Critique Against Universal Consciousness

Source article: https://adhilaa.substack.com/p/you-are-the-universe-experiencing?r=4719dc&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true

In this piece, I will attempt to explain why the self — the assumption that you are an individual, separate from everything else — is an illusion. And why understanding this is the key to escaping the cycle of needless suffering, not just for individuals but the human species as a whole

If X is an illusion it requires someone believing in or in someway predisposed to affirm X when reality is not-X. But who believes that they are fundamentally separate from everything else?

No matter how you answer this, you will realize that the ideas you have about yourself are created by society and your mind.

Why is that a problem? Most ideas comes from mind and society. Like money, internet, reddit etc.

The natural conclusion is that you’re just a body, with consciousness inside of it. When people think of themselves and where this consciousness resides, they usually point to their brain. You are this awareness that sits behind your eyes and controls your body. I mean, that’s what science tells us, consciousness comes from our brain. Right?

Scientists and philosophers would be typically critical of hommunculus and Cartesian Theatre views of consciousness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

But where does this environment end and you begin? Your body is constantly exchanging particles with the world around it. Every breath pulls molecules from the atmosphere into your cells and every exhale releases them back. The sunlight that hits your body is absorbed by your cells. The food you eat becomes your muscles, your blood, your thoughts.

Just because there is no absolute ontological boundary, doesn't mean there is no functional informational boundary. There is still some pattern here, we can feed pictures of bodies and train AI to recognize and "segment" body as an object from environment. Moreover, boundaries can be formalized in terms of Markov Blanket and other means like Levin's Cognitive Cone: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02688/full

Your thoughts are something you observe, rather than create. This gets a little trippy, so please stay with me. Try to predict your next thought before it arrives. You can’t. Any prediction you make is itself a thought. What about if I told you to think of a random word. Where did this word come from? Did you choose to think of that word or did it just… appear?

To me this array of question seems to presuppose a naive hommunculus like view. As if there is some observer sitting over there, and there is some cleanly separable "observer-choices", and some cleanly separable "observer-actions".

Instead of questioning this clean-structure -- you are instead questioning if this "observer-choices" exist or if "observer-actions" are just events that go on by itself. Yet, you are still keeping on here a subtle dualism of some "observer" hommunculus standing behind - possibly passively.

More realistic picture, given the hummonculus fallacy, would seem to be there is no such clean-structure, there is no "observer" as such, rather "experiential-causal-acts" in transaction with the rest of the cognitive economy -- where there is no "observer" that separates from "actions". Moreover, how exactly the causal profile works out for experiences is more of a scientific question and need not be transparent. Even from phenomenology, this looks like attention allocation - as a form of voting on cognitive direction is one thing it's doing.

Try to predict your next thought before it arrives. You can’t. Any prediction you make is itself a thought.

So you are basically asking us to think your next thought without thinking your next thought? Why should inability to do that have any implication? Are you picking this up from Sam Harris?

Did you choose to think of that word or did it just… appear?

But what if the "just appear" is the choice-enacted? Basically it seems like you are suggesting that there has to be some sort of gap as if a thinking about thought - then thought, for thought to be genuinely count as a "choice". But that makes no sense as a demand.

On the other hand if the "observer" is genuinely not doing anything - not causing anything - you have more problems at hand. How can their be even thoughts about "observer"? Or any writings about it?

Thoughts are first created in your subconscious and appear in the consciousness a few milliseconds after. Even how you move your body is not up to you. Neuroscientist Benjamin Libet found that brain activity initiating a voluntary movement begins up to 550 milliseconds before any conscious awareness of intending to move. Your body was already acting before you knew you had decided to act.

First, Libet himself allowed "free won't" (free will to reject an action).

Second, Libet has been invalidated empirically: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1210467109
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/09/free-will-bereitschaftspotential/597736/

Ok, so now we’ve established that you don’t exist as the individual you thought you were. But here you still are. Reading this. Aware. Something is experiencing these words right now. Something is considering these ideas, feeling the resistance or recognition they produce.

Why think so? There are "experience-events" sure, there is a retention of just-past stiched into a specious present-moment with access to long-term memory giving a sense of continuity, sure, there are functional capacities like differential sensitivity sure (which some calls awareness), but why believe in this suppose non-acting "awareness" as a metaphysical thing on its own -- experiencing things?

Why is "Something is feeling the resistence" the right view as opposed "there is a reflexive manifest feeling of resistence", why should there be a separate "someting" "having" things, rather than feelings being just a reflexive manifest event participating in a complex causal economy?

To be clear, I am not saying "Something is feeling the resistence" is an invalid statement to speak of merely that some systems are being affected by a feeling that contributes to specific behavior. But that's not what you are trying to get at, you seem to be trying to get at something like a witness consciousness - that's what I am questioning from a more process-relational perspective.

Ok, so now we’ve established that you don’t exist as the individual you thought you were.

