Knowing: Consciousness and the Universal Mind

By Ken Levi

Consciousness is the core of who we are. Without it, we’re an empty shell. Yet, Psychologist Stuart Sutherland (1989) declares consciousness “a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it has evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.” Philosopher David Chalmers (1996) proclaims it “the hard problem.” In this book, I assemble some of the best ideas about consciousness, and add a few of my own. I lay out arguments from leading thinkers; picking and choosing from their ideas, keeping the good and discarding the bad. Then, I introduce an entirely new explanation, building on, and adding to, insights from the past. I think the hard problem can be solved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ken Levi
• Release date: Oct 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463230404

Ken Levi

I grew up in Boston, moved to Ann Arbor, where I received my Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Michigan, then moved again to San Antonio, where I taught Sociology at the University of Texas. I am the author of seven books: "Violence and Religious Commitment" (Penn State Press), about the suicide and murder of over 900 members of the People's Temple Church in the Jonestown massacre; "Proving God Exists: Physics, Cosmology, and the Universal Mind," about scientific proof for God's existence; "The Moral Symmetry of Good and Evil," about the scientific derivation of morality; "Knowing: Consciousness and the Universal Mind," a composite theory for solving the "hard problem" of consciousness; "Mind of God," addressing the question, "Does the Universe think?" "Scandal in the American Orchid Society," about treachery and betrayaI in a volunteer organization; and "American Hitler," about Trump and his fanatical followers. I have also published a series of six articles on human consciousness in "The Journal of Consciousness Exploration and Research," in addition to several other articles on violence, crime, and delinquency, including "Becoming a Hit Man" (Sage Publications), which has since been cited in over 110 other books and articles.

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Introduction

Seventeenth Century philosopher Rene Descartes conceived the mind as separate from the body, with the mind taking pride of place. For that reason he is considered the father of Dualism. But the idea for some sort of Dualism goes back much further than that.

The word spirit comes from the Latin spiritus, or breath. It is the essential thing separating the living from the dead. For that reason, the spirit was thought to contain our intelligence, consciousness, and sentience. Breath and spirit are also equated with each other in the Greek pneuma, the Sanskrit Atman, the Hebrew nephesh, and the Egyptian ka. Ancient Egyptians believed that ka, the life force, was breathed into each person at birth by the god Heket, or Meskhenet. At death, the ka leaves the body, but it endures.

Likewise, ancient Chinese worshipped the still vital spirits of their dead ancestors. And in Hinduism of ancient India the highest plain of existence was thought to be the Brahman, the great spirit, which dwelled in each individual in the form of the Atman, the personal soul. All major religions believed, and still believe, in this duality of existence. The concept of spirit as an invisible, non-material substance, is nearly universal. It is thought to be the essence of our life.

In this section I will outline some of the leading Dualist thinkers in philosophy and religion throughout history – from Socrates to Descartes – who strongly influenced how we think about body and mind in Western society.

Phaedo

In 399 B.C., Socrates drank a cup of poisoned hemlock and died. He had earlier been condemned to death by an Athenian jury for the crimes of refusing to recognize the state gods, and for corrupting the city’s youth. In his jail cell, the great philosopher was surrounded by mournful disciples, one of whom later recounted the scene during Socrates’s last hours. His name was Phaedo (Plato (1961/ 380 B.C., pp. 40-98).

During these final moments Socrates engaged his students in one of his most famous dialogues. It concerned the immortality of the soul.

Socrates states, as a given, that we are part body and part soul. He then asks his followers which of the two is most pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless (Plato, 1961/380 BC, p. 63). They readily agree it’s the soul. The body, on the other hand, is afflicted by the opposite features: impure, transitory, mortal, and changeable.

Under these circumstances, the body is the soul’s prison. And for the soul, death is release from confinement.

The body, according to Socrates, is a distraction from what’s most important, which is pure and unadulterated thought (48). He explains that, . . . when the soul uses the instrumentality of the body for any inquiry, whether through sight, or hearing, or any other sense – because using the body implies using the senses – it is drawn away by the body into the realm of the variable, and loses its way and becomes confused and dizzy, as though it were befuddled, through contact with things of a similar nature (62).

The only solution, Socrates concludes, is if we are to have knowledge of anything (49), we must get rid of the body in order to contemplate things by themselves (49).

Death is the surest escape from the body’s prison. But in the meantime, a person should strive to abandon, . . . bodily pleasures and adornments, as foreign to his purpose and likely to do more harm than good, and devote himself to the pleasures of acquiring knowledge, and so by decking his soul not with a borrowed beauty but with its own – with self-control, and goodness, and courage, and liberality, and truth . . . (95).

The abandonment of bodily pleasures and the spurning of borrowed beauty can be accomplished in life because it is the mind that rules the body. To Socrates, soul and mind are the same thing.

Socrates uses the example of his own incarceration. If it were up to the muscles and sinews of his body, he would long since have escaped. But his mind made the decision to remain and obey the law. The mind, therefore, is the cause, and the body merely provides the conditions whereby the purposes of the mind can be met (80).

It is noteworthy, at this point, to underscore the uniqueness of Socrates’s concept of soul/mind, and therefore, consciousness. On the one hand, he does believe the mind rules the body through knowledge and wisdom. On the other hand, he severs from his definition of mind all of the senses – to include seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling. To him, these are bodily functions, and, therefore, distractors. Somehow, consciousness is knowing without sensing!

The main theme of Phaedo’s narrative focuses on one aspect of the soul, in particular. It focuses on immortality.

