I just read Galen Strawson's "Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism", and this footnote got my attention:
"Note that if temporality goes, i.e. not just spacetime but temporality in any form, then experience also goes, given that experience requires time. One of the fine consequences of this is that there has never been any suffering. But no theory of reality can be right that has the consequence that there has never been any suffering".
If somehow this idea were to be right, every element of our lives, such as individuality, language, religion, philosophy, science, art, violence, war, and an endless etcetera, would be a symptom of our biological problems, because these problems would have provided the spacetime information (NE) to conceive the world as we know it. In short, the world we have built throughout history would be the logical world for us to build while experiencing dualism (E/NE).
The following formula could summarize the scope of this idea.
EE or exclusive experience of the mind as our form of existence implies the absolute realization of our fields of study in the sense that knowledge (or investigation, for that matter) would be unnecessary and logically impossible since there would be no subject-object relation for any investigation to happen. In other words, the present idea implies that the change from EE to E/NE was the change from omniscience to absolute ignorance.
This formula can get particularly interesting when applied to the field of Psychology, because the change from EE to E/NE would be the change from absolute consciousness to absolute unconsciousness. Therefore, Freud's appearance in our history would have been defined since the very first moment of dualism, because the unconscious would be a constant in human life as for someone to structure a field of study around it. But perhaps a more relevant idea here is that our present unconscious would be our absolute consciousness before dualism, and that our present consciousness is only the spacetime consciousness we can have while experiencing dualism.
First of all, the mind-body problem comes down to the logical impossibility, in our subject-object relation, for objective knowledge (science) to reach that which makes it possible: the subject, the mind, consciousness. In other words, we can have objective knowledge of every element that makes consciousness possible but it will never be objective knowledge of consciousness. Objective knowledge of consciousness will always come in the form of the actual experience of consciousness. And science, again, doesn't have access to this experience, even just to confirm objectively that it is happening. To illustrate this matter, we have a neuroscientist in our days claiming that consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. This panpsychic scientist, by the name of Christof Koch, holds that all animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious, and that even the internet could be conscious. And the only thing that keeps his claim from being an objective truth or falsehood is, again, the mind-body problem.
But the idea I'm trying to get across here is about the logical impossibility for religion, philosophy and science to surpass the mere assumption of God, the Being and consciousness, respectively. This shows that the claim of a spacetimeless unity, whether it's God, the Being or consciousness, will be arbitrary (an oxymoronic act of faith, if you will) as long as it is done from dualism, plurality or the subject-object perspective. In any case, a scientist would be on better grounds for his arbitrary claim based on both the experience of consciousness and the example of the Internet as results of the interaction of a plurality of neurons and computers. Whereas the religious spacetimeless God and the philosophical spacetimeless Being will always be nowhere to be observed or experienced in order to be explained as consequences of the spacetime plurality we're living.
Therefore, the question if science will ever explain the universe as a spacetimeless unity can only have a negative answer, because science can only confirm if the criteria is met for the experience of that unity to happen (Koch's theory of consciousness). So, the moment science tells us that every element in the universe is interacting with one another, the moment we will have a scientific explanation of the universe as to presume the experience of consciousness, God, the Being, whatever. In short, science would confirm Strawson's idea that physicalism entails panpsychism.
Now, the reason to call this masterpiece of philosophical theory universal communism is the analogy I find between the subject getting rid of himself in his way to reality and Marx's capitalism doing the same in its way to socialism. But then again, this literary accident could also be called Inverted Buddhism, that is, the idea that suffering causes the experience of limitation and not the other way around. If this were to be the case, we wouldn't need all those boring meditation lessons we still see in our days, but instead we'd need to start healing each other and stop screwing up the planet, the universe, the Internet, whatever, i.e. ourselves. In short, we'd need to become old school christian missionaries, Green Peace members, human rights watchers, world peace activists, etcetera. The end.
"Note that if temporality goes, i.e. not just spacetime but temporality in any form, then experience also goes, given that experience requires time. One of the fine consequences of this is that there has never been any suffering. But no theory of reality can be right that has the consequence that there has never been any suffering".
Now, here's something I've been going about recently that involves absolute absence of suffering:
Experiential (E) = mind.
Non experiential (NE) = body.
If we suppose, let's say, for the sake of argument, that E is humans' exclusive nature, then, an interruption of E must have occurred in order for NE to have emerged. So, an immediate, non magical, non metaphysical explanation for NE's emergence could be that of a biological problem. In other words, the idea here would be that absolute health maintains human life in accordance with its nature -exclusive experiential (EE), and that illness, on the other hand, causes NE's emergence.
If somehow this idea were to be right, every element of our lives, such as individuality, language, religion, philosophy, science, art, violence, war, and an endless etcetera, would be a symptom of our biological problems, because these problems would have provided the spacetime information (NE) to conceive the world as we know it. In short, the world we have built throughout history would be the logical world for us to build while experiencing dualism (E/NE).
