Lucid Waking: The Answer to the Problem of Consciousness

By Jack Tanner

There is no problem more baffling to the academic world than the problem of consciousness. It’s fair to say that no academic has any clue at all about what consciousness is. In fact, academics have totally confused it with something radically different, namely sentience. The problem that faces the academic world is the insurmountable one of how you get lifeless, mindless, purposeless objects (material atoms) to manifest subjectivity. It’s a category error to imagine that matter can provide any answers to the foundational issues of mind.

Academics believe that to answer the problem of subjectivity is thereby to solve the “hard problem” of consciousness. In fact, the problem of subjectivity (sentience) is totally different from the problem of consciousness. To understand why, simply ponder all of the following statements: 1) animals are sentient but not conscious; 2) human babies are sentient but not conscious; 3) humans who never encountered another human are sentient but not conscious; 4) sleepwalking humans are sentient but not conscious. The problem of sentience is drastically different from the problem of consciousness and if you conflate the two you have immediately set yourself an impossible task, especially if you make any attempt to solve these problems within the framework of materialism (i.e., the ideology of anti-mind).

To understand what consciousness actually is, it’s essential to understand the difference, in the world of sleep, between dreaming and lucid dreaming. Exactly the same dichotomy is present in the waking world. A sleepwalker is a person who can do complex tasks – such as riding a motorbike for half an hour – without any consciousness. A conscious version of a sleepwalker engages in what we refer to as “lucid waking”. Lucid waking is the key to consciousness.

The fact is that consciousness is not an inherent property of human individuals. It’s not built into them. It’s acquired, just as some people acquire the ability to become lucid dreamers. Since sleepwalkers could do many of the same things as conscious individuals, the question is invited of why consciousness is required at all.

If you don't know what consciousness is, how can you expand your consciousness to the maximum? Wouldn't you like to be maximally conscious? Think of the power you would have.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781300217428

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Lucid Waking

The Answer to the Problem of Consciousness

Jack Tanner

Copyright © Jack Tanner 2021

All rights reserved.

978-1-300-21742-8

Imprint: Lulu.com

Table of Contents

Lucid Waking

The Consciousness Conundrum

The Consciousness Confusion

The Hard Problem?

Sense Consciousness?

The Location of Consciousness?

In Dreams

Suggestion

Separate Minds?

Universal Hallucinations

Induced Synesthesia: The Birth of Language

Mood

Writing

A Sentence

Language and Free Will

Language Synesthesia

Language and the Brain

The Mute Tribe

The Surgical Removal of the Unconscious?

Narcolepsy: The Sleeping Sickness

The Ur Language

Hypnotism

Habituation

Consciousness and First, Second, and Third Person

Tourette’s Syndrome

Zen Bullshitism

Metaphor

Love and Light

God

Hegel and Language

The Absolute in Ontological Mathematics

Creating Consciousness

Experience versus Knowledge

Organ for Truth

Sense-Certainty

Syntax and Semantics

Capitalism and the Mind?

Outer and Inner speech

The Big Problem

Induction

The Consciousness Game

Perfect Consciousness

The Community

Leibniz and Language

Intrusive Thoughts

The Jews

Imaginary Friends

The Writing is on the Wall

Empiricism

The Problem of Consciousness

The Inner Voice

The Third Man

The Joke Philosophy

Reincarnation and Language

Wittgenstein

The Basic Building Blocks

It’s All in the Mind

The Thing Itself

What about AI?

The Obstacles

The Exceptional

The Human Mind

Conclusion

The Consciousness Conundrum

It’s thanks to consciousness that humanity can contemplate the universe, yet science has no idea what consciousness is. Nor does academic philosophy, nor does religion, and nor does any spiritual system. The greatest mystery of all for the human race is the very thing that makes us human and puts us in the position to think about the nature of existence and allows us to pose the self-referential question: What is consciousness?

Some people, spiritual types in particular, believe that consciousness is the foundation of existence, yet also the ultimate mystery, meaning that existence has no answer. The nature of consciousness, they say, can inherently never be elucidated since you need to use consciousness to ask what consciousness is. How can consciousness explain itself? What means would it use? There seems to be a Catch-22. To address the problem of consciousness, you first of all need consciousness. If you didn’t have consciousness, you couldn’t ask what it is.

