective, this seems to be due to the chemical expansion of the awareness to the fluid and temporarily anomalous activity of the brain. In deduction of this, we can rather say that the psychedelic substances induce the expansion of consciousness toward the inner dimensions of mind and the full-fledged exposition of the processes that take place behind-the-stages of the conscious awareness. The plasticity of the mind performs like a virtuoso complex reflecting processes. The self-observational capacity increases to the millionth, meaning that one can inspect automatically micro-elaborations of the conscious content in the scale of a microsecond. In a sense, a binocular vision enhances the self-reflectivity and thus consciousness’ content becomes a prismatic kaleidoscope of chaotic events that do not really concern the normal attention. Somehow, this metarepresentational augmentation causes a lot of subconscious

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content to float on the light of consciousness. Intentional and motivational webs of information become manifest and, subsequently, the phenomenological causal roots of behavior are accessible to the expanded attention. Psychedelic explorers, like Aldus Huxley and Alan Watts, have asserted that the psychotropic agents, indeed, open up the gates to the subconscious and, perhaps, lead one even further to Jung’s non-personal collective unconscious, the repository of all human experience. The psychedelic experience induces the awareness of that unconscious level of mind and thus generates a kind of super-conscious awareness, which arises by the merging of conscious attention and unconscious content.

Even more exciting is the fact that the non-linearity of consciousness pertains in the most undeniable way the experimenter. Unanticipated happenings can baffle anyone who has applied himself to a heroic dose. There have been reports that indicate the abolition of the concept of time. For instance, one may perceive in advance something which is about to happen in the immediate future. A word from a fellow right before its articulation, or generally the vivid intuition of a forthcoming event. Not less astonishing is the climax of synchronicity between inner and outer events; an issue that Jung studied quite extensively. Moreover, statistically psychologists in the Harvard of the ‘60s have proved that telepathy is a very frequent phenomenon during the experience, and that is an argument that I would polish, regarding my own personal evidence.

The thing, though, that transcends every conceivable skepticism is the fact that after a high dose of a psychedelic substance one slips out of his body. No need to guess the reactions to this for someone who ignores the issue; yet this is what surely happens. The concept pass-out becomes literal as one expands outside the edges of his body in an orgasmic burst of ecstasis. Self-transcendence is not a metaphorical word of the advanced psychedelic experience. No, the shattering self-transcendence is a reality for shamans, sorcerers of the Amazon-basin and chasers of the adventure, and it has been for millennia. The reason that we neglect to comprise this concept in the agenda of mainstream psychology is because we do not have a token of such an experience in our modern lives. Yet, it is something that one can easily trigger just by the ingestion of hallucinogenic substances… shockingly true, indeed, if we deduce that such an evidential experience demolishes the so-called triumph of traditional rationalism in science.

This leads me to the following train of thought: Just because the weirdness of the psychedelic phenomenology is not plausible to the rationalistic structure of science should not guide scientists to skip the deep scrutiny of the experience but, in contrary, should force them and inspire them to seek for methods to retool their intellectual inventories so that they will attain a more flexible and advanced epistemology. They should ponder on how such supernatural experiences are possible if we maintain the view of mind as derivative of the brain processes. Would not be reasonable to scratch our heads and make the leap to decide to see a bit more seriously the speculations of the radical vitalism in the matter of consciousness? That would be the best venture for reaching the level that we will be able to explain these peculiarities. I believe that this will be the first step towards a sophisticated science of mind –an esoteric science that will launch us to a new dimension of investigation, where individuals will become Magellans, explorers of a new realm, in their own living-rooms; the frontiers of reality of a new epoch. Under such a setting, I cannot see but one thing, the brisk blooming of the science of consciousness.

True Hallucinations

The hallmark of the psychedelic experience is the total sensory distortion that, sometimes, in a spectacular way forces the subjects to ponder seriously over the nature of reality. Hallucinations are the chemical-induced changes that destabilize perception and thinking so much that the environment bends to all kind of alterations. It is true that with the increase of the dose, those perceptual deformations go out of one’s hand, leading to an awesome deconditioning of ordinary reality. The reports of hallucinations vary widely; there are times that the distortions can only be characterized as pseudo-hallucinations, in which the effects of the substance gives rise to a mere vivification of colors and vibrations of light; other times, people astonished refer to melting objects, fleeting lights, subterranean or high-pitched sounds coming out of the blue. Even more perplexing accounts have been reported by subjects who dared to apply themselves to the so-called heroic dose, in which the hallucinations gain literally a supernatural magnitude. Beyond any compunction, at that level

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is where one loses the marbles from his head. Spectacularly, matter dissolves as if it is a kind of liquid and there can be a pure light blazing all around. Super-complex patterns of an artful composition adorn the visual field, so beautifully that makes one wonder. The classical experience is to encounter an extra depth in space, something that was not perceivable before the substance began running in the brain. It is not proverbial to say that the essence of infinity becomes visible even to the smallest objects. Phobias may turn to reality and wishful thinking can obtain an objective dreamlike dynamic. Imagination intrudes reality and as they merge, words become a handicap for an utter explanation of the events. I confess that it is truly bewildering the fact that the intense hallucinations can turn from phantasms to concrete reality which bears clusters of meaning that requires psychoanalytic thinking in order to be deciphered.

A hallucination is not a mere noise on the sensory channels. Far from it. A hallucination for the introspectionist of the psychedelic experience is a real problem, in a sense that its phenomenal plausibility is hand and shoulders over any attempt to give an account on which an existential assessment is missing. The implications of the true hallucinations can dramatically modify our notions of reality and mind. I dare to say that the word distortion seems to be the wrong kind of attribution towards the emerging sensory fluidity during the hallucinogenic activity on the brain.

Individuals who do not have a personal experience of hallucinogens tend to think that the accounts of experimenters are usually boosted by wishful exaggerations or even that they are mere confabulations of semi-psychotic people. I recognize this as a healthy reaction from their side, since they have no evidence of the reality’s quirks. They fully ignore how much wider is the spectrum of potentialities both of their minds and the spatial fabric. I am not surprised on the fact that a majority of them tends to be conservative nee-sayers, narrow-focused scientists, materialistic philosophers, readers of outdated books in physics and cosmology, and mere average thinkers who prefer to follow the herd. Definitely, they have the mitigation that they were raised in a cultural environment where education suffers from severe blindsight against the transcendental and transpersonal realms, which simply have been elbowed as outmoded conceptions for reality and thus they bear no more relevance to the growth of the self (if there is anymore such a process in contemporary psychology). Nevertheless, those very realms, the realms of the spiritual awakening, of dreams, and of hallucinations is there waiting to be explored. However, they are a consensus among the aficionados of psychedelics, and generally, among the people who prefer to have a positive attitude against such abstract notions.

How do cognitive scientists see all this? If we judge from Dennett’s orientation, I think they do not see at all. They are pretty blind. Dennett’s book, Consciousness Explained dedicated a number of pages to the issue of hallucinations. In fact, he opened up his book by tackling those strange phenomena with the premise that they are nothing more than illusions, a kind of positive-feedback sensory noise, which ends up to a theatrical exhibition of the subconscious content. He denies seeing the existential aspect of this phenomenological problem, something that should not surprise us anymore, considering that this is the crowning verdict of his whole career. In other words, what he scarcely begins to admit loses its weight as he ignores to realize it due to his blindness against the meaningfulness of human experience. It seems that philosophers like Dennett unconsciously acknowledge the fact that psychedelics challenge the materialistic doctrines on the nature of mind and that is, perhaps, why he embarked his book upon the matter of hallucinations. I am afraid he has not accomplished much, though.

His cognitive and mechanistic account of perceptual alterations is based on a metaphor of a game. He introduced the psychoanalysis party game as the most proper model to identify the method by which dreams distort the conscious reality. Briefly, he designated the hallucination as the synergistic effect between the elaboration of the partial idleness of the perceptual system and the deep-stored concerns of the hallucinator. To put it in another way, the interaction between the lapsing brain (synaptic enhancement) from its routines and the “sticky” meaningful content (wishes, expectations, intentions, fears) produce ever-growing in complexity hallucinations. Unluckily for him, he did not hesitate to regard that explication in a wider framework of causalities. By basing his assumptions on the factors that function from the ground of chance and randomness, he deduced that a hallucination is just a simple derailed process. Here is where he reminds me of his predecessors, the first inspirers of shortsighted rationalism. Darwin chose a similar explanation for the evolutionary track of life.

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He asserted that an important part of the foundations of the life’s emergence is mere chance; just a lucky fluke. He deduced that chance is the architect of the rich biospheric complexity. A complexity so perfect and admirable that inevitably forces one to revision the notion of chance. We scarcely can compromise with such an epistemological policy, because by following our nose, we find ourselves struggling with new superlative concepts, which begin to arise in the natural sciences. A quick look on chaos theory would convince us that randomness is that by which the actual becomes possible. Revolutionary ideas from that field inspire us to think that there is a peculiar determination hiding behind the fortuitous events that happen to structure the universe at all scales. It is not a hyperbole to state that a somewhat blueprint seems to attract processes –while from our point of view they just heuristically scan for ideal pathways. Chaotists, today, support that there are attractors who shape the world by the medium of randomness. We will come back to this astonishing view at the end of this part, where consciousness will be presented in a way as never before.

The reason I included the above on the issue of the hallucinogenic processes is because I find it as a derivative of a general way of thinking. Darwinian notions of randomness in evolution begin to fade away –if respectable Dennett cared at all to encompass in his study such newcomers he would, inevitably, suspect that his interpretation of hallucinations is not demystifying them at all! Just as the error is the architect of evolution, the derailment of cognitive processes in the brain can be the novelist of a valuable spiritual meaning, which has much to tell about the nature of consciousness. By inspecting the reality’s shifts and the meaning that they cling to, through the process of hallucinating, I believe we knock the door of a new stage in psychological assessment. Ambitious endeavors over that direction can only move us forward to bump up the scientific trade of ideas on the subject.

Personal experience and reaffirmation from worldwide resources on accounts of the psychedelic experience forcibly convince me that full-blown hallucinations have a bizarre reality of their own –they appear to be indicators of subconscious meaning. Numerous individuals have expressed their confoundness on the fact that during the experience there seems to be a superior agent organizing the perceptible content. There is a dissension at this point, which is referent to the dispute between Jungian and Freudian psychologists. The formers believe that indeed a superior agency manipulates our cognitive experience either way, intoxicated or not. The reason that we are sightless on this is because we are mainly preoccupied with external conditions and, thus, a bias eliminates such a realization. Jung has called this agent, the psychoid: an autonomous driving force which dwells in the depths of the human psyche. On the other hand, Freudians and their shortcomings draw their boundaries to the sexual sphere and they deny making a step toward spiritualistic concepts; therefore, their explanations of hallucinations would not be very different from the cognitive version. Conversely, psychedelics are famously known as the celebrating verifiers of the Jungian psychology

I express my confidence that something profound happens on those states of mind. Terence McKenna (1992) chose to resurrect the concept of Logos from the Hellenistic philosophy, in order to make ends meet with the phenomenon. Heraclitus has presented the Logos as a higher force of intellectual vigor, which dresses with meaning all representations. The Logos is the speech of God, which emancipates consciousness from darkness. In respect to that, it is a fascinating speculation to think of the human mind as a true pipeline to the Divine realm of Gnosis. Psilocybin mushrooms in the range of five dried grams can very reliably and repeatedly elicit this set of occurrences. During the experience, there always a certainty hanging for a kind of ultra-intelligence surrounding one’s being, with which he can interact. Psilocybin mushrooms and other similar tryptamines are famous in the millennia for their capacity to manifest in one’s cognition the aliveness of the surroundings. They introduce one to an animate universe; a universe that is not just alive but also minded! I do not know how much painlessly this can be undertaken by the scrutiny of science, but it is the honest confession of steadfast scientists and philosophers, except from average people. Aldus Huxley, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Gordon Wasson, William Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, and many others have demanded a better explanation of the psychedelic phenomenology that will be equivalent with the insightfully spiritual events that take place on those states of mind. Next to those startling reports, psychologists are fiddling while Rome burns!