The following formula could summarize the scope of this idea.
EE or exclusive experience of the mind as our form of existence implies the absolute realization of our fields of study in the sense that knowledge (or investigation, for that matter) would be unnecessary and logically impossible since there would be no subject-object relation for any investigation to happen. In other words, the present idea implies that the change from EE to E/NE was the change from omniscience to absolute ignorance.
This formula can get particularly interesting when applied to the field of Psychology, because the change from EE to E/NE would be the change from absolute consciousness to absolute unconsciousness. Therefore, Freud's appearance in our history would have been defined since the very first moment of dualism, because the unconscious would be a constant in human life as for someone to structure a field of study around it. But perhaps a more relevant idea here is that our present unconscious would be our absolute consciousness before dualism, and that our present consciousness is only the spacetime consciousness we can have while experiencing dualism.
Now, this line of thought came about by mere accident, during a moment of literary creation, while shuffling around a variety of ideas on a piece of paper. And the actual accident that occurred was an interpretation of the third chapter of the book of Genesis as a message about the beginning of dualism due to the first biological problem in our species.
Life in the Garden of Eden was interpreted as life in the form of absolute health or EE. The original sin was interpreted as the first biological problem that caused NE's emergence. Whatever this problem was, it affected the woman before the man due to their biological differences and condemned the future generations to its inheritance. Biological difference also meant a natural advantage for the man over the woman in the construction of the world based on dualism. The fate of the earth announced in this biblical passage was interpreted as a logical consequence in a subject-object relation, as opposed to the experience of unity that would have preceded dualism.
Having done this interpretation, and understanding what was behind it, it was only logical to aim the analysis at the character held by christians as both free of sin and the savior of mankind from the original sin inherited from our first parents. And the coincidences that I have found in the gospels go from the very image of Jesus Christ's body in the cross (NE's symbol), to the message of love among humans, and to a more substantial content (as far as Philosophy is concerned) found in John 17:21-23, where Jesus talks like a perfect eleatic addressing the Being:
(21) that they all may be one, as you father, are in me, and I in you; that they also may be one in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. (22) And the glory which you gave me I have given them, that they may be one just as we are one: (23) I in them, and you in me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that you have sent me, and have loved them as you have loved me.
Now, an analogy.
Internet = experiential
Hardware = non experiential
We are rational computers designed for the exclusive (spacetimeless) experience of the Internet that at some point got disconnected due to a failure. Our rationality is leading us through an investigation of ourselves in the (spacetime) dimension of the hardware and towards the recovery of the spacetimelessness we are designed for.
As far as Philosophy is concerned in this analogy, Parmenides would be the first computer to discover the logical (mind-body) problem in our lives, and the rest of Western Philosophy would be simply a debate around the same problem over and over. This debate would end, as well as our spacetime history, when we recover EE as our form of existence (Hegel's Absolute?).
So, if I were to be right on this one, that is, if it were the case that by mere accident I hit the jackpot that the big guys have been aiming for since the origins of Philosophy, then, the natural order of things would be that absolute health (immortality, really) keeps us not only from the experience of time but also from experiencing life in the shapes and forms (space) in which we presently do. In short, EE would maintain our experience of the continuous substance of which everything is made of (energy?).
For this matter, a metaphor that I'm not too fond of (but I don't seem to find a more precise one as of now) is that scene from the movie The Matrix when Neo ceases to perceive walls, buildings and agents and perceives instead the code in which everything is programmed. So, for the untrained (ill) eye Neo would be performing miracles when he resurrects and stops the .50 Desert Eagle's bullets that the agents are firing, but for the expert (absolute healthy) eye he is just being the code (substance) that the agents, the bullets, the speed of the bullets and Neo himself are made of.
In other words, when Neo becomes one with The Matrix he no longer engages life from a subject-object perspective for he is no longer a subject. He is pure thought thinking itself. He has reached Schopenhauer's level of consciousness where "a man relinquishes the common way of looking at things, gives up tracing, under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason, their relations to each other, the final goal of which is always a relation to his own will; if he thus ceases to consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither of things, and looks simply and solely at the what; if, further, he does not allow abstract thought, the concepts of the reason, to take possession of his consciousness, but, instead of all this, gives the whole power of his mind to perception, sinks himself entirely in this, and lets his whole consciousness be filled with the quiet contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether a landscape, a tree, a mountain, a building, or whatever it may be; inasmuch as he loses himself in this object (to use a pregnant German idiom), i.e., forgets even his individuality, his will, and only continues to exist as the pure subject, the clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object alone were there, without any one to perceive it, and he can no longer separate the perceiver from the perception, but both have become one, because the whole consciousness is filled and occupied with one single sensuous picture; if thus the object has to such an extent passed out of all relation to something outside it, and the subject out of all relation to the will, then that which is so known is no longer the particular thing as such; but it is the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectivity of the will at this grade; and, therefore, he who is sunk in this perception is no longer individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; but he is pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge".
