I think another name for the observer is "awareness". Maybe because the our brain can constantly respond to things, it is said to be aware. What about a thermostat (temperature regulating system) though? I think it is aware in a way - though its options are extremely limited - it is 2 dimensional - 1 dimension for the current temperature, and 1 dimension for the current setting.
For those of you who are interested in artificial consciousness - here's a good link:
artificial consciousness project chapter 8

Hey John Clay, I take credit for that link!

Amazing how the same path can lead to so many destinations. One of the things that I discovered about my ADD was that I am not well connected to reality. If there not enough stimulus being produced, and produced RIGHT NOW, I start making up my own. Also, things that are "common sense" for others, I tend to blow off. It's good in a way, because I don't respect apparent boundaries, but I also have had a hard time of figuring out where I step out of the real stuff and into the only-in-my-head stuff. I've read the zero ontology stuff, and I find it very interesting and persuasive. But at the same time, *I* have to be very skeptical, and consciously analyze how it applies to reality. While I'm a big fan of Tao and meditation, and the zero ontology looks like an interesting way of thinking, I see no reason to assume that it's real.

IOW, there's a huge expanse of thoughtspace that is open, interesting, and worthy of exploration, but a *very* small area that is passes muster for being called "real". That doesn't deny the reality of those *thoughts*, that just denies that those thoughts have existence independant from the mind that produces them.

I'm sorry, it's just that it can gets hard to toggle so many people's replies all at once, and still make coherent responses myself. Nobody is being harsh, I think we're just getting stressed from all the repetition and you're right, it gets pretty pointless.

What can I say, what works for me, may not work for you, but whatever those things are, they can change for either of us, based on what new things we learn.

I think words like mysticism have been stigmatized by society to sound 'curved', with the scientific revolution and all, offering an explanation for 'everything'. There is nothing odd about there being a reality that we do not perceive with our immediate senses. Quantum physics is a science of a mystical nature... but I guess the word "science" makes it easier to swallow in that context. It just depends how you look at it.

As for the word supernatural, I don't see even see the point of having it in any language. There is no such thing as existence 'outside of reality'; only reality exists. It's like the dumb saying, "nothing is something."

Anyway, I just wanted to clear the stigma on those words.

That's just the thing, I'm not trying to invoke anything that doesn't exist, in my opinion; I'm just trying to show people.

Think about how it would affect our lives if more people were certain of the existence of the Soul. Then we could begin to seriously conceptualize about much more complicated things like the nature of God and what God really is; aside from a fantastic conceptualization of some Zeus-like man in the sky commanding humans to do things for no apparent reason. People will often ask what this 'God' or 'Universal Consciousness' is, without knowing anything about what they are.

If we can understand that we are built on the Laws of reality, then we can understand that how reality is has a lot to do with how we are. It is enough of a challenge to understand things like living organisms and consciousness, without delving into questions about what God is and trying to disprove God with ingorant questions like, "can God make a stone that he can not lift?" which someone posted in the "Existence of God(s)" forum, when we don't even know what it really is that we are questioning or trying to disprove.

If we can truly understand ourselves better, physically, mentally, emotionally, even philosophically, then we can begin to understand the aspects of reality that we can not observe through a microscope or telescope for that matter.

I don't believe the Spiritual realm is something supernatural (outside or reality). It just happens to be outside the visual spectrum of materialistic science, but not outside of reality. That is why I posted this thread here, in the philosophy forum.

These things should definately be investigated if we are to enrich our knowledge and understanding of the nature of the Universe and our place in it.

I think there is a lot left to the imagination in learning. Einstein formulated most of his brilliant theories which he later turned into mathematical equations my imagining how things work; he visualized something that he felt intuitively to be true, and then he proved it. Many people give him a lot of credit when it comes to science and, and use his discoveries to disprove Spiritual concepts, I bet a lot of them didn't know that he himself believed in God!

Anyway, thanks Nial (and everyone else) for participating in the discussion. I know I can be a pain, especially when I am overwhelmed with so many brilliant replies... and honestly, I don't mention it, but some of your theories are really inspiring!

[This message has been edited by Filip Sandor (edited April 18, 2001).]

I posted this over on the "we seek meaning in life" thread in the Existence of God forum, but I figure it belongs here too:

There far is too much evidence for functionalism, that Dennet points out, for Chalmers' claim that consciousness is a "fundamental force like electromagnetism" to be true.

You're missing the point of Chalmers' argument. Chalmers agrees 100% with the functionalists that physical workings of the brain can explain all of our behavior, including our speech-acts about "consciousness" or "qualia"--he just feels that a functionalist cannot account for the first-person aspects of consciousness, the fact that all these brain processes are accompanied by experiences rather than going on in the dark. Here is a post I wrote for another group on Chalmers' ideas:

--------------

> The idea of "life-force" didn't die because of people talking about life
> as an emergent property of matter; it died because people found out more
> and more about what actually goes on in living creatures.