As you walk around in the world, you can’t use your eyes to look at your eyes. You use your eyes to look at everything else. Similarly, so some people contend, you can use your consciousness to reflect on everything else, but you can’t use it to reflect on itself.

Yet we can see our eyes in mirrors and pictures, we can dissect the eyes of the dead, and we can do all manner of experiments regarding eyesight. We can therefore gather a vast amount of information about eyes and how they function. Why is consciousness any different? Aren’t there equally productive ways to study consciousness?

The central problem lies in defining what consciousness actually is. As it turns out, it’s easy to mistake it for other things which actually have nothing to do with consciousness per se.

The academic world is making no progress with the problem of consciousness because it doesn’t know what it’s looking for. It doesn’t know how to specify the problem and separate it from other issues that obscure it.

Consciousness, it can’t be stressed enough, is not a fundamental property of human beings, which is why scientists and philosophers are looking in the wrong place, for the wrong thing. Even less is consciousness a fundamental property of the universe. There was no consciousness in this universe at the Big Bang.

Consciousness is not foundational. Something else is. It’s by understanding this other thing, this foundational thing, that we can then understand what consciousness is.

There is nothing baffling going on in the universe. There are no impenetrable mysteries. All problems can be resolved in exactly the same rational and logical way: by applying the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its corollary Occam’s Razor (the law of parsimony).

This is not the most perplexing universe. It’s the reverse. The basis of existence is literally the simplest possible. What possible reason could reality have for rejecting the simplest basis, and on what possible basis could it create some arbitrary, more complex basis?

Reality deals only with the simplest basis, and wouldn’t know how to construct anything else. It doesn’t have any choice in any of this. Reality doesn’t say to itself, You know what, I don’t like the simplest solution to existence so I’m going to try something else … how about, let me see, Solution X, twenty-three percent more complicated than the simplest solution. Let’s do it. Er, hold on, maybe I prefer Solution Y, twenty-four percent more complicated than the simplest solution. Nothing like that happens. It’s the simplest solution, and that’s it. Nothing else is ever attempted, or ever could be. Nothing else could be calculated.

Existence is based on absolute simplicity. Therefore, consciousness can be cracked, just like everything else.

If you don’t understand that existence in itself is literally as simple as it can possibly be, you will never understand existence. You will always get it wrong. You will always believe in falsehoods and fantasies.

The No. 1 problem isn’t what consciousness is. The No. 1 problem is what existence is made of. This is the Ontological Question. Once this is answered, all other problems can be answered, because they all necessarily reflect the properties of what existence is made of.

Scientists believe that matter is foundational, which means they believe that consciousness originates in matter. No scientist has ever produced any plausible hypothesis for how matter – a lifeless, mindless, purposeless substance (in science’s estimation) – produces consciousness. No scientist ever will. Science will not resolve this problem. The solution lies elsewhere.

Science is inherently anti-mind. It’s all about matter. There is no bridge from matter to mind, and if you can’t get to mind, you can never get to consciousness. It’s not rocket science!

The Consciousness Confusion

The problem of consciousness is so daunting because philosophers and scientists don’t even know what it is they are trying to explain. They have been unable to define the problem. The whole phenomenon is a mystery to them and that of course is why they have made no progress with it.

The defining mistake they have made when it comes to consciousness is that they have entirely confused it with subjective experience. All philosophers and scientists are wrestling with a drastically different problem from the actual problem of consciousness. The problem these people are addressing is how can you extract subjective experience from a system of atoms of lifeless, mindless matter, with no subjectivity, no mentality, and no need whatsoever of subjective experience. This is an enormous problem in its own right, but it is not the problem of consciousness. It is the problem of sentience, something which is a precursor of consciousness but is definitely not consciousness.

The core of the sentience problem is qualia. Wikipedia says, "In philosophy and certain models of psychology, qualia (singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. [JT: Note how subjective experience is instantly, and wrongly, linked to consciousness, thus confirming our point.] The term qualia derives from the Latin adjective quālis meaning ‘of what sort’ or ‘of what kind’ in a specific instance, such as ‘what it is like to taste a specific apple, this particular apple now’. … As qualitative characters of sensation, qualia stand in contrast to ‘propositional attitudes’, where the focus is on beliefs about experience rather than what it is directly like to be experiencing. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett once suggested that qualia was ‘an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us’. … There are many definitions of qualia, which have changed over time. One of the simpler, broader definitions is: ‘The what it is like character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc.’ ... Frank Jackson later defined qualia as ‘...certain features of the bodily sensations especially, but also of certain perceptual experiences, which no amount of purely physical information includes’. Daniel Dennett identifies four properties that are commonly ascribed to qualia. They are: 1) ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any means other than direct experience; 2) intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience’s relation to other things; 3) private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible; 4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale."