In Praise of Psychedelic Introspectionism

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People who cultivate an interest on psychedelics and endorse on their itchy curiosity to explore the experience, always inescapably reach the need to translate the eerie content to philosophical contemplation. It is simply impossible to come out of this as impassive. The typical reaction is to begin a process of a radical revisioning on major issues concerning the selfhood. A large part of uncharted consciousness that becomes exposed by the light of self-observation provokes the initiation of the long process of a drastic inner exploration. As a result of this, scientific dictums that deny the self, as a reality and reject spiritual side of the coin become nothing more than an exhibition of the contemporary stifle vision of human and life. From the spectacle of the psychedelic experience, the purposelessness that science dictates with such an assurance seems as a maddening sign, fully expressive of our age’s morally sterile condition. The fact is that every Marxist, fundamentalist Christian, nuclear physicist, physiologist, would all find themselves deeply questioning their own beliefs, postpsychedelic. The inevitable aftermath of the experience is the standard reaction that leads to monumental changes in the conceptual landscape of every conceivable individual. The good news is that such an existential shock, as the psychedelic introspection, leads the majority of people to positive realizations, which help to revert the falling trajectory of our culture to the desirable uplifting for the fulfillment of an ideal civilization. Moreover, a better vision of humanness emerges, due to several potentialities that come out from the use of such substances –potentialities that reestablish in one’s mind the notion of spiritual awareness and indicates that God is not just an idea but a whole continent in the human mind.

In our culture, we have no experiential token of the hidden aspect of consciousness. We have been customized to reject as improbable all kinds of philology devoted to numinous issues. Science, the leading social conductor, preaches that logical positivism is the only way to attain the ideal interpretation of nature’s mysteries. However, what is clear from several observations is that individuals exhibit a finite set of transcultural behavior patterns while they are in a drug-induced or meditative-induced altered state of experience. Such kind of evidence leads to support Jung’s concept of a “collective unconscious” dimension of the human mind and, furthermore, provides the theoretical basis from which these various states might be more adequately comprehended. I find extremely unfortunate any endeavor to do so by purely positivistic and materialistic methods. Neurotransmitter drugs, Einsteinian relativity, the DNA code are so alien to Judeo-Christian-Marxist conceptions of the human nature that they have been repressed. We are familiar with the tendency to place under taboo facts, which disturb orthodox dogmas. Such is the case and with abstract notions against the rationalistic scrutiny. The latter simply is incapable to admit any glimpse of truth from the opposed side.

In dealing with the misconstrue of the Western civilization against psychedelic agents, one realizes that there is a wide open door waiting, which leads to a room full of new potentialities that can facilitate our present state, but unfortunately few dare to step inside. Perhaps it is the insecurity of the modern individual to face his major existential questions; perhaps it is all about misinformation, meaning that people misinterpret the role that psychedelics can play in a society in their wise use. Nonetheless, it might be that we are so in love with the trip of searching the answer that with the announcement that this answer can at last be found much faster than one expects, we go faint. In spite the fact that transpersonal phenomena are frequently reported and are of obvious relevance to many crucial areas of human life (Grof, 1975), little has been done to make sense or to integrate these experiences to the theory and practice of the human sciences. The message of paramount importance that researchers as Leary have extracted from their own experimentation is that consciousness is far deeper than previously thought, and that it is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in to the neurological processes and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in our body. As the voyage inward begins, more and more energy becomes focused on the realms of experience totally alien to the superficial ego-crust. If we do not recognize that today, the chances to remain in the future fixed in that position is close to zero. The human curiosity, which nowadays has almost conquered all the material manifestations, is bound to become increasingly stimulated by the unknown of the human mind.

CONSCIOUSNESS REVALUATED

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Unfolding the Suppressed Potentialities of Consciousness

At this point, I think it is essential to present an extract from Steven Pinker’s book How the Mind Works (1999), in order to depict the outrageous attitude of cognitive science against the potentialities of human consciousness. Sadly, this domain of science, which is regarded as the future triumphant of the mental mystery, presents a claustrophobically narrow illustration of mind, so much that one begins to feel a mere automaton destined to meet nothing more than the apparent and the calculatedly expected. Steven Pinker, confident for the superiority of his thesis says:

We are organisms, not angels, and our minds are organs, not pipelines to the truth. Our minds evolved by

natural selection to solve problems that were life-and-death matters to our ancestors, not to commune with correctness or answer any question we are capable of asking (…) we cannot see in ultraviolet light. We cannot mentally rotate a four-dimensional object. And perhaps we cannot solve conundrums like free will and sentience.

I understand well that it is not the time or the paper in which I would challenge those assumptions at great length, considering that the scientific knowledge of altered states in consciousness is really infantile. You simply risk your academic solemnity by rushing to jump on postulations you fished in the advanced level of the psychedelic introspection. You find yourself in the same position in which Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and others strived to ascertain their own radical convictions. No doubt that in the near future we will witness such audacious endeavors but today we should focus inclusively on the theoretical method by which we will counter on such eliminativist theses, like the above. How does Pinker see the human mind? As a mere organ that have been shaped reasonlessly by the evolutionary forces. An object of no particular potentiality for spiritual performances. By experience, I am forced to go up against his argument, word by word. He says we are organisms and not angels. I would veer the case by asserting that inside the ape body of the humankind must be a somewhat angel. The linguistic activity, the fascinating imagination, the visionary planning, and the foresight of the future, the expectations, and the hopes, the coziness of religious emotions and the psychological miracles that come out from them seem to be an attribute of an angel. I do not find a reason to discard the angel within the animal by the poor and irrelevant evidence of physicalistic probing. Another thing that causes disbelief on the not so nurturing thesis of Pinker is his statement that mind is not a pipeline to truth. How bad for him not to acknowledge this! People who meditate and practice spiritual disciplines would laugh at his face, concerning that this is a very familiar reality to them. The most significant potentiality of consciousness is the capacity to receive knowledge from the deep channels of the subconscious. Any descent existential-phenomenologist or depth psychologist knows that Gnosticism was an approach build over the continuous involvement with a flowing knowledge that comes out of the blue. And a more precise attack would be on the fact that Pinker thinks that his position is supported by the evolutionary theory. He thinks that the fact we now know that we have been shaped by natural selection closes all windows to metaphysical thinking. Well, consciousness might have evolved by life-and-death matters, but it has not done this for mere reasonless survival. No matter how far-fetched to his ears it would sound, consciousness have evolved to reach something yet unknown; consciousness has grown in capacity to deal with moral correctness and solve the puzzle of existence by only placing questions to the self to be answered by the self. Free will and sentience are notions yet unexplained but how timid is the judgment to reject all possibilities of reaching one day their full understanding!

Scientists like him are deliberate victims of a general truth. Logic is only one product of the total functioning of the mind and therefore it is no wonder that we cannot arrive at a logical definition of consciousness or awareness by standing all the explanatory power on it. There is a long time now we acknowledge that the part cannot define the whole. Most of us know how to do arithmetic, speak English, write a check, drive an automobile, and most of us know about things, like behaving socially, thinking analytically, and so on. Not many of us, though, were trained early in childhood to enter an altered state of consciousness, where we can be, for example, possessed by a friendly spirit that will teach us songs and dances, as it is done

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by some cultures. Nor were most of us trained to gain control over our dreams and acquire spirit guides that will teach us useful things, as the Senoi of Malaysia and the Amazonian shamans are. Each of us is simultaneously the beneficiary of his cultural heritage, the victim and the slave of his cultural narrowness. Like almost all people in all cultures at all times, we think our local culture is the best and other peoples are uncivilized or savages.

We better be cautious about labeling other extraordinary states as “pathological” and other cultures as “primitive”. The Australian aborigines, for example, are almost universally considered one of the world’s most primitive cultures because of their nomadic life and their paucity of material possessions. Yet Pearce argues that, from another point of view, these people are among the most sophisticated in the world, for they have organized their entire culture around achieving a certain altered state, which they refer to as the experience of Dream Time. Our bias toward solely material concepts, however, makes us unable to see this.

The conclusion is that psychology should turn its interest on the necessity to give sophisticated explanations on such unnoticed facets of the consciousness-reality. The human capacity surpasses all present speculations. The human capacity is a sequence of surprises waiting to be explored. The least that modern scientists can do is to tag on with a more holistic orientation in which multicultural views of consciousness will be focused. The key to the solution is to keep an open eye to subjective, to global, and to irrational experience.

It is time for change.

The Religious Experience

The thing that gives the psychedelic experience all the importance in the world is because it is seen as the means by which people can augment their religiosity by attaining a more direct contact with the realms we know traditionally as spiritual. The word contact seems to be a key-word of the novelty that the human mind often encounters in those states. Beyond doubt, there is a kind of an intelligent agency interfering subtly with individuals who reach the experience’s overwhelming level. It makes you wonder, how would rationalism explain this? Skeptic individuals might use as an opposing argument that there is no evidence to support such a belief. However, the answer would be that apart the strange certainty that one feels at such moments, there are some times that things can become a lot more wondrously, if we recognize the fact that there are accounts which talk about the hair-raising trespassing of the fantastic towards reality. An often account is that of peculiar lights of no physical evidence on the sky, or rapid changes of weather conditions by the influence of one’s beliefs. Strange synchronistic events are a routine for the psychedelic experience. Depth psychology has attempted to deal with them by realizing synchronicity as alternative physics. We are still awkward, though, on how we will respond to that yet dark matter. C.G. Jung has dedicated many journals and a famous book on the issue of synchronous (coincidental) events between the inner and the outer world. If, though, he had an acquaintance with the psychedelic experience, most likely, he would have reached a more satisfactorily comprehension. That is because psychedelics repeatedly cause an undeniable dialogue between one’s thought and the external events.

That principle –the exploitation of synchronous events, elicits the religious experience, which is frequently deployed during the action of mind-manifesting substances. The obstacle on transferring and popularizing the experience is the fact that we cannot express precisely the content of those eerie quirks that take place on that state of mind. If the mere psychedelic experience is a slippery floor, then the religious revelation is an untrodden sea. Albeit speculation, expression, and immediate mystical experience are essentially interdependent and mysticism requires the vehicle of language to unfold, yet the experience never exhausts itself in finished language. No matter how much one tries to illustrate the events that marvel one’s mind, he is bound to meet insuperable obstacles. Perhaps, science will never manage to chart those areas, those frontiers of both mind and reality. The least to say, there seems to be some kind of a shocking surprise.