The problem with this argument is that consciousness does not seem to be a functional problem like "life"--David Chalmers specifically differentiates between the "easy" questions about consciousness, which includes *all* functional properties of what a brain actually allows an organism to do, and the "hard" problem, which is about why these functions are accompanied by first-person experience. This is different from the question of why organisms *act* like they have something called "first-person experience," which is another functional property. I think this is really what Damasio is addressing in "The Feeling of What Happens," although naturally there is a tendency to feel that explaining the functional properties explains the whole problem away.

To see this more clearly, it helps to think about the "zombie problem." Chalmers believes that the physical world is probably "causally closed," meaning there is no magic mind-stuff causing effects that can't be understood in terms of the emergent properties of interacting matter/energy. But he still believes that first-person experience is somehow ontologically distinct from the patterns of matter/energy that seem to "give rise" to it. So, he imagines a kind of parallel universe in which every physical event that happens in our universe happens there too, but in which it all happens in the dark, with no accompanying first person experiences. This would be a universe inhabited by "zombies" who do exactly what we do, say exactly what we say, right down to a zombie Chalmers and zombie Damasio writing the same books they write in our universe (but in this universe, zombie-Chalmers would obviously be mistaken in proposing that there was a Hard Problem beyond the functional questions addressed by Damasio).

It may seem like a sort of metaphysical flight of fancy to propose that we can explain all functional properties, including our tendency to talk about this thing called "consciousness", and still be leaving something out, but the alternative is just as bad--a purely materialistic view would seem to imply that consciousness is like "cuteness", all in the eye of the beholder, which goes strongly against the feeling that I *know* I am conscious and would continue to be even if everyone else in the universe thought I was just some sort of clever Turing-test passing
fake. Chalmers suggests an ontology in which the basic stuff of reality is something like "information" which has both a subjective side and an objective side, with the link between the two sides codified in some kind of formal "theory of consciousness", and to me this looks like the most promising idea so far--there are certainly some suggestive facts about modern physics that suggest the concept of information is quite fundamental (I think 'The Bit and the Pendulum' is a good popular introduction), and we obviously have strong reason to think there's a close link between information-processing and conscious experience. There are still some serious problems with Chalmers' idea, but it's at least a promising first step in imagining a view of the universe which "takes consciousness seriously" and yet is still fundamentally naturalistic, not treating consciousness as some sort of magic soul-stuff.

--------------

Someone then argued that talking about these purely first-person aspects was totally useless and unfalsifiable...here was my response:

--------------

> Looking at neuroscience, it is actually not
> particularly hard to explain why the brain gives us self-awareness. Now,
> why self-awareness "feels" exactly like it does is a problem of qualia,
> in
> exactly the same way as "why does the color red produce the particular
> subjective sensation that it does, rather than one that 'feels' like
> something else?"
>
> The latter problem is not "hard", it is "impossible". It is an utter
> waste of time to dwell on it (does that mean much of philosophy of mind
> is
> an utter waste of time? You bet). No information, whatsoever, can ever
> be produced about it. No light can ever be shed on it. It is
> fundamentally impossible to determine any objective information about it
> whatsoever.

Obviously I disagree that it's a complete waste of time. We can't expect a "theory of consciousness" that would have computations on one side of the equation and a red-quale on the other, but it might be possible to have a theory that quantifies something like *degrees* of consciousness, a bit like how the people at the Santa Fe Institute are looking to find a rigorous theory corresponding to our intuitive notions of "complexity" (this obviously isn't a perfect analogy, since a theory of complexity would have to make successful predictions in order to be accepted, while a theory of consciousness would make no functional predictions). Of course we could never verify that such a theory is actually the correct one (we can't even verify that other human beings aren't zombies), but we might have strong reasons for suspecting it is on grounds of some kind of "elegance". For example, if John Wheeler's "it from bit" idea turned out to be true than it would have to formally define some property of "observerhood" in order to tighten up the idea of observer and world co-creating each other (the'participatory universe' idea) and if such a theory was successful, intuitively it would seem quite plausible that observerhood and consciousness were two sides of the same coin. Likewise I think the anthropic principle needs some sort of formalization to become fully comprehensible--is it just a lucky break that I find myself to be a member of the most intelligent species on the planet, or might this be a pointer to some kind of extended anthropic principle in which observerhood is a matter of degree rather than a strictly binary question? A theory of the anthropic principle would also seem to have a lot of overlap with a theory of consciousness. It from bit and a formal theory of the anthropic principle are both long shots right now, but I think they at least demonstrate that looking for a theory of first-person consciousness need not *necessarily* be a total waste of time.