It's clear that Neo is a metaphor of JC. And it's also clear the implication that reality would consist in being some sort of universal substance as to perform acts like turning water into wine, walking on water, changing physical appearance and whatnot crazy stuff we read in the bible. But as crazy as it may sound, there's another passage in the gospel of John where Jesus Christ himself, according to John (if they ever existed), seems to explain that which allowed him to perform such wonders and that which would allow us to perform just as well and even better. And I'll be damned If I didn't find another interesting match:
John 14:8-12
(8)Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us." (9)Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father'? (10)Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. (11)Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves. (12)"Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father.
Now, it might seem as though this would be the perfect theory for christians to explain what the hell they've been talking about for the last 2,000 years. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see exactly why they would reject it instead and condemn its author straight to the sixth circle of Dante's inferno -even though this theory would be about love and nothing but necessary love among humans for the sake of our realization (a universal communism, for the less romantic). And the reason to suspect christians' rejection is that there is neither space nor time for evil in this theory -forget about free will. If anything, evil would be us performing the logical consequences of suffering and turning into freudian cases in all shapes and levels generation after generation (Julian Jaynes' brain dualism in action?).
This idea in particular has certain implications that could be relevant to mention. Basically, one is to wonder why is it that we are not naturally committed to avoid our own and other people's suffering if our realization depends on it. And the answer I have found for this is that love or whatever biochemical process meant for the realization of our species would encounter, in the exact opposite direction, the behavior logically caused by the experience of NE, spacetime, individuality, plurality, etc. In other words, despite our natural disposition for self preservation, dualism can lead us to self destruction without the privilege of perceiving such destruction as our own because in the subject/object relation the object seems external and expendable to the subject despite the scientific fact and the scientific knowledge that they're both one and the same.
So, to summarize all this quasi religious pseudo philosophical woo woo mumbo jumbo: can we imagine ourselves being only the mind? The answer is, "Yes, we can". The fact that we can do such thing is the reason dualism remains in our everyday experience and, of course, in our modern philosophical discussions. John Searle, for example, our american philosopher, he tells us that there's really nothing to the mind-body problem and that we just have to address consciousness as, yes, ontologically subjective, but also objectively explainable -like pain, digestion or any other process of the human body. And one cannot but agree with Dr. Searle, but the idea that consciousness is ontologically subjective and objectively explainable is simply a confirmation of our empirical dualism as much as it can be (dis)solved by way of scientific explanation. In other words, no matter how far down the scientific road we go, the relation that we have with the objective elements of our existence, namely, our bodies, will always be the type of relation that we have with our cars or with any other object of the universe, that is, a subject-object relation -which is the cause of the philosophical discussion, to begin with. So, as far as dualism is concerned in our present lives, scientifically, we're good, but, empirically, we're still screwed. And this is the reason for universal communism to be considered, for it could be the solution for our empirical dualism.
So, being that we can imagine ourselves being only the mind, the idea here is to take the exercise to its complete and absolute level, that is, to assume that we are completely and absolutely the mind. No body, no brain, NE or any of that crap involved in our existence whatsoever. To cut to the chase, according to my interpretation of Genesis 3, when god asks Adam, "who told you that you were naked?", he's really asking (considering that Adam would have been naked since his creation), "who told you that you were a body?". And what is wrong with being a body? Well, nothing really. Except that life is spacetimeless if we are the mind and the exact opposite if we are the body. And why does it have to be a biological problem the cause of the body's emergence? Well, let's say that it's merely an alternative to the devil in the form of a talking snake religious version, given that, as I mentioned before, there is neither space nor time for that character in the present theory.
The Internet analogy helps us again to get an accurate picture of the former scenario, because what I'm saying here is that as long as we are connected to each other we won't have the spacetime experience of the hardware but only the spacetimeless experience of the Internet. But as soon as we experience the hardware a disconnection from the internet is implied. So, if we apply this analogy to our interpretation of Genesis 3, the Internet would be the biblical god asking computer Adam, "Who told you that you are the hardware? And the concern behind this question would not be the hardware itself but the logical implication of its experience.
So, again, if somehow I hit the philosophical jackpot as to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied, Genesis chapter 3 would be a message about the beginning of dualism (spacetime) in human life.
And just when you think this could not get any better, the next question seems rather inevitable: if this is just a biological phase we're going through, why Jesus Christ? What could he do that nature could not do for itself? (one can change nature for god if the problem of anthropomorphizing nature arises). And this is the best I could do for an answer.