The expression “mystical experience” is often used by religious people, or those who practice meditation. These experiences, which are undoubtedly real enough for the person who experiences them, indeed, are said to be hard to convey in words. Mystics frequently speak of an overwhelming sense of being at one with the universe or with God, of glimpsing a

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holistic vision of reality, or of being in the presence of a powerful and loving influence. Most important mystics claim that they can grasp ultimate reality in a single experience, in contrast to the long and tortuous deductive sequence of the logical-scientific method of inquiry. Even Einstein spoke of a “cosmic religious feeling” that inspired his reflections on the order and harmony of nature. Indeed, regular mystical insights, sometimes induced chemically, can be a useful guide in the formulation of scientific theories. Those experiences are direct and revelatory. Russell Stannard writes of the impression of facing an overpowering force of some kind, “of a nature to command respect and awe… there is a sense of urgency about it; the power is volcanic, pent up, ready to be unleashed”. Others have perceived this force as the source of meaning and another portion of people who experienced it prefer to remain speechless, recognizing that any attempt to codify it words is vain.

Prehistoric evidence suggests that some of the experiences people have had in altered states of consciousness, generally called mystical experiences, have formed the underpinnings of all great religious systems and of the stable societies and consensus realities that were formed from them. Terence McKenna is forced by evidence to claim that in the world of prehistory, all religion was experiential, and it was based on the pursuit of ecstasy through plants. The psychedelic experience was the first light at the beginning of history. It is that which pushed the animal mind towards the human mind. Already, researchers like Albert Hoffman have discovered the noetic archeology of Eleusis, a place where people had rituals with ecstatic potions for centuries. This is like a discovery of a skeleton on a closet. This is the skeleton in the closet of the human origins and of the origin of religion. If we come up in terms with this, we can begin to understand the shape of the human future and the destiny of the human consciousness. Gordon Wasson’s (1967) idea is that religion actually originated when an omnivorous protohuman encountered alkaloids in the environment. Mircea Eliade, the most brilliant expositor of the anthropology of shamanism, agreed with him and regarded that the absence of ecstatic drugs by a culture is probably a token of a decadent phase.

The religious experience that is triggered by the responsible use of psychedelic agents introduces to consciousness a world of miracles. One comes to admit that, as Hoyle believed, there is an organization in the cosmos controlled by a superintelligence that guides its evolution through quantum processes. Hoyle’s and de Chardin’s teleological God, who directs the world toward a final state in the infinite future, becomes a celebrative realism.

If we do not turn our backs to this eventful and exceedingly meaningful reality, which is regularly experienced by some background people, should we adopt the approach of the pragmatic atheist who is content to take the universe as given, and get on with the superficial cataloguing of its properties? And what about consciousness? How ridiculous are deniers psychologists against those very existent theo-realities, as Maslow designated them? We have but one choice, if we really want to probe substantially consciousness; that is to keep an open mind about the value of such experiences. Maybe they provide the only route beyond the limits to which science and philosophy can take us, the only possible path to an ultimate explanation of nature’s most mind-boggling mysteries.

Logically Proving the Illogical

Apparently, this paper disputes the generic methods that have been traditionally supported as the compass of the scientific research. On the issue of consciousness, scientists seem certain that a right explanation can only come through the use of logic, in the way that we have learned to use it in the inquiry of other subjects. Thus, they expect that, eventually, they will have in their hands a full-fledged explanation of consciousness, which will be akin to the models we have from other fields. That expectation leads them to the insistence of denying experiential accounts of consciousness that challenge the “infallible” system of logic. Rationalists react cynically against individuals who describe their outlandish experiences. The religious revelation is nothing more than a charade; the visionary experience induced by psychedelics is a sheer ludicrousness. The various bizarre phenomena that defy an explanation are seen as mere misinterpretations of purely normal events. Their policy is to regard them as projections of wishful thinking by individuals who report them. Therefore, there is a big debate between “rational” and “irrational” people. This debate is here for ages, as the certainty of the latter struggles to come in terms with the consensus of logic. It is very unsettling the fact that those challenging experiences are no less real than the undefeatable status of rationalism, which is the spinal cord of scientific investigation.

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However, when we are referring to consciousness and selfhood the familiar logic becomes deeply troubled. I think that now is the time to show that even mathematics can give us the permission to believe that reality functions in a noticeably different gear on the sphere of mind. I mean that logic becomes altered when it moves from reference to self-reference. The humdrum nature of normal rationalism becomes wiped out by the paradox of referring to one’s self. In another way, the reference to one’s self entails to the dissolution of expected commonsensical deductions. Therefore, consciousness, as a number one token of a self-referent phenomenon, comes under that class of mathematical formulation, and that means that consciousness is pertained by another kind of causality, phenomenally paradox in comparison with the plain logic of reference.

Hofstadter speculates that the critical level of complexity appears to occur when the system becomes capable of making statements concerning itself, or, in other words, capable of self-reference. Self-reference speaks directly to the issue of human consciousness. When humans explore the external world, the world of objects, events, and their interrelationships, the system of logic and scientific reasoning being used is not self-referent. However, the mathematician Godel has shown us through his famous equations that when we attempt to explore the nature of our own thought processes and consciousness (that is, the nature of ourselves), we act in a self-referent manner. At this point, Godel’s theorem takes on metaphorical relevance. It suggests that when the human individual attempts to understand himself, truth must have a definition apart from logical provability.

Where does this awareness of the nature of self-reference lead us? It here suggest us that it lead us to a classic borderline between the rational, thinking, conceptual mind, the realm of the Jungian masculine, the phenomenal divider, the subject-object dichotomizer, and the intuitive, feeling, wisdom-seeking higher faculty, the realm of the Jungian feminine, the noumenal congealer, the dissolver of all apparent difference (Tart, 1988).

Kurt Godel proved a sweeping theorem that provided an irrefutable demonstration that something in mathematics is actually impossible, even in principle. The fact that there exist undecidable propositions (Davies, 1999) came as a great shock, because it seemed to undermine the entire logical foundations of the science. Indeed, the great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell demonstrated that the existence of such paradoxes strikes at the very heart of logic, and undermines any attempt to construct mathematics rigorously on a logical foundation. Godel’s theorem of self-reference warns us that there will always be truth that lies beyond, that cannot be reached by familiar rationalistic methods. We do not have to contemplate much to realize that such is the nature of consciousness.

If we do not conceive the implications of Godel’s theorem fleetingly, we are bound to start a revision of the way we understand mind. Roger Penrose, a famous physicist, has decided to attack the computational theory of mind with such a verdict. He followed a very different track in the issues of logic and physics, much akin to the path that we follow in this paper. As a pioneer, he avoided to fall in the trap to conceive the human mind as a mere computer program. He found it an impasse and a cliché. With the weapon of Godel’s theorem, he asserted that not all aspects of consciousness could be explained as logical computation. He regarded the operation of neurons as too narrow to support the whole phenomenon. On such a premise, the cognitive scientist and victim of the computer age, Steven Pinker, has reacted saying that the security of the computational theory fits so well to our understanding of the world that in trying to overthrow it, thinkers like Penrose have to reject most of contemporary neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and physics. My own reaction on this fulmination is that Penrose is much closer to the truth than Pinker. Penrose argues that mind has strange properties derived from the quantum level and that seems to be much more comforting to the events users of hallucinogens and spiritual practitioners encounter. Pinker attacks Penroses’ thesis by asserting that he incites us to abandon the contemporary nexus of data in science; but did he questioned himself that it is not a matter of abandonment but rather of further progress? Scientific disciplines have always been in the position to change radically their mentality; why not now?

According to the parameters gathered already, we should be convinced that a plain computational theory of mind is not enough. Whoever thinks the opposite is walking towards a diametrically opposed direction from where the answer lies. Our approach to consciousness is successful only when we tailor the computational theory with the unorthodox facets of late discovered innovations in logic and physics, in association, of course, with the introspective accounts, no matter how heretical at first seem.

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The stage is set now for more daring propositions in the study of consciousness. It is time to face the answer and announce the new vision of humanity. It is not a utopianism to believe that a satisfactorily solution in the problem of consciousness will most likely lead to the inspiration of a new ecology of inner and outer space. There are some unorthodox ideas stalking to fascinate us once and for all –ideas that have been expressed in the archaic ages but later our hyperbolic love to the shallow waters of rationalism, due to intellectual insecurity made them seem foolish. There are old ideas, which in their revivification will be flammable to the drybrush and deadwood of our age’s decadent intellects. Before I present my speculative approach of the cosmological evolution, which is decidedly pertinent with the nature of consciousness, I have to quote some words, which seem to mirror both the Platonic doctrine of disembodied eternal Forms and the Jungian notion of archetypes –ideas that are prerequisite of the following hypothesis. Godel (1944) himself once said:

“Concepts and classes may be conceived as real objects (forms, archetypes)… existing independently of our definitions and constructions. It seems to me that the assumption of such objects is quite legitimate… and there is much reason to believe in their existence.”

And Heraclitus one shiny day had had postulated:“… Cosmos seems to develop by means of a reverse motion…”

Assemblance and Backward Causality

Currently, we have in our hands a number of theories that allow us to believe that in the horizon some shifts will bring our conceptual understanding of the universe upside-down. Novel theories inspire us to think very different from yesterday. They give us the impetus to be daring to request the truth in a somewhat grotesque way. The fact that we have begun acknowledging the mechanics of non-linear self-organizing systems and that we glimpsed the impressive notion of emergent properties have pushed us to a new way of thinking, widely different from the traditional methods of deduction. It is true that we have not been used to contemplate on non-linear, parallel processing systems. All we could do approximately fifty years ago was to study systems that worked in a linear fashion. In addition, we were not exactly experts on understanding substantially the dynamic systems and the turbulent phenomena, which so often we meet in our universe. Actually, the universe, life, and the human mind almost in their entirety come under this class of phenomena. That is because they are fluid, ever changing, dynamic, and unstable.

Since a lot of theory and practice have been accumulated in the study of emergent properties and the dynamic systems, suddenly many unanswered questions reemerged to the agenda of psychology. What we realize is that chaos theory and emergentism can help in an unanticipated way the problems that confound this discipline on the issue of mind and consciousness. Beginning from emergentism, I would say that this theory promises a forthcoming breakthrough in our conceptions of evolution and life, and the way it works. In a nutshell, emergentism claims that local processes can manifest a higher-order phenomenon of superorganic properties, meaning, the properties that emerge over the local processes are distinct in nature and in purpose by those that support it. As we saw in the previous part more extensively, emergence appears to be a widely manifested phenomenon. We can observe it to an ant-colony, which becomes a kind of superorganism composed by the interaction of ants; we can observe it in the way a human personality emerges from the chemical and electrical interaction of mere neurons, the way a city and its distinct cast of features emerges from the interaction of its citizens, etc. What I suggest we should hold from that theory is the fact that an emergent phenomenon seems to be the point which pulls toward it physical processes. Crudely put, the superorganic properties, by which a new phenomenon emerges with its own behavior and its own distinct reality, seem to demand a kind of complexity and order from the underlying processes so that they assemble. Now I know, they way I have put it is too abstract to be accepted as a concrete presumption. However, here is where I speculate and I only sketch a possible orientation for conceiving the notion of emergence. Recalling the hypothesis of Godel, who conceived concepts and classes as real objects existing independent from our conceptions and definitions, I propose to look at the issue in a similar fashion.