--------------

Right now my best guess is that the solution to the mind/matter problem is panpsychism--the basic stuff of reality is experiences, and nothing but experiences. But these experiences are related by regular laws, so that we can view other experiences "from the outside" as physical processes, like those going on in a brain...the corrolary of this is that all things we call "physical processes" might have some limited kind of experience associated with them, although as I said a theory of consciousness might quantify the degree of consciousness of different systems.

None of this would contradict known science--it's just a sort of metaphysical reinterpretation of what the laws we discover are actually describing (I think Chalmers calls it something like 'extended naturalism'--ie a form of naturalism which is not materialism). Chalmers has a similar view, and I think Bertrand Russell also suggested something similar. And as I said, if the fundamental laws of the universe end up being very "mind-like" in the manner of "it from bit", this sort of view would become even more intuitively plausible.

Filip Sandor:
Just about higher consciousness again - in "The Handbook to Higher Consciousness", the higher centers of consciousness involve feeling less and less separate with your environment until they are indistinguishable. But I think "higher consciousness" really means to see you and others just playing roles in the game of life. By losing your sense of identity, and playing any old role (e.g. being smooth, or immature, or out-going or calm, etc) you are freed from the limitations others face who think that they *are* their roles. It allows many more possibilities although those I knew were very concerned about my behaviour. Ken Keyes said to just go along with your original role in the game but I just thought that the world could be changed better if you take a more out-going approach. (I'm usually very anti-social) And when I was changing roles, I became those people - I wasn't just superficially pretending. As I learnt that there wasn't much difference between me and others (we can act the same) I felt less and less separation - which is that Ken Keyes's definition of "higher consciousness" is.

I think by studying animals, we can work out what consciousness is.
For example, take a nest of termites (those big ones in africa and australia). A termite is an incredibly dumb creature, one that could hardly be called "aware", and who's behavior could be exactly simulated by a decent neural network program. Not even the queen is much smarter than this. But there are thousands of termites, each communicating with the next, so we get a "hive mentality" going. In toto, the hive can be called "aware". This in itself is a good case for functionalism.
If we study animals with gradiated degrees of "awareness", from just complex behaviour (simple animals), awareness (like a cat or a dog), to conceptualization (like chimpanzees, african parrots, and to a lesser degree, other mammals), to hyperconceptualization (actual thinking, and ability for language, I believe present only in humans), we could have a gradiated scale of "consciousness", and thus learn a lot more about it. Forget cognitive neuroscience just for humans, we should expand to other animals as well.

I have some views that are pretty complicated and sometimes it almost hurts my brain to think too hard about it all; it really does get complicated, the deeper you get into it, the harder it is to conceptualize what 'higher' consciousness is like.

My views on consciousness, are pretty much in harmony as far as what I know, believe and intuitively sense to be true, with this piece of literature.

Etheric Planets, Schemes of Evolution, and Our Solar System

Check it out, it's really beautiful and magnificent. It made me feel so strongly when I first read it that I ended up shedding tears upon the last sentence.

(I am really imaginative!)

[This message has been edited by Filip Sandor (edited April 19, 2001).]

I think a look to neuropsychology with its imaging techniques and its supply of schizophrenic subjects is the most promising lead for an answer to those questions. In schizophrenic conditions we see people who possess varying degrees of sense-of-selfhood, from near-average to none at all, yet they still seem to us to be themselves. I have no answer, nor even any useful speculation; just a lot of information and more questions.

Hmmm...
Well I wouldn't call that intuitive...

Well I guess you must be into astrology and all that.

Anyway about Ken Keyes again...
His 1975 he published The Handbook to Higher Consciousness, which sold over a million copies. Here are the Seven Centers of Consciousness he talked about. Unfortunately his living followers just concentrate on his writings from the 70's. In the 70's he also wrote The Hundredth Monkey. "When a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated directly mind to mind. There is a point at which, if only one more person tunes into a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone." That was based on the apparently debunked Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon. The book was really about phasing out nuclear weapons through grass-roots influence.

In 1991 he wrote Planethood which has many quotes, including one from Einstein which says that global government is necessary. He says that a democratic republic (and not a confederation of nations) is best. He talks mainly about the U.N. and how international law needs to be strengthened. He talks about the hundreds of billions of dollars spend on the military, which would hardly be necessary under one republic.
The 1995 book, Your Road Map to Lifelong Happiness, written just before he died, talks about evolution, the components that make up our brain, quirks in our brain and developmental psychology. There seems to be nothing mystical in it at all! It has a large emphasis on love and happiness though. His sections on evolution and the brain seem to say that there is nothing unusual about us - except that we have a lot more neurons in our precortex(?) which lets us think using language. So he seems to have gone beyond his "head in the clouds" ideas though his Living Love organisation hasn't.
Anyway, enlightenment isn't a destination, it is the ongoing journey. Just like happiness.