In that regard, Socrates advances four arguments. These are: 1) contraries from contraries; 2) recollections from before birth; 3) body and soul affinities; and 4) the form of life. The first and the last are the most intriguing,

The first argument is: contraries from contraries. Ingeniously, Socrates argues that for all animals and plants, everything comes from its opposite. For example, cold comes from heat, heat from cold. Little comes from big. Beauty comes from ugliness. Every quality emerges from its opposite, and from no other source (53).

What, then, is the opposite of living? Dying. What is the opposite of dying? Living. So, dying comes from living and living from dying. This means something must endure after death, and then re-emerge to bring new life. That something must be the soul!

Furthermore, if life is the product of a soul entering a body, then where did the soul come from? It must have abided in another place, until the time came around for it to be reborn.

Socrates’s fourth argument for the immortality of the soul is: the form of life. Here’s how it goes:

1. Absolute beauty can never be ugly. Absolute evil can never be good. Absolute tallness can never be short.

2. That is to say, an opposite can never be opposite to itself (84). Cold, per se, can’t be hot. Sadness, per se, can’t be joy.

3. This also applies to the person or thing for whom the the quality in question is a distinguishing characteristic (85). For example, snow has coldness as a distinguishing characteristic. So, it cannot simultaneously be hot. In fact, when heat is applied, the snow itself ceases to exist.

To take another example, consider the number 3. It has oddness as a distinguishing characteristic. The number 3 can never not be odd. If you tried to make it even, it would no longer be a 3. And although 3 and oddness are different things, 3 still requires oddness in order to be itself.

4. So, Socrates asks, what must be present in a body to make it alive? The answer is soul. The distinguishing characteristic of soul, therefore, is life. And for that reason, soul can never be without life, any more than snow can be without cold or 3 can be without oddness.

5. Soul must be immortal (87).

If the soul is immortal, it demands our care. We must strive to live a good life because whatever we do in this life will carry over after we are gone. Socrates proceeds to offer a fanciful notion of what happens to the soul after death. For most people, the soul resides in the afterlife awaiting rebirth. But for the extremely wicked, the soul is cast into Tartarus, a horrible pit of torment. From thence, it never emerges.

With those words, Socrates accepts his fate. He does so cheerfully, confident in his logic, and in the destiny that his own soul will face. Indeed, his last words are, Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Aesclepius (40). That’s what Greeks used to do, to thank the god of medicine for curing them from an illness, and providing them with a better life to come.

Aristotle

Aristotle, in the 4th Century B.C., had his own version of the mind. To him, there are three substances: matter, form, and a compound of the two. Matter refers to things. Form refers to souls. And compounds are the things that have souls. It’s the soul that gives them life (350 B.C., cited in Shields, 1907).

The soul is the form of the living thing; not its shape, but its nature. The soul, he says is the first actuality of a natural body. It represents a capacity to engage in life’s activities. It is what animates us.

As an example of the relation of the mind to the body, Aristotle cites the case of the eye. Suppose that the eye were an animal. Sight would have been its soul, for sight is the substance or essence of the eye which corresponds to the formula; the eye being merely the matter of seeing. When seeing is removed, the eye is no longer an eye, except in name. It is no more a real eye than the eye of a statue or of a painted figure. We must now extend our consideration from the 'parts' to the whole living body; for what the departmental sense is to the bodily part which is its organ, the whole faculty of sense is to the whole sensitive body as such (De Anima).

In other words, mind is to body as sight is to eye. Take away sight, and the eye is useless. Take away the eye, and there can be no sight.

So, Aristotle felt mind and body worked hand-in-hand, and neither could be separated from the other. But what happens after death? As we have seen, Socrates held that the soul never died. It exists, he declared, separate and apart from the body. In the Phaedo, cited above, Socrates maintained that the soul is immortal, as opposed to material things that are perceptible, composed of parts, and subject to dissolution (380 B.C., cited in Jowett, B., 1942).

But Aristotle disagreed.

To him, "The soul neither exists without a body, nor is a body of some sort. For it is not a body, but it belongs to a body, and for this reason, is present in a body; and in a body of such-and-such a sort. It is a capacity, not the thing that has the capacity [italics mine]. And he added, We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one (Aristotle," Yahoo Answers, 2/11/2008).

For these reasons, Aristotle broke with his predecessors, and flatly declared that, apart from the body, the soul is not capable of existence.

Saint Augustine

Christians believe in the body and the soul. That belief is a core tenet of their faith. It is the solid foundation upon which much of Christianity is based. Why talk about Heaven and Hell; why talk about revelation; why talk about eternal salvation, if there is no such thing as a soul?

Yet, when we examine the Bible and pour through the Old Testament, there is scant basis for such a belief. There, the word soul was used as a term to refer to people and animals, as in the statement, Five thousand souls departed from Egypt, during the time of the Plague. Nowhere in the Old Testament is soul referenced as immortal or everlasting.

Only with Origen in the 3rd Century and St. Augustine in the 5th Century was the soul established as a spiritual substance and a philosophical concept in Christianity. And both men based their views - not on the Bible - but on Socrates, Plato and early Greek philosophers.

In Phaedo, as we have seen, Socrates poses the question, Is the soul immortal? And his answer is, Yes. Moreover, the soul is the reality of a person, and the seat of rationality. The body is the soul’s prison.

Even before Plato, 6th Century B.C. Greek philosopher Pythagoras stated that the soul is home to basic knowledge. Only the soul has the power to know the true, eternal, and unchanging nature of reality. And, he added, the truth can only exist in an incorporeal substance.

Drawing from the early Greeks, St. Augustine declared the soul the intelligent mind. It is both separate from the body and immortal. And it precedes a person’s bodily existence.

Death, therefore, does not mean the end of personal existence, Augustine (426 AD) writes in The City of God. If the truth is immortal, he declares, Then the soul must be immortal." Death is the separation of the soul from the body.