In my point of view, I do not find it forbidden to perform such speculations. I believe that the abstract point of complexity, which triggers the concrete emergence of superorganic properties in a non-linear system is a kind of law, a kind of stance which exists always no matter if the processes will reach that demanding point or not. Many philosophers have

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engaged themselves to painstaking thinking about whether the universal laws, which shape and give orientation to the evolving cosmos, are independent and transcendent from the physical plane. Paul Davies (1992) in his fascinating book The Mind of God has focused on that with an intense interest as if an answer on that would breed immense implications in the contemporary philosophy. Indeed, if a law enjoys a transcendental existence and if it is no less tangible than the physical phenomena that it mobilizes then we are revered to assemble with a new way of thinking, a palpable transcendental philosophy in which we decide in favor of Plato and Plotinus.

The reason that I was infused to coin that speculative approach as assemblantism was due my insight’s reaffirmation by reading some neuralgic data of chaos theory. My insight was that there is a transcendental reality of no physical evidence, which interferes closely with the evolving processes of the material world. I realized the rise of emergent properties as a point of partial assemblance between the two planes. In other words, I conceived the non-linear processes as a kind of “ritual” whose goal is to “invite” the approach of higher properties that are stored in a higher-order reality. When that is achieved, I begin to talk about an assemblance where the two levels initiate a direct interaction. Needless to try hard to guess the reaction of the reader. Most likely, he finds the speculation a bit unpractical and surrealistic. Nevertheless, here is the point where chaos theory will support my argument and will invite one to think more open and less culturally-restricted about consciousness.

Chaos theory has cancelled away the notion of randomness in many fields, especially biology. Famous pioneers, like Hubbard and D’Arcy, have claimed that chance serves only as a tool in the process of evolution. Empirical evidence forced them to believe that the results of any so-called “random” process in non-linear systems is deterministic and predictable. That is because they have been led to understand that behind those processes there is a fractal object of no physical evidence that shapes the flowing patterns and directs them. That object has been called attractor. An attractor cannot be found anywhere in any scale of the universe. It is invisible information that works as a cosmic blueprint for the turbulent state of matter. It is the actual map of the ideal pathway for any positive-feedback process. Chaos theorists today believe that the successful complexity of biological evolution is a result of this extradimensional mould. An example will make this notion more intelligible: When we go into a new room, our eyes dance around it in some order which we might as well take to be random, and we get a good idea of the room. The room is just what it is. The object exists regardless of what I happen to do. The attractor –the Mandelbrot set as chaotists call it- exists in the same way. It is there waiting to be explored and to be actualized by the heuristic scanning of self-organizing systems. It existed before we understood its mathematical essence and formulation, before Mandelbrot discovered it, even before (and that is the most important) evolution in earth began from the organic soup of the oceans. The attractors existed earlier than nature began organizing itself by means of simple physical laws, repeated with infinite patience. The astonishing conclusion is that behind the particular, visible shapes of matter must lie ghostly forms serving as invisible templates (Gleick, 1985).

If we wed emergentism with chaos theory and its bizarre fractal attractors, then the option of realizing the emergence of superorganic properties as a point of assemblance is widely open. The backward causality becomes an important term for any ambitious theorist. If the universe and life evolve by the shaping intervention of an attractor then we must welcome the notion with an open heart. How much this twist would change the way we conceive consciousness? I believe it would blow a profound change with spectacular results. First, a significant implication would be that higher consciousness is a universal phenomenon stored somewhere in the folded up aspects of space. A brain evolutionary advances its organization and its convoluted complexity to assemble with that sphere. Obviously, this speculation guides as to apprehend the universe as multidimensional and hierarchical. If the process of the sentient matter of the human brain was attracted by the plane of consciousness then there must be more consciousness to be acquired in the progress of the future. In that manner of thinking, it is very tempting to believe that the crust of matter, the three-dimensional surface of the cosmos, is structured around a center of pure consciousness, of pure mental energy, and insatiated flux. The emergent structuring seems to be the teleological function for the conquest of higher-realities.

Scientists who take a cynic position against such speculations should revision their attitude. Beyond doubt, they appear negative due to their ignorance on the rapid flow of new information that upgrades the field of physics. Already physicists talk about a hierarchy of

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dimensions, about wormholes in space, about time-travel. The future is here and the ones who cannot compromise with the breeze of this new epoch, the ones who cannot modify their heritage with innovations of this new horizon, are the ones who will not participate in the reformation of science and society. Major conceptual changes coming from all directions set a new vision for humanity. Cynicism and narrow-mindness are not fashionable anymore. The openness is the new trend and whoever negates that, means that has forgot his mind sometime back in the frenzy condition of the 20th century. The cock is singing for the awakening at a new dawn. We better all react against the idiocy of devaluating scientific dictums by putting forward our most promissory to excel ideas. The surprise is that, today, in such an enterprise we have more allies than ever.

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***THE NATURALISTIC APPROACH

3The

QuantumRevelation

“Whoever is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it” -Niels Bohr

THE VITALIZATION OF PHYSICS

From Newton to Bohr

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The purport to comprise in a descent research of consciousness the psychedelic experience one century ago would be a preposterous enterprise. The extraordinary states of mind are known for their anarchic and uncompromising nature toward the traditional mode of rationalism. A scientist who would express his interest on the subjective accounts of the reality’s meltdown would simply be seen as a romantic poet and not someone who thinks in the framework of the scientific morale. The acceptance of such experiences as true would automatically mean the demolishment of the reality’s firm stratum. Given that the philosophy of reality is hugely influenced by the concepts of physics, the Newtonian logic, which was so prominent more than a century ago, would be a low ceiling to such high speculations. Newton had presented us a universe much fordable to our expectations of reality, meaning that there were no big diversions between his formulation of physical reality and what we observe with naked eye. For him gravity was gravity and light was light, mass was a composition of particles and the forces were just dynamics caused by electricity, magnetism, microcosmic nuclear pressures. Nobody would regard Newton’s explanations as simplistic at that age, but in comparison with today when physics have penetrated to alien territories the name of Newton sounds a bit primitive. In the course of the last bountiful century, we have been slapped by many unexpected surprises, as several additions in our conception of reality have altered our vision of the universe in a wondrous way. Today the horizon gives the impression of a shaking destiny, which will bombshell even our most unbridled fantasies. The world of Newton tends to become the world of a poet.

The classic mechanics of physics present a world of predictability, plain determinism, and ignorance on the role of consciousness in physical reality. This immature and childish approach of physics held that the phenomenology of matter depicts its true essence. The conception was that matter is as rigid as it seems to our macroscopical realities. The atom was a particle as physical as an object of our scale. The electron was revolving around the nuclear in a similar fashion to the revolution of the planets around a star. Moreover, the status of an observer of any physical event was taken for granted, as the first physicists thought nothing of this. To my point of view, this was an indication of the climax of the total scientific promotion to deflate the self. Our role in the universe was secondary if not entirely feeble. The effect of extreme rationalism and conformism was the gradual negation of our role in the universe as active agents, who would have the potency to interact with it by mere observation. Nevertheless, this was the condition that characterized the belief systems of the archaic people whose attitude eventually was doomed due to the facile intelligibility of rationalism. This twist of fate overshadowed the sense of interactivity we had with the universe and brought the blindness of classic physics on covering that crucial aspect of reality.

A storm of conceptual changes in physics the previous century, though, changed radically the parameters of reality. It is not an amplification to say that the whole science of physics had to be retooled in front of a new landscape that nobody would dream to be discovered by guardians of positivistic thinking. The physicists’ aspirations in the beginning of the 20 th

century were very different to what they were destined to meet. Empirical evidence, through repetitive experimentation, showed that our formal scientific beliefs on the nature of matter and reality were a silly estimation. From the Einstein’s equations and onwards, Newton passed to the museum as just the initiator of a juvenile theory of physics. The day that quantum physics emerged in some of the brightest minds of this epoch was the day that we departed towards a new domain of unfamiliar, yet familiar, theoretics. Since then, the equations appear to be alive, vital, vivid, essential, as if God breathes fire on them.

Quantum physics changed our conception of the microscopic reality dramatically. First, it introduced us to a new kind of motion of the electrons around the atomic nuclear. Experiments showed that the rules of the macroscopic reality do not apply in microcosmos. Logical expectations found a closed door –a new modality was emerging in the observations, which represented an alien logic. The thing that astonished physicists was the realization that the electrons do not revolve in a linear fashion around the nuclear but they rather make leaps between different tracks. At one moment they are in the tracking periphery A, the next moment they are in the periphery B. Electrons proved to be blinking spots that miraculously could jump from one energetic field to the other. That was deeply troubling to even the most pioneering ones who witnessed the breakdown of ordinary logic and the disproval of classical atomic physics. Of course, that has some crucial implications in the macroscopic level, regardless of some natural philosophers that want to annihilate such a supposition.

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The other thing that caused an earthquake in the domain of physics was the empirical realization that an atom is both a particle and a wave. Needless to say that such a novel estimation led many solemn thinkers to the edges of insanity. It was a paradox no one dreamed to encounter in physics. On that point, through quantum mechanics the program of rationally understanding nature has at last reached been pushed so far that we have reached the irrational core of nature herself. The postulation that a particle becomes a fluctuated wave when it is not observed initiated a long process of revision in the realms of philosophy and epistemology. It was the proof that our mental states have an intimate interference with matter, something that opposed to the Newtonian physics where the observer is simply inexistent. Repetitive experiments confirmed that we are participants in the process of observation and hence we progressively focused on the role of consciousness in the physical reality. In addition to this, Einstein’s formulas had as their topmost sermon the devaluation of matter. In his life, he accomplished to demonstrate mathematically that the phenomenal rigidity of matter is a delusion of our perceptive systems. Nowadays, it is a consensus to the lovers of physics that the physical reality is nothing but pitches of energy frequencies. Besides, the last decade a new forceful theory reinforced this argument. The hypothesis of the superstrings seems to be the decisive end of Newtonian matter. Physicists appear to be guided by evidence on a purely energetic vision of matter. In the 90s, many books have triumphantly proclaimed that the day of the unified theory is close, as the tiniest particle has been, at last, deduced. The emerging conclusion is that all matter, atoms, photons, quarks, gluons, tachyons, positrons are shaped by a variety of vibrations of super-small strings that swim in the unimaginably undersized Planck’s length. So here we are, matter is music.