First we suppose that JC is part of nature just like any of us. So, whatever he's doing, it's really nature doing it. Secondly, we suppose that history as we know it is indeed humans' logical behavior under the influence of spacetime. Ok, with those two ifs in mind, the following scenario is to be considered:
Since spacetime experience will always produce the history we are living, then, our history can be known a priori by an observer who has knowledge of such constant. So, assuming the connection between Jesus and Genesis 3, as well as his intervention in our history, his character could be explained not only as an observer who knows a priori our past, present and future, but also as someone who could have used that knowledge to plant the necessary message, at the specific time, as to guarantee our return to life in accordance with his sender: God, Nature, the Internet, whatever.
This speculation of Jesus Christ's role in our history implies perhaps the most dramatic idea for an event that would be waiting for us in the future. Because, on the one hand, we have the conclusion that christians are perfectly right when they say that Jesus saved humanity already. That is, from the perspective explained before, he would have planted already the message that would be consequently inevitable for us to comprehend sometime in the future and that would lead us back to live in accordance with god, nature, whatever. But the dramatic element here would be that the comprehension of this message (whatever it may be, concretely) would make us look back not only at JC's direct intervention in our history, understanding exactly the logics of what he did, but also at our entire history, with the same clear understanding of the logical path we've been following.
Now, the way I see it, again if all this rather fantascious account of things turns out to be the way nature is working, the field of study to complete this paradigm of unity or universal communism would have to be science, because religiously and philosophically the subject is, in principle, immediately exhausted. But this idea takes us back to the core of the mind-body problem as explained before in reference to Searle's philosophical project, because if reality is indeed the spacetimeless unity claimed on mere faith and on logical grounds by christians and philosophers, respectively, then, scientists would eventually explain the universe (or whatever we call everything that exists) also as a spacetimeless unity. And to think of the possibility of such explanation ever happening led me to the following perspective of the mind-body problem.
First of all, the mind-body problem comes down to the logical impossibility, in our subject-object relation, for objective knowledge (science) to reach that which makes it possible: the subject, the mind, consciousness. In other words, we can have objective knowledge of every element that makes consciousness possible but it will never be objective knowledge of consciousness. Objective knowledge of consciousness will always come in the form of the actual experience of consciousness. And science, again, doesn't have access to this experience, even just to confirm objectively that it is happening. To illustrate this matter, we have a neuroscientist in our days claiming that consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. This panpsychic scientist, by the name of Christof Koch, holds that all animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious, and that even the internet could be conscious. And the only thing that keeps his claim from being an objective truth or falsehood is, again, the mind-body problem.
But the idea I'm trying to get across here is about the logical impossibility for religion, philosophy and science to surpass the mere assumption of God, the Being and consciousness, respectively. This shows that the claim of a spacetimeless unity, whether it's God, the Being or consciousness, will be arbitrary (an oxymoronic act of faith, if you will) as long as it is done from dualism, plurality or the subject-object perspective. In any case, a scientist would be on better grounds for his arbitrary claim based on both the experience of consciousness and the example of the Internet as results of the interaction of a plurality of neurons and computers. Whereas the religious spacetimeless God and the philosophical spacetimeless Being will always be nowhere to be observed or experienced in order to be explained as consequences of the spacetime plurality we're living.
Therefore, the question if science will ever explain the universe as a spacetimeless unity can only have a negative answer, because science can only confirm if the criteria is met for the experience of that unity to happen (Koch's theory of consciousness). So, the moment science tells us that every element in the universe is interacting with one another, the moment we will have a scientific explanation of the universe as to presume the experience of consciousness, God, the Being, whatever. In short, science would confirm Strawson's idea that physicalism entails panpsychism.
Universal Communism.
Finally, universal communism is a form of life where the subject-object relation is suppressed by living the fact that the subject and the object are one and the same. It is a socioeconomic organization where health replaces money as the currency between its members and where reality is the only good being traded. So, if one individual is ill, for instance, the rest will engage in his cure above anything else, because they know reality is at risk if health is not reestablished. In philosophical jargon, health is ontological in universal communism because being ill or unhealthy is being unreal on account of the spacetime experience.
Now, the reason to call this masterpiece of philosophical theory universal communism is the analogy I find between the subject getting rid of himself in his way to reality and Marx's capitalism doing the same in its way to socialism. But then again, this literary accident could also be called Inverted Buddhism, that is, the idea that suffering causes the experience of limitation and not the other way around. If this were to be the case, we wouldn't need all those boring meditation lessons we still see in our days, but instead we'd need to start healing each other and stop screwing up the planet, the universe, the Internet, whatever, i.e. ourselves. In short, we'd need to become old school christian missionaries, Green Peace members, human rights watchers, world peace activists, etcetera. The end.