The other general issue about the above arguments is that it seems to set out a hard dichotomy of "either there is a sharp line between x and y, or x and y are not different or not separate". Yet, in reality many things can be graded. There is no sharp line between two species in the evolutionary tree of life, yet it would be absurd to say human biology is not different from or separate from single-cellular organisms.

The issue with trying to answer this question through neuroscience alone is that consciousness may lie outside of tangible, material reality — or may be the very thing that creates it. Even if we could perfectly map every neuron in the brain, it still wouldn’t explain how any of it gives rise to subjective awareness. What if consciousness does not come from the brain at all, but is the most fundamental feature of reality itself?

Typically we are implicitly and explicitly comparing hypothesis that are logically consistent with empirical data (empirically adequate) based on theoretical virtues. It is controversial how virtues "consciousness as fundamental reality" is compared to everything else and I feel like the substack doesn't invest on this point as deeply -- doesn't try to respond to say Type-B physicalist positions.

Moreover, another point is that consciousness can be thought of in two different senses (among many other):

1. As the common property of experientiality/phenomenality present in all conscious experiences.

2. As a "subtance"-like thing or witness-being that underlie variations of experiential contents.

Philosophers are more often talking of (1). It is not yet clear to me that something like (2) even needs to exist at all to explain anything - let alone considering whether the universe is consciousness in (2)-sense or not.

More fundamental, this implicit substance-property framework (even if it's not verbalized here), is also itself questionable.

And these fields may all be one

We have to be also a bit careful about. At the end of the day, fields are mathematical formalisms, and we have to be careful of taking literally visual imaginations of fields imposed in space. Moreover, philosophically there is a question about how much scientific realism can be adopted -- some would argue for taking scientific models as merely models useful for prediction and intervention and while they may be tracking something structurally real they may not portraying the ultimate nature of things: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04528-9#:~:text=The%20pragmatic%20scientific%20realism%20debate,%2C%20prudent%2C%20or%20most%20practical.

This also harkens against literalist block universe interpretations from relativity.

At the quantum level, particles do not have definite properties until they are measured or observed. Before observation, a particle exists as a wave of probabilities — a superposition of all possible states simultaneously. It is the act of observation — of interaction — that collapses this wave of possibilities into a single definite outcome.

This is not a philosophical interpretation.

The way it is framed it IS somewhat of a philosophical interpretation, which is clearer if we put out an alternative interpretation that is also experimentally consistent - interpretations that take a more epistemic stance about nature of superposition and "wave of probabilities". Your ontological framing (using is-and-exist-terms) IS an interpretation - one among many others.

You can see alternatives here:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-bayesian/

This leads to one of the most radical ideas in all of physics — the block universe, also called eternalism. If time is just another dimension like space, then past, present and future all exist simultaneously. The entire history of the universe — every moment that has ever happened or will happen — exists as a single four dimensional structure. What we experience as time passing is not the universe changing — it is our consciousness moving through a structure that already exists in its entirety.

Right. But this isn't the only game in town.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/phpe.12167?domain=author&token=TH7HEZTHWRYQYM5FEPXQ
https://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Lee-Smolin/dp/0544245598
etc.

At the fundamental level, you are not a collection of particles moving through empty space. You are a temporary pattern of excitations in fields that extend across the entire universe. The boundary between you and the world around you does not exist at the level of the fields themselves.

Yes, but I am not sure how realist we should be about fields as fundamentals. Second, even if we grant that there is a question about semantics. Why is it best to say "I" refers to the field -- not just the temporary pattern of excitiations and some others that relate to that excitations in interesting way -- carving out a specific location in the 4D block?

As an example. The same argument you made applies also to my spectacles. But we cannot communicate if every thing now is made out to refer to the universe-quantum-field-as-a-whole.
In practice, by my spectales, even if the spectales is ultimately an excitation of the universal-field-as-whole, I am referring to specific functionally carve-able patterns and some specific symmetry group of transformations (which I may not consciously know, but something that is cognitively modeled - thereby certain transformations of the spectacles view and positions are still considered as preserving "sameness" and certain others (e.g if I bring a hammer and crush it) don't).

As an analogy why should I now buy that the "semantics" of "I" should refer to the universe as a whole if the semantics of spectacles doesn't?

Also what about alternative views that semantics of person may be simply indeterminate or lack consensus - e.g. (https://philarchive.org/rec/MILHTB) -- why does this semantics of I - as universe gain privilege?

The other issue is that, even if the spectacles are just excitations in the universal field or whatever, I t would be absurd to call the universe as an "universal spectacle" -- why? because it excites into matter other kinds of thing, "spectacles"-pattern is not something special.

So even if some excitation-events are conscious-experience, what licenses us calling the universe as universal consciousness? This may make sense to call if you can argue that not just some but ANY excitation in the universe is a conscious-experience, even the spectacle is constituted by conscious experiences -- and so on. But what is there to support that view?