However, the greatest shock came by the dual nature of particle/wave. As already mentioned, matter appeared to be mystically schizoid. Philosophers fed by this incredible development, broke their heads to understand the implications of this. Is it possible that reality is in a state of uncertain flux if unseen? Is there any reality in the absence of an observer, after all? The puzzling wave-particle contradiction was solved in a very surprising and unexpected way, a way that called into question the very foundation of the mechanistic, Newtonian world-view –nothing less than the reality of matter itself. At the subatomic level: matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather show “tendencies to occur”. In quantum theory, these tendencies are expressed with probabilities –mathematical quantities which take the form of waves. This is the way in which matter manifests itself as both particle and wave at the same time. These same tendencies are not actual three-dimensional waves (like sound or water) but are rather “probability waves” –abstract mathematical quantities which are related to the probabilities of finding the particles of particular points in space at particular times. All the laws in atomic physics are expressed in terms of these probabilities.

The Interpretation of Copenhagen illustrated that whilst in classic physics we imagine a system of interacting particles to function with the accuracy of a clock, regardless if we are observing or not, in quantum physics the observer has an effect on the system in such a grade that we can not conceive that this system has an independent existence. By choosing to measure accurately the position of a particle, we force it to develop an even greater uncertainly on its surge. On the other hand, if we choose an experiment for measuring its waving properties we efface the particle-characteristics. There is no experiment that can manifest simultaneously both the wave and particle mode. Subsequently, we have to admit, just like physicists did, that the performance of observation of an event changes it and that we, the observers, are literally part of the experiment –there is nothing functioning independent of its conscious observations. Nothing that is not captivated by an observing eye is happening in a concrete way! The artist by sculpturing the marble reveals according to his foresight a hidden form. Could this be the way by which our beliefs shape reality? The philosopher and physicist Eddington said in the mid ‘30s, after the discovery of the neutrino: “I do not believe in the neutrino. But I dare to say that experimenters are enough intelligent to create one.” In contemplation of this, one would realize that the world is not really made from particles but from concepts and language.

Apparently, the change is so immense with quantum physics that one has to reinvent the world that he lives by hastening to recognize mind and its properties as the leading edge of reality. If it is generally accepted that consciousness influences the material processes in the microcosmos, I do not find a reason why not to apprehend the macroscopic reality as such. No matter how outrageous it sounds to traditional rationalism, I believe that we have just found

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the first glimpses of gold. Our active role in the universe at last becomes a subject of inquiry in science. By means of quantum physics, soulism takes its revenge. Experiments that respect the importance of mind, like the Schrodiger’s Cat, should be the hallmark of such a destination and should inspire with awe all ambitious psychologists who want to give back the importance of selfhood in the study of their field.

Although, natural scientific disciplines have been traditionally considered as irrelevant to the investigation of consciousness and human experience, after the surfacing of revolutionary ideas in physics, we have found that the constructs discussed in diverse fields bear a remarkable semblance to the very issues that are central to the psychological study of consciousness. Quantum theory and relativity, dissipative structure in chemistry, morphogenetic fields in biology, Godel’s theory in mathematics, all have striking implications for understanding both the structure of consciousness and the process of self-realization. How can you exclude psychology from the celebration of this new knowledge, when nowadays in the natural science it is generally accepted that physics give rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; information gives rise to physics? (Davies,1992) This rather cryptic statement is rooted in the ideas of quantum physics, where the observer and the observed world are closely interwoven. It is only through acts of observation that the physical reality of the world becomes actualized; yet, this same physical world generates the observers that are responsible for concretizing its existence. The observer thus became involved in establishing physical reality and the scientist lost the role of the spectator and became an active participant (Davies, 1992). With the further development of quantum mechanics the word “I” took a very important connotation, since the role of the observer became an even more central part of physical theory, an essential component for defining an event. Literally, person and world proved to co-constitute one another, they actually make each other up.

To sum up, until now, mainstream psychology has patterned itself after the apparent successful method and the underlying philosophy of the natural sciences. Specifically, it has undertaken the experimental method basing it on the foundation called empiricism. The method and base of thinking, in particular, have come from classical physics we learned so well in our school days. Newtonian physics have provided us nothing less than a “way to think”, an implicitly enculturated view of reality, a prereflective assumption of what the universe really is. Yet, within the field of psychology, there has always been a stream of discontent with this natural scientific grounding. The humanistic, growth psychologists, the existential phenomenologists, and, most recently, the transpersonal psychologists are a few of many who have cried out something akin to: “Stop! There is more in being a human!” A different ground is needed, a different look at the nature of what is, what was, and what could be. It is from this cry that the application of existentialism and Eastern philosophies and doctrines has, for example, provided new insights and understanding to the multifaceted nature of human behavior, human experience, and the world situations that a person find himself thrown into.

The cry however continues and given the humanistic and ecological crisis, it is expected to culminate in the near future. The ground that natural scientific psychology stands (i.e. the Newtonian worldview) has been discarded and left behind by the physicists themselves as too narrow and too limited in its conceptual scope (Heisenberg, 1960).

What has come out of this? What has come is the beginning of a whole new way of examining some very old but still equally crucial questions: “What is the true nature of consciousness?” “What is the place of the human being in the known universe?” “What role does mystical and religious experience play in human evolution?” and perhaps most importantly, “How much certain can we be for the validity of such experiences after the quantum revelation?”

An Epistemological Circle

Something monumental happens in epistemology the past hundred years. There is a clash between the traditional certainty of reductionism and the new conceptions that emerged in the field of physics. The fact is that not many up until now appear to give significance on this, but it is something that sooner or later they will be forced to do. Biologists at the beginning of the 20th century developed an increased interest on the nature’s hierarchy that materialism sponsored. Soon physics became the primary science of reality and reductionism the only

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method by which truth could be approached. Simultaneously, though, with this developing tendency of the biologists, physicists were moving away from the strictly mechanical models of the universe and they found that a holistic approach to physics, with the crucial contribution of mind, is a much more progressed view. Apparently, two opposing views were spreading ambitiously to conquer the title of the predominant methodology on the scientific mentality. During that time, there was no bridge to connect them, since biologists delayed to hear the ringing bells of the quantum implications. The physicists’ turn to holism and mentalism and the biologists’ decision to approach life in a reductionist way, was a reversal of roles that left psychologists in an ambivalent position.

The study of life in modern times has been relied on reductionism, an approach that is oriented in the smaller scales of reality for the validity of any explanation. Therefore, in the vocabulary of psychologists words like consciousness, perception, awareness, and thought were obsolete terms. The only reliable terms were words like synapse, lobotomy, proteins, etc. That led to the devaluation of mind per se and to the transference of the academic spotlight to a hard-core vision of the material dimension. The Newtonian physics became the leading science of reality and the science that studies the mind was left as the one which brings up the rear. If we combine psychological and biological reductionism we are led from mind to anatomy and physiology, to cell physiology, molecular chemistry, to atomic physics… which are laid on the bedrock of quantum mechanics; something that biologists and psychologists failed to notice then. They were largely unaware of the new mode of reality that was emerging in the conceptions of physicists; a reality much more fluid than the obsolete version that was still drawing the attention of other disciplines.

The most shocking postulation of quantum physics was the establishing of a new reality, which held the role of the observer in an experiment as a significant factor on the material processes and changes. The scientist from a spectator became an active participant and an important part of the experiment. Very fast the role of mind uplifted as a rocket. It emerged as necessary element in the structure of all physical theories (Morowitz, 1987). Heisenberg stressed that after the quantum revelation, the laws of nature no longer dealt with elementary particles, but with our knowledge of these particles –that is, with the contents of our minds. The philosophical thinking and speculations that arose from this startling shift in physics incited a revival of the mystical of view of the universe. The sterile version of materialism unexpectedly became an impasse to the natural sciences in front of a profoundly important return to esoteristic philosophy in the framework of natural philosophy. The Tao of Physics from Capra, Schrodinger’s sympathy with Eastern philosophical thought, Cassirer’s perennial philosophy, and others, was an indication of such a vitalization of epistemology.

Quantum physics showed us that a physical event and the content of the human mind are inseparable. The linkage forced many researchers to seriously consider consciousness as an integral part of the structure of physics. Such interpretations moved science toward an idealist view of life, in contrast to the realism that was still pertaining philosophy. The ultimate reality is consciousness and nothing can happen without its participation. This is a conclusion that rattles in everybody’s mind that has comprehended the magnitude of the new physics’ implications. The space opens for the emergence of many flexible mottos that were banished some centuries now due to materialistic compunctions. The epistemological circle from mind to mind is probably the weightiest change that has appeared the last 300 years. The human mind, including consciousness have been explained in terms of the central nervous system, which, in turn, can be reduced to the biological structure and function of that physiological system. Then, biological phenomena can be explained in terms of atomic physics, meaning, through the interaction of carbon atoms, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. However, the arrival of quantum theory has illustrated to us that beneath atomic processes, mind, as the primitive component and inspector, is the agent of physical change. Thus, we have gone around a striking epistemological circle –from mind, back to mind again (Morowitz, 1987).

Anyone who has paid attention to this is on the track to accept psychology as the primary science of reality and to understand physics as a subordinate of mind. In my understanding there is not even an epistemological loop; what we have is nothing but a solely element, whether the research is addressed to cells, molecules, or atoms. There is only one element and that is mind –matter is a misconception, maybe the most remarkable false impression of all the ages.

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THE RESPIRITUALIZATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

A Division: Sentience and Consciousness

Before we move any further and begin to manifest the nature of consciousness in its own right, we ought to make an important distinction. This distinction happens to be very practical for the establishment of the argument that will follow. At this point the reader must keep in mind that the paper is going to close the issue with a radical suggestion that reinforces all the content that have proceeded. It is not easy to accept the miracles and wonders of consciousness if you put your bets on the narrow mode of mind. I believe that it is clear up to now that the narrow mode of mind presents a different picture of consciousness than the one that is held millennia before science bloomed on a positivistic ground of thinking. In the opposed side, we have the large mode of mind in which brain is not its generator but its conductor. If we accept this view as serious and realize that it deserves an extended research then we come to the sparkling conclusion that the awareness is not confined strictly to the organic nature but it might be something that pertains all matter, organic or not. That line of thought shows the way to form the vital distinction between consciousness and sentience. If we really wish to have an open dialogue with cognitive theories and functionalistic doctrines that currently appear to contact the issue in a very promising way, then we must not let ourselves go forth in fallacious postulations that may cost the reliability that depth psychology wants so much to have. It is not going to be an elegant move if we realize consciousness as something that emerges painlessly from the dull matter. The physical brain is definitely the critical station where human consciousness is concocted. Nevertheless, we should not give up our weapons in the idea that consciousness is fully coming to place by the events and processes of the central nervous system. I feel that this idea is very akin to the idea that the Big Bang has exploded out of nothingness. Scientists meet insuperable obstacles and objections with this kind of thinking. I find the notion that we are descended from ant-people who came out of the urine of a sky god when he got out of his canoe to relieve himself more palpable than we are derivatives of the Big Bang –a moment when the whole universe sprang from nothing and for no reason at all. The same goes and for our unsubstantial convictions that consciousness booms only from the processes of matter. The less to say, it is crazy to accept this kind of explanations and is much more easier to orient the study towards more essentialist views.

