Roger Penrose is a Nobel prizewinning physicist. He has pointed out that “artificial intelligence” can never be conscious. He bases this not on discovery, but on a fundamental law of mathematics; an equivalent to Godels Incompleteness Theorum. No matter how fast machines calculate, they can never become conscious.
What then is consciousness?
For TS Eliot “The point of intersection of the timeless with time, is an occupation for the saint”
”At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is” TS Eliot, Burnt Norton
“The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint” TS Eliot, Dry Salvages
”To be conscious is not to be in time”
” “In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement.” David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order
It seems to me what we call “me” – our ego – is spun up as we develop from a foetus. Something like candyfloss at the fun fair where a stick is held within a spinning sugar stranding machine so that this wonderful pink confection arises seemingly from nowhere. I remember the mixture of awe and anticipation as a child as it magically appeared from nowhere.
If that’s a helpful image, then what is the stick from which our ego is spun? In a material sense of course it is our genes and the physical bodies of our parents. The sugar that adheres is our bodily experience. Our ego is a confection of embodiment. Our particularly experienced ego, our very selves in this life are the latest manifestation of emergence that has been unfolding since the Big Bang and the accretion of the earth and moon 4.6 billion years ago and the emergence of life 3.7 billion years ago. Life evolving through single cells and dinosaurs to humans. We are just the latest, and not the last, expression of life. What though is the point of our ego, It will die. What trace will be left, and for what purpose? This candyfloss will re-merge with all that is as our individual body fades. Why have this sweet separated space in which we become?
Carl Sagan said “ we are the way the cosmos gets to know itself”.
And that knowing is through relationship with other parts of the embodied universe. In that way something new emerges. Something like fabric created from weft and warp of individual fibres – each in turn spun from plaited ropes of our individualities.
Maybe a way then to think about this is imagining our individual candyfloss combined into a rope or plait with others?
Marion Woodman, a Canadian Jungian Analyst, was a source of deep and accessible wisdom. She recorded a series of talks as “Sitting by the Well”. These are compelling listening. They offer entrancing insights into the wisdom to be gained by listening to and through our body.
“The body has a wisdom of its own. However, slowly and circuitously that wisdom manifests, once it is experienced it is a foundation, a basis of knowing that gives confidence to the ego. To reach its wisdom requires absolute concentration: dropping the mind into the body, breathing into whatever is ready to be released, and allowing the process of expression until the negative dammed up energy is out, making room for the positive energy, genuine Light, to flood in” Marion Woodman
She points out that the word – matter – shares a common root with – mater ; which of course means mother.
In the years before her death in 2017 she talked technological evolution as matter itself coming to consciousness. This echos the work in the 1950’s by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin for instance within the “Phenomenon of Man”.
”Matter is spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Others also focus on embodiment as the intersection of spirit and world – for instance David Bohm, TS Eliot and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What distinguishes Marion Woodman is that in her talks and writing she grounds this into easily understood and practical steps.
I really recommend anyone to listen to Sitting by the Well, . Most audible book services offer a free trial period, within which you can hear them…
All is always in flux. Change is really all that is permanent. We have two attitudes to this. In one, we are backward looking. We want to slow or stop change, to live in the past. This leads to life full of fear. We are nonetheless dragged along with the movement of all that is. I guess there is another approach, which is to bury our head and anaesthetise ourself. Drink, drugs, materialism..
The other approach is to dive in to the flow and look forward with hope, expecting good. This does require us to abandon and live at least partly outside our ego – becoming willingly identified with all others. Effectively to love our neighbour as ourselves.
None of us, certainly not me, find this easy. But it seems to me that this is at least an aspiration..
I believe that the current state of Israel is a tragedy that could have been avoided; and a wasted opportunity.There was (and is?) an alternative. This was set out by Martin Buber, whose book “I and Thou” set up the Philosophy of Relation. He opposed the views of Weizmann and Ben Gurion. Essentially his vision was for the cooperative development of respectful, peaceful, equal and creative society between Jews and Arabs.
In 1925 he co-founded Brith Shalom – The Covenant of Peace – which set out this vision. He fled Austria and Germany during the Nazi holocaust, but persisted with this message. In his 1947 tract “Questions and Answers. The Jewish Settlement of Palestine” he directly addressed the potential for conflict and advocated a path of peace, respect and deep listening. He deplored Jewish terrorism (for instance the attack on the King David Hotel). His vision was for restriction of Jewish immigration, a mutually interdependent society with a common economy for all – Arabs and Jew alike, and the creative growth of a new nation by the efforts and for the benefit of all.
He saw the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea as a melting pot. Where peoples and cultures could meet and thrive creatively. Where East, West, South and North could come together. A nexus. This view was perhaps natural to his family. They were Hasidic Jews from melting pot of the Polish-Lithuanian Common Wealth. The country that was once the largest in Europe and which stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea with cultural centres in Poland and Ukraine.
A history of thought and listening and in many languages. Martin Buber spoke and read German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Dutch.
It is a tragedy for the world that this path was not followed.
Walking with psychotherapists. Here’s what I found. Dialogue is a way to align feeling and thinking – within us and between us. Try walking with someone in nature. You don’t need to say anything even. You’ll be surprised. I was..
I’d love to know what you think.
This is the first of three short videos which discussthe power of dialogue, with original research amongst psychoanalysts. There are two more over the next two days. What do you think? I’d love to hear!
Through this whirlpool ent’ring the clouds (trailing glory)
Through tongues of fire she arose
(To be won)
The journey of water starts as molecule – HoH – evaporated from that sea, arising to form clouds, alive with brownian motion. On the one hand water represents eternal bonding – with the hydrogen and the oxygen atoms held-together through their covalent cloud of electrons through endless cycles of rebirth. A trinity. On the other – they associate variously – in droplets falling, through the rivers to the ocean. Together water retains a memory. (Mixing memory and desire). Water has a triple-point – at 0.1 degrees celcius at atmospheric pressure – where it’s different forms – solid, liquid and gas – are in equilibrium. The phase-change between ice and gas without passing through the liquid state – is called sublimation. An image of resurrection.