If consciousness is linked to qualia then it becomes impossible to assert that animals are not conscious because who today would seriously question the reality of subjective experiences in animals? Descartes was the last notable philosopher to assert that animals were just glorified machines with no internal subjective experiences, even if they looked like they were having them. (For Descartes, animals were pure matter and did not have souls, hence they did not have mental experiences. Curiously enough, modern science more or less says the same thing, and also reduces human beings themselves to soulless automata, devoid of free will.)

By any process of logic, a system of objects cannot produce subjectivity. It’s a category error to insist that objects can make subjects. Science commits exactly this category error. It has no choice because all it believes in is matter, and matter is attributed no subjective properties at all. Why would matter need to have internal experiences? The very idea is absurd, yet science, to the extent that it even believes in subjectivity (and it really doesn’t), has to maintain that matter produces subjectivity because it has no other tools to deploy to explain internal experience. It’s matter or nothing. Matter, in science, must explain everything, whether free will, the unconscious, consciousness, subjectivity, life, or whatever. But it can’t explain any of them! It can’t even explain itself. Science has to claim that matter randomly comes from non-existence (from the total absence of matter), another category error. Nothing ordered can come from randomness, which is associated with chaos, not its opposite (i.e., a cosmos, a domain of order).

The obvious truth is that if you put random groups of lifeless, mindless atoms into entities called bodies they will not then start having subjective experiences. Computers are complex collections of lifeless, mindless atoms. Computers are not having any subjective experiences. Does anyone seriously imagine they are? Are rocks or sand dunes having subjective experiences? You must be joking.

Subjective experience comes from the nature of mind itself. It is built into the properties of mind. If mind is denied, what then? How could anyone explain subjective experience when they have claimed that mind in itself – substantive mind; immaterial mind outside space and time – does not exist?

More or less all academic scientists and philosophers deny the reality of mind as something different from matter. Under no circumstances would they accept mind as the true basis of matter (i.e., matter is actually mental). You would not be employed in a university science or philosophy department if you did not accept a fundamentally materialist, empiricist, positivist, natural worldview. It is exactly that fallacious worldview which cannot explain subjectivity. When you get rid of the fallacy, you get rid of the problem of subjectivity.

There is no hard problem of subjectivity. There is a hard problem – indeed an impossible problem – of explaining mind without mind, life without life, and subjectivity without subjectivity. How can you explain subjects via objects? No one could. No one ever will. University science and philosophy will never explain subjectivity, and will therefore never be able to move on to the different problem of what consciousness is. They’re permanently stuck. Their paradigm is unfit for purpose.

The Hard Problem?

The hard problem of consciousness, as it is called by academic philosophers, is no such thing. The real hard problem for scientists and philosophers is that they have no comprehension whatsoever of life, mind and subjectivity. They are trying to explain these via lifeless, mindless, material objects. This is a category error, a contradiction in terms, a logical impossibility, on a par with the academically intractable problem of Cartesian substance dualism. In fact, it’s actually the same problem, just cast in different terms.

If you choose the wrong paradigm, you create hard problems that aren’t hard in reality but are in fact impossible in terms of your chosen, fallacious paradigm. They are artifacts of the paradigm, not problems that pertain to the real world.

There is no conceivable path – given the materialist paradigm – to reach mind, life, free will, the unconscious, consciousness and subjectivity. As soon as you subscribe to materialism, you are never going to understand subjectivity and consciousness.

Some academic philosophers – the panpsychists – accept scientific materialism, but think it’s lacking an ingredient. What they want to do is add a little mind, a little consciousness, to atoms so that anything made of atoms will therefore be capable of expressing mental properties, including subjectivity and consciousness. Of course, there is absolutely no way to add mind to matter. Science wouldn’t know where to begin since it doesn’t believe in mind at all. Science is an exclusive faith in matter. The panpsychists believe they can smuggle subjectivity and consciousness into materialism by, somehow, supplementing matter with mind. Their attempts are uniformly comical. They don’t make any sense at all. Moreover, they show a catastrophic misunderstanding of science and the scientific project.