Therefore, under those conditions one is forced to wedge the notion of sentience in the story. Sentience must be realized as something different from consciousness. I think that by comprising this difference in the attempt to formulate a superlative theory we are facilitated in an important way. Quantum physics have already comforted us to understand mind as something much more universal and unlimited from the brain. According to this view, mind is an overwhelming and oceanic feature of the cosmos (if it is not the cosmos per se). Scientists deduce that consciousness is a derivative of the brain just because physically they can alter it, but that does not explain away its source. Thinking deeply this would convince that such an attitude is infantile and, perhaps, overblown.

We need to distinguish consciousness from awareness. Some kind of “pure” sentience may be a basic from which we start. Ordinarily, we experience consciousness, as basic sentience, existent in all space, which is channeled and vastly modified by the machinery of the brain. In the approach of transpersonal psychology, awareness is given a real and separate status. We must put a dividing line between awareness/sentience and consciousness as we experience it normally. Sentience is that basic, but hard to define property that makes us cognizant of things; consciousness is awareness as it is modified, enhanced, and embedded in the structure of the brain and the nervous system. Consciousness is awareness transformed by the brain-body machine so that awareness loses some of its own innate properties and gains certain properties from the structure that is channeled. This would justify us many of the paranormal or gestalt properties that we maddeningly try to explain without attaining anything important. If our conscious experience is the amalgamation between the all-encompassing property of matter (sentience) and the extremely complex function of the brain, then this new dualism opens up the doors to a fascinating thinking. As far as I can understand psychologists discard the Cartesian Theater in a sense that there is no time and place in the brain where all processes come together in a kind of bundle. However, my

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suggestion is that if sentience is the basic underlying stuff by which the world is made, there is still something Cartesian in the case. That Cartesian element is defined not from where “it all comes together” but from where “it all begins”. The implications of this outlook mean that each of us individually is greater than his phenomenal existence. Moreover, the nihilism of death is passing to a rejoicing revision of our moral and cultural attitudes against it.

Lets be straight: Experiments in quantum physics have indicated that mind is the substratum of being and the leading edge of reality. It is not the resultant of being but its very cause! Mind is the foundation of matter; or perhaps I would be more well-aimed to say that mind is indistinguishable from matter. Yes, cognitive scientists are right to scream against Cartesian naiveties; mind is a property of matter. However, it seems to be the vice versa. It is not just it doesn’t matter neither just never mind, it is both. Therefore, albeit, the ghost in the machine is light-years away from truth, it still bears a kind of an essential correctness. The dyadic nature of consciousness is a fact, although not the way we are customized to acknowledge. The distinction between sentience and consciousness, which is inferred from the astonishing discovery of quantum physics presents not a ghost in the machine but a somewhat ghost machine or, in another way, the machinery of a ghost.

The vital motivation that triggered the contribution of the naturalistic approach is the necessity to evade usual and ordinary aphorisms in the issue. One of the dominating proposals is that if we clearly understand in a philosophical and holistic way the implications of quantum mechanics then we are in the position to accept and applause the following suggestion: “Psychology should cease its awkward attempts to explain the origins of consciousness and should realize that this enterprise is to be handed in the field of physics…” Indeed, all presages prearrange a future, in which physics obtain a vitalistic tinge and matter a spiritual zest. Consciousness? Its evocative respiritualization.

The Quantum Permission to Esotericism

Presently, we are still too unsettled and dissipated intellectually to establish a new conceptual setting in our lives. Although, the developments in science and philosophy are frantically fast and the changes are sometimes breathtaking, the majority of people is unaffected and unenlightened by the insinuations of the novel theories. In matter of fact, there are people who practice spiritual techniques and maintain a strong belief in a God, and when they are faced against the stern cynicism of a hard-core scientist, they back off as if they agree that the power of rationalism can sweep away their intuitive knowledge. The truth is that in the framework of the Western rationalism’s system there is no way that a believer can support his convictions. However, the new naturalistic approach that has arose after the realization that consciousness is an important parameter of an observation, definitely permits us to conceive mind as something much greater than previously thought. For reasons that have been mentioned in previous pages, the Western rationalism meets its dead-end, while a new system of thinking shows us a horizon full of possibilities and solutions to old problems. The spiritualization of matter is a monumental initiation of the forthcoming concretization of mere belief. Spiritualism is in the track to become a concrete science, although, a very different one from what we have today. The compass indicates us the unexplored destination of consciousness, for to be mapped and explored. In times like this, when the natural sciences support the primary role of mind in the universe, the accusations of the rationalist against the spiritual pursuit sink down as too limited in their scope. It is time to understand that people who apprehend consciousness as a medium for spiritual actualization, for growth, and for reception of gnosis, are not naïve fellows who ignore the truthfulness of science and thus sanction their imaginations to take them over with irrational expectations. No, it is the other way around. It is science, which is the discipline of organization that should be organized, as Bacon insisted, and it should be organized under this profound change in physics. When all scientists decide to become less rigid so that they can embrace the new developments with deep understanding, it will be the time that the spiritualist will be respected as the most commendable model for the quest of valuing consciousness.

There is a vast array of belief systems about the mind and the brain. There are those primarily in religion who believe that the mind is something greater than computations done by a biocomputer, which demonstrates an implicit faith that the human mind somehow is connected with a human spirit or soul that transcends the everyday operations of the normal standards. Such concepts generate a “mind unlimited” belief. However, it seems to be more than a belief. There are empirical proofs that this is the reality that one will fully face after his

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or her biological death. Under the influence of anesthetics, psychedelics, in states of trance, or being in an isolation trunk, one can enter into states of being in which the mind seems apparently to be indeed unlimited. The constraint of a body and a brain faints away, allowing the titanic dimension of the cosmos to be perceived directly as if it is part of the selfhood. Depth psychology always knew this, although in a kind of abstract way. They depicted this unlimited feature of mind by making models that represented the wide content and the extension of consciousness. They worked them in consideration of space-time, inwards-outwards, spiritual hierarchy, etc.

Another thing that led us to the realization of an unlimited mind, apart from mere intuition or naturalistic experimental evidence, are the rather frequent paraconceptual phenomena. Several times psychologists have carried out experiments in which one person, whom we shall designate the sender, has been given some randomly selected stimulus, such as a number to concentrate on or a picture to look at, and is asked to try to mentally “send” it to another, sensorially isolated person –the receiver. What if over a series of experimental trials, the receiver’s behavior shows sufficient correlation with the randomly selected targets presented to the sender? It would be foolishly stubbornness to dismiss it as coincidence, because using appropriate statistical tests, we find that there is at least some transfer of information at a statistically significant level (Tart, 1988). Such paraconceptual phenomena do not fit in any way to the narrow mode of mind. It is stupid to believe that the brain has some kind of hidden antennas by which it sends signals. Conversely, it becomes plausible when we accept the spatial fabric as a mental substance by which our individuated minds can communicate in a subconscious level.

In addition to all the above, another factor that reinforces the point of esotericism in the consciousness studies is the influential power of belief. In dealing with the microcosmos, the particle level in physics, the observer cannot be taken for granted, for the process of observations alters the phenomena being observed. If we relate this micro-reality to our macro-reality then we end up with the conclusion, that mind can alter events in the world by the belief-factor. Already, much has been written about it. Dr. Wolinsky, a famous growth-psychologist, has initiated the first steps of quantum psychology, in which his crowning enterprise is to sway people to understand that the belief has an immense power over reality –something that is ascertained by eminent experiments in the field of physics. The idea held in many spiritual systems of thought that have dealt with altered states of consciousness, is that physical reality is not a completely fixed entity, but something that may actually be shaped in some fundamental manner by the individual’s beliefs about it. I am not speaking here simply of perceptions of reality, but of the actual reality. Pearce (1977), for example, describes an experience as a youth where he accidentally entered an altered state of consciousness in which he knew he was impervious to pain or injury. In front of witnesses, he ground out the tips of glowing cigarettes on his cheeks, palms, and eyelids. He felt no pain, and there was no sign of physical injury. This is something many spiritual practitioners attempt to do with miraculous results. From the radical point of view, their beliefs about reality in the altered state actually alter the nature of physical reality.

In the near future, we will increasingly be coming to grips with the intangible nature of mind. The aspects that have been underemphasized in our epoch will forcibly come to focus once again. The paradox is this: the more nearly physics have approached the 21st century, the closer it seemed to got to the cosmology of the remote past. Thus, the scientific discoveries of our own time are moving us toward ideas in many ways indistinguishable from those held by the sages and seers of India and Greece. Beyond doubt, a growing fashion for mystical thinking and archaic philosophy makes deep and meaningful contact with fundamental physics.

THE COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS ARGUMENT

God and Physics

The problem of consciousness begins with sentience. Although, we have enough knowledge on the nature of the machinery and the way mental representations parade in the brain, we are absolutely to scratch on our understanding of the awareness and sentience and

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how it is generated by the brain. Sentience seems to float in its own plane, high above the causal chains of neuroscience. If we could ever trace the neurocomputational steps from perception through reasoning and emotion to behavior, the only thing left missing would be the understanding of sentience itself. Already, I have clarified the paper’s thesis, and that is the suggestion that the study of sentience or unmodified consciousness should be handed to physics. But what are the implications of such a radical and a great deal daring argument? If the brain is a subordinate of consciousness and not a superordinate, then we must face the most shocking prospect of all times. Quantum physics support that the intangible notion of mind and consciousness is something much more broad than previously thought. It is something much more fundamental to the universe. The spatial continuum is mental in nature and, therefore, the whole cosmos is but a mind. In other words, the texture of consciousness is one and the same with the texture of space. Although, it is awkward to our usual modes of thinking, it is yet legitimate to say that the world expresses itself within human consciousness. The world seems to act on us. Consciousness is equally comprised of our activity in orienting ourselves to the world, and the activity of the world in expressing itself within human consciousness. We are intimately connected with the peculiar spatiality of the environment. The conscious human being does not reside in his head; the mind rather inhabits the space of the world.

How can we correspond to the repercussions of such monumental postulations? If physics turn upside down, then chemistry, biology, medicine, sociology, philosophy are in the chrysalis for a historical change that will transform the whole conception of humanity. And what about psychology? In the recognition of such a mentalistic reality in the universe, then psychology has no choice but to ascend as the dominating science. Hierarchy will be reverted and the ethics will find their lost ground, regained from the materialistic deadwood of the last centuries’ sterile condition. Perhaps, it will take many decades to conceptualize at depth this but once we will entertain the idea of a cosmic consciousness, most likely, we will throw a big global party.

The idealist point of view in epistemology declares: “essence precedes existence”; that is, ideas are there a priori and meaning emerges by virtue of the structuring power of ideas. The secular and atheistic existential position counters: “existence precedes essence” (Sartre, 1963); that is, the categories of knowledge are not given a priori but arise from the primacy of vital processes, of sensuous and perceptual involvement which can become reflexively heightened toward conceptualization and universalization. In previous pages, I presented my speculation of the backward causality and the strange assemblance between striving material processes to reach and a state of higher order stored always in a higher plane. I believe that this argument comes under the former class, so as the argument of cosmic consciousness. Any reveries over such notions would lead to such a manner of thinking about the world. The resonant evidence for establishing as valid the precedence of essence from existence comes straight ahead from the experimental proofs of quantum mechanics. We are forced to visualize a universe in which the idea is the kernel of existent order.

