Bill Marks
Saturday May 19, 2pm ­ 3 pm
National Institute of Health, USA

A scientific approach to consciousness and the infinite: matter is made of experiences and is endless

The origin of everything for us is our own individual awareness. It should therefore be at the center of our picture of reality. But the familiar picture of reality, atoms interacting in a void, inescapably concludes that matter as the brain is the source of consciousness. Yet logically matter and the brain have a derivative status; they are hypotheses or guesses about the sources of our experiences. Experiences are prior; they are a given. In this talk I will put experiences as the source of matter and explore where that leads.

Many scientists think that personal awareness is real, but is out of the range of things science can presently explain. David Chalmers, in "The Conscious Mind, In search of a Fundamental Theory" (1996) says that to him it is logically possible for someone to have an identical body to his but to lack all subjectivity, or to experience red in the same situation in which he experiences blue. Subjective experience does not seem to be required by the laws of physics, and after physics as we know it there is still something to be explained. Chalmers suggests that subjectivity may be an additional aspect of all matter, and that its extent and clarity can grow with the complexity of systems.

Personal awareness does depend on the state of certain parts of the brain. In "The Feeling of What Happens" (1999), Antonio Damasio points out that after damage to most regions of the brain the patient may lose a faculty, perhaps memories, but will continue to be perfectly aware and responsive through whatever channels are left, whereas some regions are required for awareness. For example when the cingulate gyrus of the inner cortex was extensively injured, a patient was awake but unresponsive and apparently unfeeling; on recovery she reported the absence of any suffering or of any other kind of experience.

Thus subjectivity does interact with matter. Following many thinkers from the past such as Peirce and Whitehead, let us postulate that matter is composed of interacting experiences, whose interactions produce new experiences. Their interrelations would be objective and their responses subjective. Whirlpools of interacting experiences, to the degree that they interact only among themselves, would have the quality of permanence. These evolving particles and organisms would encompass increasingly complex inner and outer experiences, and the evolution of the whole system would be toward increasing understanding. I will discuss the details of these ideas, which resemble the underpinnings of physics. The laws of physics themselves appear as experiences, evolving with the whole. The brain must have a special facility for interacting with the world of experience. How and where might this happen?

Many physicists, like David Bohm, believe that new discoveries will never end, so that the world in which we are embedded has an infinite aspect. Bohm also points out that our own matter is infolded nonlocally with all matter. This suggests that we may embody some faculties for dealing with limitless reality; that our awareness should have broad and mysterious qualities. Love and beauty for example affect our lives more deeply than information; the pattern of our lives is influenced by deep aspects of reality that lack words. Feelings are all we get about them. These ways of thinking validate our consciousness and it put it nearer the center of what is real.

Biography

While I was studying for my BS in Physics (MIT 1956) I came across the book "Mysticism" by Evelyn Underhill, in which she emphasizes a common trajectory in the lives of western mystics. It suggested to me a universal tendency in humans to grow in responsibility and sensitivity. Since I was an atheist I saw this as the result of growth rules for the connections between neurons, leading to expanding neuronal assemblies with increasingly delicate discrimination. So I became a neuroscientist and attempted to develop methods for visualizing the activity of many neurons. I failed at this (though for my PhD at Johns Hopkins in 1963 I did discover the three kinds of retinal photoreceptors that provide the basis of color vision), and I am now a quantitative neuroanatomist at NIH.

Failure enhanced my outlook, and through it I became convinced that our subjectivity is more real than our matter. I retain the approach of a physicist, and my preoccupation is to see how universal subjectivity operating behind the scenes has lead to the evolution of matter and life, and to processes in the brain that personalize this subjectivity.