Panpsychism is as futile as Cartesian substance dualism, of which it is simply a less coherent variant (it’s similarly trying to get mind and matter to coexist even though they have nothing in common). Panpsychism would be much more viable if cast in terms of idealism rather than materialism, but more or less no academic philosophers have any interest in idealism, i.e., in mental rather than physical reality.

The academic world believes in the power of matter, not the power of mind, which is somewhat ironic since these academics are supposed to be intellectuals, people of the mind. If only!

If consciousness is not found in subjectivity (sentience) then where is it located? In recent decades, the seminal text in this regard is The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by psychologist Julian Jaynes. This book has something of a cult following, but it ought to be one of the best-known books in the world, and taught in every school. The reason it isn’t is that scientific materialists show enormous resistance towards it because it changes the problem of consciousness from a scientific problem to a cultural problem. It switches the problem from genetic to memetic. Consciousness becomes concerned with the colonization of the brain by verbal memes, and, above all, by the conveyor of verbal memes, namely language. Consciousness arises when the unconscious learns and internalizes language.

Richard Dawkins wrote, "Do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme."

Gene evolution is staggeringly slow. Meme evolution is staggeringly fast. The right memes – good ideas – can transform the human race overnight. But the wrong memes – bad ideas – can send humanity back to the Stone Age. We are living in a time of staggeringly bad ideas, which are being catastrophically amplified by social media. We are in a meme war and the bad memes are winning hands down. Practically no one is interested in good memes. The memes of the Idiocracy are in full control. The lunatics are running the asylum.

Dawkins wrote, Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word ‘culture’. … Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution. Geoffrey Chaucer could not hold a conversation with a modern Englishman, even though they are linked to each other by an unbroken chain of some twenty generations of Englishmen, each of whom could speak to his immediate neighbors in the chain as a son speaks to his father. Language seems to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.

This is a critical point, essential to understanding consciousness. Consciousness does not arise from biological evolution, but from cultural evolution. It proceeds by way of a different replicator: cultural memes rather than biological genes. Anyone who is looking for consciousness in the body, matter, genes, and biology is looking in completely the wrong place.

Memetic language, unlike the genetic Darwinism of Richard Dawkins, reflects Lamarckism, a theory of evolution based on the principle that changes associated with organisms during their lifetime can be transmitted to their offspring. Children can pick up the changes to language made by the preceding generation, and can also start making their own changes. Language changes cause consciousness changes, and consciousness changes alter human evolution, making memes more important than genes, and the dominant force of evolution.

Consciousness is actually incredibly easy to understand. Once the neocortex of the brain reaches a sufficiently complex level, it achieves massive overcapacity in terms of processing power and can take on the considerable burden of handling sophisticated language, which then dictates consciousness.

Most brains – the brains of all animals except humans – are totally preoccupied with detecting the external sensory world and reacting, instinctually, to it, moment by moment. Animals can’t plan. They can’t reflect on the past and work out how to have a better future. They just live their life in a permanent now. That’s all their simple brains can cope with. But what happens when the brain has outgrown mere biology, mere living in the moment? It wants more, it demands more. It has to use all of its extra evolutionary capacity. After all, that’s what nature does. It uses as much as is available to it.

If the external world cannot supply the neocortex with enough stimulation, it will start generating its own internal content. It will start dreaming. It will undergo visual and auditory hallucinations. These will start off in seemingly quite a haphazard way, but, like all such things, they will evolve, and they will become more and more organized and powerful.

The more useful the internal hallucinations, the more they will be naturally selected. What is the internal hallucination to which the vast majority of us are subjected all of the waking day? It’s the amazing auditory hallucination that we know as the inner voice or internal monologue. Not only does this constant auditory hallucination not seem like a hallucination at all (even though it is), we actually regard it as the voice, the vehicle, of our consciousness!

We are all constantly being spoken to by an internally generated voice, but we are not alarmed by it because we regard it as our own voice, rather than some disturbing alien voice. Yet, if we were schizophrenics, we would hallucinate rather different voices: menacing, persecutory voices, which seemed to come from external entities.

Schizophrenics are those who are having auditory hallucinations that have spiraled out of control, and their own consciousness in effect starts to splinter and fragment. Schizophrenics are actually no different from the rest of us. They do not differ in kind from normal people, only in degree. Their hallucinations are much more powerful. They are unable to inhibit them and take ownership of them.