The famous experiment that drove us in such a hair-raising situation in both epistemology and philosophy was the Schrodinger’s Cat. He placed an imaginary cat in a sealed box. This cat was facing a gun, which is connected somehow to a piece of uranium. The uranium atom is known for its unstableness and how often it undergoes through radioactive decay. If a uranium nucleus disintegrates, it will automatically trigger through a mechanism put in the box the gun to fire, whose bullet will kill the cat. From outside and with absolutely no knowledge of what have happened inside the box, we must open it and observe the state of the cat. With an ally of much quantum evidence, Schrodinger questioned about the state of the cat before we observe her. According to quantum theorists, we can only describe the state of the cat by a wave function that describes the sum of a dead cat and an alive cat. For many this idea was the apotheosis of absurdity, yet nevertheless the experimental confirmation of quantum mechanics forces us to this conclusion. At present, every experiment has verified quantum physics.

The paradox of Schrodinger’s cat is so bizarre that expects us to think that before we see any event or state it is a sum of all possibilities flashing in the frequency of the uncertainty principle. Subsequently, consciousness seems to be the creator of a fixed reality. In respect to that rule, which is very predominant in quantum physics, we must apprehend all reality, before living observers were bred by the cosmogonic evolution, as a flux of a non-elected lottery. A perpetual wave of probabilities without a final output. And here is where physicists

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have encountered a great obstacle for accepting this reality. How is it possible for a universe of all possibilities without a final output to produce evolution and living organisms? There is something wrong here! Now, whether they had to close their eyes in the experimental validity of the quantum indeterminacy or they had to give their scientific benediction to the existence of some sort of universal cosmic consciousness. Because all observations imply an “observer”, and an observer implies the genesis of certain reality, then the universe must be some kind of consciousness, with a self-observing capacity. This argument was first initiated by some physicists, like Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner.

The most embarrassing feature of quantum theory is that an observer is necessary to make a measurement. Thus before the observation is made, cats can be either dead or alive and the moons may or may not be in the sky. Usually, this would be considered crazy, but quantum mechanics have been confirmed repeatedly in the laboratory. Since the process of making an observation requires an observer, and since an observer requires consciousness, then the disciples of holism rightly claim that a cosmic consciousness must exist in order to explain the existence of any object.

Regarding all the new evidence we have in our hands, is it irrational and immature to believe in a somewhat higher being, in which we live inside? For Spinoza, consciousness appears as an attribute of the infinite substance and thus seems to be defined as eternal and necessary. However, he left no doubt that this consciousness has no more than the name in common with the human ego-consciousness. Actually, there is no greater kinship between the two “consciousnesses” than between the dog and its barking.

The Oneness of Consciousness

The other thing that physics have implied is the basic oneness between the universe and the self. There is no plurality of consciousnesses but one consciousness which is individuated by the species. That means that a person is a version of cosmic consciousness, only trapped by the individualistic process of its nervous system. If the brain and the physical universe are seen to share this implicate order, each organism, for instance, must in some sense represent the whole universe. In turn, the universe must imply each organism, each of us. Physicists have been drawing such conclusions for a half century (Capra, 1975), but they are new to biologists and experimental psychologists. These conclusions are counter-intuitive and extremely difficult to comprehend, although in the western philosophical tradition they have been enunciated from pre-Socratic times onward by such eminent thinkers as Plato, Pythagoras, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, and Whitehead. In addition, they sound so much like those described by mystics on the basis of the religious transcendental experiences, that hardheaded, mechanistical-oriented scientists are apt to shy away from formulations derived from an enterprise so totally different and foreign to the ordinary scientific methods.

Consciousness is generally believed to be a relatively private matter; that is, each one of us is “conscious” but each consciousness is unique to that person and is in no way shared by others. In Hindu thought, however, individualized ego-consciousness is considered to be only a partial manifestation of a more global condition. The universe and all that it comprises it is made up of pure impersonal consciousness. That is the thesis that quantum physics want us to hold. This new theory has demolished the classical concepts of solid objects and of strictly deterministic laws of nature. At the subatomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wavelike patterns of probabilities, and these patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of thing but of interconnections. A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory reveals to a basic oneness of the universe and hence of consciousness. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated basic building blocks, but rather as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole.

Moreover, another thing that entails the oneness of consciousness in the universe is the annihilations of the borders between the subject and the object. Natural relationships always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in the chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can be understood only in terms of the object’s interaction with the observer. This means that the classical ideal

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of an objective description of nature is no longer valid. The Cartesian partition between the I and the world, between the observer and the observed, cannot be made. We can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves (Capra, 1975). Scientists like Zukav (1979) believe that the ancient philosophers of the East were right all along in their insistence that the observer and the observed are fundamentally one; that when we study nature there is no way to avoid the fact that nature is studying itself. Physicist Saul-Paul Sirag puts it this way: “If what we can know of the world is a function of the structure of the mind, then what we are elucidating in doing fundamental physics is the structure of the mind”. Also, we should consider Sir Arthur Eddington, a renowned British astronomer, who once proclaimed that “the stuff of the world is mind stuff”.

Evidence supports that we have a unified field of being, in a self-conscious universe realizing itself to be integrally whole and interconnected. By analogy with field physics, the reality might be as well termed field consciousness. Knower and known thus are falsehoods: crude constructs based on abstraction. They are unwarranted by the way things really are, namely, the monism of Bohm claims is most fully compatible with the message of modern physics. We are one and we share one consciousness, although, shaped by different attributions.

A Secret Flirt

Whether we are narrow-minded scientists, forsaken philosophers, holistic thinkers, or mystics, we are all under the influence of our subconscious minds. Alternatively, should I say, we are all influenced by the collective unconscious? The thing is that we disdain to accept foreign ideas and we tend to protect our own as if they are part of ourselves. However, it seems that the ideas that contain a grain of truth always annoy in a subconscious level the ones who disregard them. They are left like pins on the hostile ideological grounds. On the other hand, they become remnants that affect the ways of thinking, no matter how opposing to them. In the age of rationalism and positivism, where the industrial dreams have substituted the necessity to cling on a higher reality, under the dust something shines. It shines even to the most arrogant thinkers, who turn their backs ostentatiously to boundary-dissolving arguments, like the one of the cosmic consciousness. Sharply sometimes, they themselves do not notice that from their own pen sometimes they concede the existence of a much more magnificent reality than their ego wants from conformism to believe.

There is much evidence in the bibliography of cognitive science and particularly psychology, that the notion of a cosmic consciousness is not entirely alien to them. They envision it in an indirect way, although they never allow themselves to shed the light of research to it in wholly way. They just imply it rather fleetingly.

John Searle conceded that once we admit that some computational systems might have experiences, that would be a Pandora’s box and all of a sudden “mind would be everywhere” –in the churning of a stomach, in livers, in automobiles’ engines, and so on. He believes that any system whatsoever can be ascribed beliefs and feelings, if it is an instantiation of AI. That commits us to a panpsychic vision of the world. It is true that AI tries to define the nature of consciousness in order to simulate it, but it is noteworthy, that they have no better solution than psychology, all those years. Therefore, if ever an advanced thinking machine is made, then we are on the verge to believe that consciousness is not needed to be concocted; just to be channeled with the right devices. Searle’s thinking here seems very clearly to be referring to an underlying consciousness, which is superordinate to brain machineries.

However, Searle is known as a soft scientist, a holistic philosopher, and hence it is not such a surprise from his behalf to follow such a way of thinking. Apart from him, though, many others who are committed to materialistic thinking have endorsed in a subtle way the existence of a universal consciousness. For instance, Daniel Dennett, an individual whose books are models for conservative thinking, in some way has sided with the option that consciousness is an unlimited feature. Among pages that are hostile to radical vitalism, one would find him being positive on the assumption that consciousness can go beyond the personal boundaries. He agreed that this is true, psychologically. He referred to car drivers and how their first-person identification includes their vehicle. The enlargement of the boundaries can happen in any case in which we feel that we own something, therefore, I do not see a reason for putting limits on this inclination. If we feel that we own the universe then the universe can be included to the self-identification. Although, this example is a bit

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symbolic, I believe that in the use of language we can observe the pattern of the reality, which concerns issues like that of a consciousness.

The innate tendency that we have to treat every changing thing as if it has a soul (Stafford, 1983), I believe is not fallacious, as Dennett wants to believe. According to him, it is a biological trick that served to our survival, but I think that this is wrong. My assumption is that this is the sheer intuitional conception of the animate universe we are into. If rationalism cautions us not believe in that, then all it is left to us is to comprise it in our language and in our thinking… only in a subtle and subconscious way. To that no rationalist is an exception. Even the most hardheaded thinkers, in philosophizing they indulge in positing questions that are derived from a cosmic sentience perspective. This is an unconscious belief stubborningly surviving under the most antagonistic ideas. Inevitably, the things that are true have an eternally stable value, whether under dust or not.

EPILOGUE

A Model of Consciousness

So far, we have seen consciousness in a different way than mainstream psychology renders to conceive. The usage of quantum physics and the serious consideration of transpersonal experiences rush us to establish a new model of consciousness, in which the spiritualized matter will play a crucial role for the solution of previous hard to tackle problems. Theoretically, it has been considered that the actual meaning of consciousness is the awareness of the awareness. More or less, it is the reflection of a self-reflectory process, which generates the sense of dual being. The best way to depict this mysterious set of reflections is by viewing a visionary model.

The mind-body problem is paradoxically easy to solve out, no matter how scientists find themselves uncomfortable against this issue. It is only because we have not yet adapted to a quantum-like thought to confront such problems. In reality, there is no dualism, in a sense that two distinct qualities come together and form a two-edge phenomenon. There is only one thing and that is either matter as physicalism claims or mind, according to quantum theory. Yes, there is both mind and body, but it is one. Surely, we are talking about two qualities that in a way holographically mingle to each other. It is like a coin with its two sides, or it could be two colors fused to produce a third one.

To understand what consciousness is we ought first to distinguish it from mere sentience. As we saw, sentience is something basic, underlying, and fundamental to organic matter. Albeit, though it is a priviledge of all the living forms, I find it very possible to be a property which is not confined only in the organic world. An elementary sentience could be enjoyed by all matter in the universe. The personal tinge is obtained only by processes that cause emergent properties; for instance, an ant-colony, a human brain, a city, a country, a planet, and so on. The sentient matter that has no processes to channel it and structure intelligence of some kind, it has an impersonal and uncentralized consciousness. Since the universe with all its galaxies and its stars is a structured phenomenon, then cosmic consciousness is its flower.

The basic sentience is not self-reflectory because in simple non-metabolizing mater, like the rock, there are no processes over it to captivate its essence by reflection and reproduction of image by multiple realization. Perhaps, there could be small consciousness, which is generated in the atomic or subatomic level. A great deal of the mystery could be hidden in the dyad of matter-antimatter, something that will certainly attract the interest of the ones who have committed their carriers to the deciphering of the enigma.

The plants are more advanced than the rocks. Their sentience is enhanced due to the organic processes. I assume that this sentience is cellular or subcellular.

In higher animals, however, we are talking about a more explicit kind of sentience that reaches the standards of conscious awareness. The brain plays an important role because it elaborates a multi-reflectory process. Imagine the neurons elaborating in the billionth every single cellular sentience. Neurons talk their own language by fusing all microscopical senses in various ways in order to produce an artifact made out of mirrors. Animal consciousness. It brings me to mind a rich visually tower made out of mirrors that perplexes the eye with all its

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distortions and its manipulated reflections. When someone asks about the main building blocks of what he sees, the answer would be “just mirrors and 20 stones”. But “wow! Here I see millions of stones”. Manipulated reflection would be the answer.

The human consciousness is super-complex. It seems that our species has inherited inside our body a model of an hierarchical self-reflectory sentience stored inside us. The basis of human consciousness is the material sentience, which is the most elementary as mentioned above. It is the material from which we are made from, which is unaffected by our physical death, just because it is beyond the organic mould. Next is the cellular sentience, which is the reflective process of the inorganic sentience. This vegetative sentience is again reflected in a syntactic way by its messages that end up to the traffic jam of the brain. The brain, it turn, by reflecting those cellular messages produces the next set of sentience, which is the animal consciousness. At this point, this Russian doll self-reflectory sentience is filtered by the neuronal high interactivity. The information suddenly passes to the frantic business of the neuronal web, a level where complexion stands beyond any human calculation. Hence, I cannot see the reason why we break our heads to solve the mind-body problem. Such a superastronomical value in the connectivity of the neurons could naturally create something as astonishing as the human conscious experience with the vivid sense of duality.

This neuronal consciousness, shared by all higher animals, is upgraded and enhanced even further, when we pass to the realm of symbol-cultivation. Language boosts consciousness by giving it a form that is fostered by the enriching vocabulary of notions, concepts, and ideas. Verbular consciousness is the crowning sentience of humans and it is the leading edge of our being. It is apparent, that the human consciousness begins from the monad of the basic physical sentience and by the addition of zeros, we have the entirely “ethereal” quality of our minds. Without this monad in the beginning, no matter how many zeros follow, it would still be to scratch.

What does this hierarchical process means? I can only say that ecology is building with matter organic features in order for them to become the launching pad of a higher phenomenon called mind, which transcends space and time, step-by-step, reaching and concretizing a whole new dimension: the noosphere. Axiomatically, consciousness is the process which functions reflectory to the fundamental processes that underlie below. Human consciousness is the sum of all the set of sentiences (material, vegetative, animal) altogether interreflected at the millionth by the linguistic modality.

Selfhood Regained

The most dangerous thing that can happen in a civilization is the impairing of high values, as the importance of self-agency and the solemnity towards life. In the abdication of such ideals, it is not a surprise to watch the whole planetary culture regressing in a state of no foresight, in which all kind of jeopardizing habits are imminent. What has accomplished the 20th century from all sides is the transmogrification of human values to robotic and life-less concepts that are elaborated in academic knowledge for academic knowledge. The necessity of self-discovery, of illumination, of growth has been neglected as irrelevant to the collective quest of truth. Strangely enough, this habitual situation is not challenging any demur against the people who have promoted it. They find themselves more comforting among an epistemology that focuses on superficial questions. Questions like the depth of consciousness, the nature of death-process, the spiritual pilgrim, the nominal religious enlightenment, and a lot more are formidable taboos for them, concerning that the infallibility of science feels threatened by such a bending towards humanistic issues.

Nevertheless, the ontology of the universe and the conception of mind have radically changed last century by quantum physics. Many postulations are oppugning to the sterilization of human agency to the world. The stamp of new physics is the fact that they brought back the limelight on the human consciousness. The central role of the universe is once again our drama. We are not passive but immensely active and we have a lot of responsibility on the outcome of our evolution. Unfortunately, we already have committed innumerable mistakes; unforgettable crimes against our future; so many that we now have to strive to change our doomed destiny. Our approach to nature as contextual and our declaration of war against her, our underestimation of the élan vital for a mechanistic understanding, and our cynicism against spiritual ideals, which today are latent, have brought in the tragic threshold of a collective destruction. The apotheosis of this devaluation has

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brought the agonizing mass death, the chauvinistic neurosis and racistic psychosis. We live in an age where the dollar is our messiah and the stock market is our temple. We live in an age in which we come to understand that the world we have prepared to hand to the generations of the future is no more than a mess of broken pottage. If we want to be sincere with this madness, for the sake of the mission to save our planet and our species, we have to concede that science and philosophy are the conductors of such a junction; and that is because we worship our ideals in the fashion that scientific knowledge dictates.

Treating behavior as the only objective aspect of people has led psychologists to a profound reductionism. In the name of experiment, the search continues for the cause behind any effect and the cause in one instance becomes the effect in the next. This reductionism is a participant to the ethical crime against humanity. However, this same reductionism is a participant to the ethical resurrection of humanity. That is because the further we have penetrated in the submicroscopic world, the more we have realized how the modern physicist has come to see the world as a system of inseparable, interacting, and ever-moving components, with man as an integral part of this system (Capra, 1975). The aftermath is that just as mechanistic Newtonian atomism was found to be too narrow in scope to encompass the findings of the new physics, so our objective behavioristic psychology, which is based on this Newtonian approach appears as far too restrictive a model to deal successfully with any human phenomenon other than external behavior. This seems especially true in the light of the above noted similarity between the existential-phenomenological insight that the individual and world co-constitute one another, and the conclusion reached by the new physicists that the observer and the observed are fundamentally one.

It recurs that those grand conceptual changes in physics, together with the renascent significance of consciousness, seem to give confidence to the revitalization of psychology, to the respiritualization of mind, and most importantly, the revivification of selfhood. It is a matter of time to accommodate psychology according to this new horizon. The only thing that could stop us from that is our adoration to pessimism and fatalism. Psychology has at last found an encouraging setting for a more daring progress to the future. Our null meticulousness is about to change to a substantial existential research that will shed plenty of light to the darkest areas that have left unexplored due to our trivial concern to gain money, power, and prestige. Quantum physics is a model for future psychology. We could modify the vision of the psyche according to what we observe in the cosmos, something that would vindicate Mircea Eliade’s belief that the difference between man and cosmos is not a difference of essence but of degree. For instance, is the meditative “one-pointness” of mind analogous to the speed of light “c”? Recognizing that the breaking of a particle bonds in an atom’s nucleus releases tremendous amounts of energy, will breaking the bonds of ego through meditative and psychedelic practices, have an analogous and equally dramatic effect? Moreover, quantum physics will facilitate other kind of questions, like the debate between phenomenology and neuropsychology. According to this view, the strict determinists ignored the “wave” nature of human experience, they only allowed themselves to see our “particle” side; and those clinging to strict free-will interpretations ignored the “particle” side of human experience –their introspectionist methods allowed them to see only our “wave” side. One can venture even further and hypothesize that knowing more of our “particle” side in any given situation necessitates in principle knowing less about our wave side and vice versa. Surely, this should remind us of the cleavage between phenomenology and neuropsychology. Quantum physics testify for the mind-body problem; we could envision our mind state as the wave-side and the body as the particle-side. Certainly, this new way of seeing things will assist us to answer effectively in the years to come big questions and consciousness will be seen in an entirely new light.

Accelerating the conceptual change in physics will have an analogous and equally disruptive parallel in psychology. More specifically, psychologists will experience a dramatic change in their world-view including drastic alterations in concepts like the strictly causal nature of behavioral and experiential phenomena (something that would much facilitate the deciphering of the psychedelic mystery), the notion of a person, and the ideal of an objective description of human nature. As the “New Age”, or the “Archaic Revival” according to others, progresses, watching psychology slowly evolve into a relativistic quantum psychology will be, as Star Trek’s Mr. Spock so often said “Fascinating!”

We live in an age where storming changes shape a future in which all noble expectations are stimulated. We have to realize that a noble world is not going to come inclusively by

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technological wonders, by the boosting of technical knowledge, or by the gaining of power. History is a process that focuses mainly on the humane level; the level where the most vital game is been played in the millennia. We are a species that is immensely dependent on the morality, on hope, on belief, on sacredness. If we lack those properties then a human is nothing regresses to an ape. We are self-articulators, pursuers of gnosis, inspirers of art, enterprisers of the emancipation from the physical forces that keep us prisoners in the hard game of life. We are amusingly self-aware and we progress by means of the further increase of that very self-awareness. Lets admit it, we are beings that dwell in consciousness, in language, in meaning, in anticipation; if we steal away those convictions by the recommendation of the scientist’s cynic attitude against the significance of this domain, then our hopes will certainly become a sadly reminiscence. The far future will belong to the insects and our collective aspirations to transcend the physis and meet up with our imagination, where the human destiny belongs, will be doomed for good. We are facing the greatest opportunity of all history. Today we have an epitomizing past to teach us of previous mistakes, an enchanting technology to expand the spectrum of possibilities, and the scientific capacity to reach an ideal model of humanity. All we lack is the moral ground, the ethical certitude to actualize our gracious futuristic dreams. We can go nowhere without the supplement of spiritual consciousness. Without it, we are brutal rapers of nature and of ourselves. We are betrayers of our children, sexists, racists, mass criminals, disensouled golems. Another hundred years of business as usual is inconceivable. Dogma and ideology have become obsolete; their poisonous assumptions allow us to close our eyes to our hideous destructiveness and to loot even those resources that properly belong to our offspring. Our materialistic toys do not satisfy us anymore; our religions are no more than manias; our political systems are a grotesque aping of what we intended them to be.

Our birthright is to actualize our potentialities, which are inborn and available to anyone who is willing to use them, in an age where not much belief has left to us all. Science has proved to be a violator of the human nature, an inelegant propaganda to settle a human vision that is soulless, passive, and hacked by the cosmos as beings alien to it. Or even worse, we begin to become alien even to ourselves! We must understand that consciousness is not another piece of machine, another block of chips, or another mathematical equation. Consciousness is the highway to higher faculties that have been aimed by our ancestors for too long. Consciousness is a ladder that leads to our spiritual salvation; a well that pumps up magnificent information; a token of the cosmic hierarchy of wonders.

Some misguided individuals scan the heavens for friendly flying saucers that will intervene in profane history and carry us to paradise; others preach redemption at the principles of a misanthropist science and a pathological psychology. Some others saddened assert that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, we are up n’ end. However, some searchers have waken up in and work to effectively prove that life in this universe is much more fascinating and meaningful than we normally think in our routines. Those are depth psychologists, botanologists, anthropologists, who have realized the spiritual dimension of consciousness. To that assisted and the research on the experiential aspects of indole hallucinogens. Through them, we have had placed into our hands a tool for the redemption of the human enterprise. Moreover, physics gradually become more and more something different from the study of matter; it becomes the study of mind.

The answer has been found. It is no longer something to be sought. It has been found… Time to steer the wheel!

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