Joan of Arc was directed by voices. Self-evidently, she was a schizophrenic, subject to powerful hallucinated voices of a religious nature. She was simply the latest in a long line of religious nutcases. Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Saul of Tarsus, Mohammed, and so many others, were all schizophrenics, hearing religious voices. More or less all of mainstream religion was produced by schizophrenics. Even Socrates heard a voice (his daimon), and he had a huge influence on philosophy. Hallucinated alien voices are responsible for most of human culture and what most humans find most sacred!

So, humanity created (hallucinated) internal content because human brains weren’t sufficiently occupied by external content, and thus internal content – visual, and especially auditory – was needed to provide extra stimulation. This internal content evolved rapidly. Visual hallucinations were mostly shunted off into dreams (into the domain of sleep, so as not to interfere with the waking world, which is primarily presented to us visually), while the auditory hallucinations became extremely organized, and highly coordinated with the external visual world. They turned into language, conveyed by one, constant hallucinated voice, which internally narrated our life. This proved so useful that it became essential to us. It was none other than our consciousness.

We didn’t have auditory hallucinations now and again (as in Julian Jaynes’s bicameralism, based on intermittent voices in people’s heads to give them commands in crisis situations), we had them continuously, and they merged into one, familiar voice, none other than our internal monologue. As for our visual hallucinations, they became the continuous stream of images that constitutes a dream.

Consciousness resulted from auditory hallucinations. These hallucinations were memetic and evolutionary. Hallucinated, memetic, auditory content could and did evolve at a markedly different pace from genetic content. It perhaps started off slowly in terms of organization, but, once it had reached a certain level of development, gathered speed rapidly. It morphed from grunts, into primitive language, into effective spoken language (and later gave rise to sophisticated written language).

Language, itself inherently memetic, became the perfect platform for the generation and assimilation of new memes, expressed in language, and also in associated images. Hallucinations produced memes, and memes produced language (the framework for organizing memes), and language conveyed our inner monologue, aka what we take as our consciousness.

Consciousness is memetic not genetic, cultural not biological, mental not material, acquired not innate. Consciousness is a systemic, continuous auditory hallucination that we direct, just as lucid dreamers direct their dreams. Daytime consciousness is lucid waking as opposed to lucid dreaming. At night, our consciousness becomes passive (if we are not lucid dreamers) and we instead watch a continuous visual hallucination – a dream! Our language skills are severely degraded during dreams, meaning that our consciousness loses its agency. A lucid dreamer is someone who can maintain their language fluency during dreaming.

Memes began as hallucinated internal mental content, then colonized our brains and took over the whole show. We are different from animals because our brains can support advanced hallucinations, and theirs cannot. Our brains can host a plethora of memes, and thus culture. We can organize our hallucinations into language, and language can then out-compete the combination of sentience and instinct relied on by animals. Our memetic language, our consciousness, can be trained, it can learn, it can become highly intelligent, and it frees us from the slavery of instinctual responses.

Richard Dawkins wrote, Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.

Imitation is the name of the game. Humanity is a mimetic species. Monkey see, monkey do. Back in the day, consciousness literally spread like a virus. It remains a virus, one with which we deliberately infect every child, in particular via schools and education.

Language is our way out of our biological prison. It allows us to evolve at the speed of gods, if we let the wisest humans run the show. But that has always been humanity’s defining problem. Humanity despises wise humans and wants nothing to do with them. In his Republic, Plato gave the blueprint for rule by the wise. No nation has ever implemented Plato’s system. Everything else was tried, but never sapiocracy.

Humanity loves the sentient, but not the sapient. Many millions of people own dogs. How many of these same people also own books? The answer is extremely few. Dog ownership is a key marker for hatred of sapience. Dog owners are overwhelmingly feeling and sensing types. A typical dog owner is manifestly not interested in good conversation. If they were, they would cultivate human company and not animal company.

Humanity does not want to imitate wisdom. It wants to imitate wealth, power and beauty. It wants to imitate emotionalism. It’s not at all interested in wisdom.

Human intellectual progress has been left to an astonishingly tiny number of human beings. They are responsible for everything glorious about the human race, for all human advancement.

Dawkins wrote, If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N. K. Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: ‘... memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking – the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.’

It’s a key point that memes actually constitute a structure in the nervous system. They have become an essential, acquired operating system for the human psyche, which exerts command and control functions over the human body.

We humans are what we are because our brains did not just process signals coming from the external world, but started to generate their own content. We took in visual and auditory signals from outside and then started to imitate them internally, so that we no longer relied on the external world. These internal hallucinations soon took on a life of their own and detached themselves completely from the external world. They became language (i.e., inner voice, which we could externalize as outer voice in order to communicate with others), and dreams, which we enjoyed internally. All this inner activity, free from external necessity, is what constitutes the basis of culture and free will.

Culture exists because it is an imitation, mediated by hallucinations, of how we process the external world, but which then separates itself from the external world and becomes its own world, of language and consciousness, and extremely receptive to any memes it encounters in the world of culture.

Where animals are locked into the external world, humans are increasingly locked into the world of human culture. Look at the degree to which humans are glued to their smartphones, providing a constant stream of addictive memes (mostly incredibly mediocre, sadly).

There is nothing miraculous about consciousness. It was born from an internal imitative process of how every animal processes the external world. The human brain – because of its size, structure, organization, and storage capacity – was able to start creating internal hallucinations of what it experienced from the external world. Unlike the external world, these internal hallucinations were subject to evolutionary forces and became better and better organized and more powerful until they occupied most of our mental bandwidth. Above all, they became language, and language is the basis of consciousness.

Consciousness is our memetic capacity. It is an add-on to our genetic capacity. Consciousness is the memetic colonization of the brain. Irregular auditory hallucinations were converted into a regular, ordered, incredibly useful system: language. With language – a system of order – humans were able to start exercising reason and logic. They were able to start using an even more powerful language, the most powerful language of all: mathematics. Mathematics is in fact the language of reality, so when humans started using mathematics, they were starting to become conscious, however dimly initially, of what reality actually is.

The revolutionary subject of ontological mathematics furnishes the language of ultimate consciousness, consciousness of foundational existence … God consciousness.

Human brains, which evolved under the evolutionary pressure of survival and reproduction (not the pursuit of Truth, knowledge and understanding!), were never going to arrive at the language of existence in any easy way. The only method they had for becoming intelligent was by switching from genes to memes, from external sensory processing to internal sensory processing (primarily auditory and visual hallucinations), to manmade verbal language (systematic auditory hallucinations, capable of external vocalization), and finally to reality’s numerical language of mathematics.

The drive to produce consciousness is a teleological, evolutionary process. It’s not random, it’s not pointless. It’s the actual point of existence. Reality must become self-aware. It must understand itself. It must attain perfect consciousness.

Hallucinations, which resulted from the response of the Collective Unconscious to the external sensory world, are the true source of consciousness. If humanity could not hallucinate, it would never have formed language, and without language it would never have become conscious, it could never have become memetic. Consciousness is how we escape our reliance on the physical body. It’s how we empower the mind.

Humanity is the hallucinatory species. That’s why we differ so much from other animals on this planet. They do not engage in hallucination. Their brains aren’t complex enough.

Sense Consciousness?

Julian Jaynes said, Consciousness is sometimes confused even with simple sense perception.

It’s unusual for consciousness not to be confused with simple sense perception. Empiricists always reduce everything to the senses. They just can’t get past the senses.

Jaynes wrote, Historically, we inferred and abstracted ideas of sense perception from a realization of our sense organs, and then, because of prior assumptions about mind and matter or soul and body, we believed these processes to be due to consciousness – which they are not.

How can people solve the problem of consciousness if they don’t know what it is, if they confuse it with something else? People imagine they are conscious of what their sense organs deliver to them. That’s not consciousness. That’s sentience. Every non-human animal engages in sense perception. None is conscious.

Jaynes wrote, "If any of you still think that consciousness is a necessary part of sense perception, then I think you are forced to follow a path to a reductio ad absurdum: you would then have to say that since all animals have sense perception, all are conscious, and so on back through the evolutionary tree even to one-celled protozoa because they react to external stimuli, or one-celled plants like the alga chlamydomonas with its visual system analogous to ours, and thence to even amoeboid white cells of the blood since they sense bacteria and devour them. They too would be conscious. And to say that there are ten thousand conscious beings per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in the roller-coaster of the vascular system in each of us here this afternoon is a position few would wish to defend."

Yet panpsychists claim exactly this. To equate consciousness to sentience is exactly how to not understand what consciousness is.

Jaynes wrote, What we have to explain is the contrast, so obvious to a child, between all the inner covert world of imaginings and memories and thoughts and the external public world around us.

That’s exactly right. Consciousness is not about observing the external world with our sense organs. It’s about how we create an inner world that is much richer than the external world, and has no necessary dependence on the senses at all. A person exercising their imagination in a sensory deprivation tank is very much conscious.

Jaynes wrote, …the helpless spectator theory of Huxley (1896), [states] that consciousness just watched behavior and could do nothing. But if that is true, why is it there at all?

Mind, in science, has no role to play. Science is all about matter and material interactions. Science has no requirement of mind. It’s wholly redundant. There is no symbol for mind in science. No scientific equation references mind. The whole of science takes place without mind. So, Jaynes’s question stands: why is mind there at all? Why did evolution produce something that does nothing? How does that fit in with natural selection? Natural selection chooses valuable traits. It doesn’t select pointless things that would not be missed if they weren’t there.

If mind doesn’t feature at all in science, how does science propose to explain mind, free will, the unconscious, consciousness and subjectivity? It doesn’t and it can’t. Science cannot form any bridge from matter to mind because it doesn’t accept the real existence of mind. It consigns mind to the level of helpless spectator, epiphenomenon, illusion, something that is incapable of making anything happen in the material world.

Jaynes wrote, And so there followed emergent evolution, which was meant to save us from such a pessimistic view. It was most fully developed by Lloyd Morgan (1923), although the idea goes back to the 19th century. A simple example is water: If you take hydrogen and oxygen you can’t derive the wetness of water from either. Wetness is an emergent. Similarly, when in evolution there is a certain amount of brain tissue, then suddenly you get consciousness. Consciousness [in this view] is an emergent, underived from anything before. It is also having a renaissance in the writings of some neuroscientists today. On analysis, it generates no hypotheses and tells us nothing about any processes involved. Emergent evolution is a label that bandages our ignorance.

Emergentism isn’t science. There is no scientific mechanism to get from matter to mind. So, in the absence of any mechanism and any precedent in the supposed properties of matter, science claims that mind and consciousness simply emerge. This is like saying, There are various things that science has no idea how to explain, and so, since we can’t explain them, we’ll invent some word that makes it sound as though we’re saying something meaningful about them and know what we’re talking about. Let’s see now, how about ‘emergence’. Sweet!? This is what science has become … word salad!

Why doesn’t science say, God emerges from the universe when the universe reaches a certain degree of complexity? Isn’t that just as valid as everything else that emerges?

Science cannot predict a single thing that will emerge. All it can do is retrospectively label something that exists but which it cannot explain as an emergent property. Since when did that constitute science?

Jaynes wrote, That consciousness is in everything we do is an illusion. Suppose you asked a flashlight in a completely dark room to turn itself on and to look around and see if there was any light – the flashlight as it looked around would of course see light everywhere and come to the conclusion that the room was brilliantly lit when in fact it was mostly just the opposite. So with consciousness. We have an illusion that it is all mentality. If you look back into the struggles with this problem in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, this is indeed the error that trapped people into so much of the difficulty, and still does.

The unconscious does vastly more than consciousness. The unconscious handles all syntactic operations, everything required to accomplish bodily tasks. It controls the physical body’s deep processes, such as the beating of the heart and the breathing of the lungs. It’s what controls all muscle movements. It allows you to walk and talk.

Consciousness is the semantic element of the psyche dealing with experience and assigning meaning to each experience, mostly depending on what feelings the experience generates. Meaning, for the average person, lies primarily in what feels good and what feels bad.

The Location of Consciousness?

Julian Jaynes wrote, "Finally, in this list of misconceptions about consciousness, a word about its location. Most people … tend to think of their consciousness, much as Descartes, Locke, and Hume did, as a space usually located inside their heads. Particularly when we make eye-to-eye contact, we tend to – in a subliminal way – infer such space in others. There is of course no such space whatever. The space of consciousness, which I shall hereafter call mind-space, is a functional space that has no location except as we assign one to it. To think of our consciousness as inside our heads, as reflected in and learned from our words like introspection or internalization, is a very natural but arbitrary thing to do. I certainly do not mean to say that consciousness is separate from the brain; by the assumptions of natural science, it is not. But we use our brains in riding bicycles, and yet no one considers that the location of bicycle riding is