Seflf-causality of the reality of consciousness.
Posted: Fri Oct 28, 2022 3:19 pm
I would like to share a metaphysical hypothesis within the framework of idealism. This hypothesis addresses and resolves a number of fundamental metaphysical problems such as the problem of the prime cause (“why there is something rather than nothing?”), the question whether the MAL is metacognitive or not, and if it is metacognitive then how we can reconcile this with the suffering of the living beings in the world (“the problem of evil”). I will follow the Bernardo’s terminology of calling the reality as “MAL”, even though it can be interchangeably called by many alternative names (Consciousness, God, Divine etc).
The first point to consider is the problem of the prime cause. There are a few options here:
1. Reality exists without any cause. This position is rather an admittance of inability to provide any plausible solution to the problem.
2. There is a prime cause of reality that caused it into existence. But this proposition is problematic because it does not provide a closure: we can apply the same question to the prime cause – what is the prime-prime cause for the prime cause to exist, and then what is the prime-prime-prime cause etc. It’s “turtles all the way down”. Obviously, this solution is implausible.
3. Reality contains its own cause. This solution makes sense because if there is a prime cause for reality to exist, then such prime cause must itself be real and therefore must inevitably be part of reality. However, this requires an assumption for the existence of a self-referential causal loop within the fabric of reality.
4. "New mysterianism" - there may be a cause for the reality to exist, but we do not know it and may never know it because of the lack of sufficient cognitive capacity to know it. Just like #1, this position is another way to admit our inability to provide any plausible solution to the problem.
Now, how can we apply the option #3 to idealism? Here is the proposed scheme:
1. Let’s start from the Bernardo’s idealistic paradigm, from the original state of non-metacognitive MAL that, by its instinctive will, imagines/manifests the world as its own excitation and dissociates into alters in order to experience it. The question can be asked: where did this will to create came from? Why exactly this will to create the world in the direction of evolution of sentience and not any other kind of will (for example, a will to simply rest in the peace of its unexcited state)? In Bernardo’s version of idealism this question remains unanswered. We will return to this question later in #4.
2. Consequently, within the arrow of time from the perspective of the alters, the process of evolution of the world progresses and the alters evolve into sentient beings with progressively higher developed cognitive abilities until they become able to attain metacognition and realization of their own fundamental nature as consciousness.
3. At some point in the evolution the cognitive abilities of the alters become so powerful that they make the MAL itself also highly evolved and metacognitive when they merge with it at the end of their evolutionary paths. This soul’s evolution may involve ascending through multiple hierarchical levels of cognition. At the end of this evolutionary process the MAL reaches the state of omnipotence and omniscience beyond the limits of space and time that monotheistic religions refer to as “God”.
4. At this point the MAL knows that in order for itself and for such omniscient state to exist it had to go through the whole process of evolution from the instinctive to metacognitive state through the development of cognition of individual alters, so it was necessary to have the telos and will to evolve implanted in the original non-metacognitive state of the MAL. However, at this point MAL abides beyond time, which allows it to act at any moment of its own evolution and of the historical apparent axis of time of the apparent world. This makes it possible to for the MAL to retro-causally “implant” the telos and will to evolve (and may be even the very ability to have conscious experience) into its own original instinctive state whereby creating its own cause to evolve and exist.
Now, this paradigm gives answers to a number of metaphysical problems:
1. The problem of prime cause is obviously resolved: the MAL creates the cause of its own existence by creating the process of its own evolution from the primitive instinctive state into the final omniscient state. This answers the question of “why there is something rather than nothing”. Everything that has an existential possibility to exist does exist. In other words, the existential possibility is the same as existential necessity. Is the reality of self-causing, self-manifesting and self-aware consciousness is definitely the reality that have the existential possibility of exist, the proof of it is our own existence as conscious self-aware thinking activity. But the existential possibility of such reality must be contained within this reality, which means that such reality is self-caused.
2. The question in idealism whether or not the MAL is metacognitive and even omniscient (aka “God” in the theological idealist paradigm) is resolved, and the answer is that it is both non-metacognitive in its original state and highly metacognitive in its final state of evolution through time. It also provides a naturalistic explanation for the evolution of the MAL from the instinctive state into the final God-like state and reconciles the naturalism and evolutionism with the theistic premise of the existence of metacognitive God. God indeed exists beyond time in its omniscient and metacognitive state, but it has evolved into that state naturally by creating its own cause to exist and evolve.
3. The problem of suffering and evil is resolved. The MAL realizes that in order to exist it has to create its own cause by undergoing the process of evolution, but such natural evolution inevitably involves suffering of sentient beings. Note that the MAL knows that it itself would be the only and single subject in the universe who would experience the suffering, so it has all moral rights to decide for itself whether it would choose to undertake the suffering. However, the MAL knows that the only alternative choice to such evolution would be the choice not to exist, because if the MAL would choose not to undergo such suffering, then it would not be able to exist through the self-caused evolutionary process. In other words, the choice to exist inevitably involves the choice to suffer. This can be called “the Divine courage to exist”.
4. Based on #3, this paradigm also gives a meaning and justification for our human suffering and a sense of purpose for our human life. First, by personal development of our cognitive abilities and growing intellectually and spiritually we participate in and contribute to the evolution of the MAL. But even deeper than that, by agreeing to live as alters and undergo the suffering and troubles of our human lives we agree to participate and contribute to making the very existence of the reality of consciousness possible, we participate in and agree with the choice of the MAL to exist which would not be possible without the evolution of consciousness with our participation in its inevitable suffering. Simply speaking, we say “yes” to the choice of the MAL as conscious reality to exist.
I do not claim to be the one who discovered this idea and I have to give credit to people who approached this idea long before. I believe the hypothesis of self-caused reality was first suggested in the Western academic philosophy by Bertran Russel and then John Weeler attempted to apply it to a physical model of the universe within the framework of physicalism calling it “The Universe as a self-excited circuit” (Wheeler, J. A., “Beyond the Black Hole”, in Some Strangeness in the Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievments of Albert Einstein, Woolf, H. (Ed.), Addison-Welsley, 1980, p. 362). I myself learnt about it from Christopher Langan’s paper "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory", and even though I do not subscribe to many other propositions of his CTMU, the “reality contains its own cause” hypothesis seemed very appealing to me and I realized that it can nicely fit into the idealist paradigm. But far before Russel, Wheeler and Langan the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart had this insight in his famous quotes "God cannot know itself without me" and “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
The first point to consider is the problem of the prime cause. There are a few options here:
1. Reality exists without any cause. This position is rather an admittance of inability to provide any plausible solution to the problem.
2. There is a prime cause of reality that caused it into existence. But this proposition is problematic because it does not provide a closure: we can apply the same question to the prime cause – what is the prime-prime cause for the prime cause to exist, and then what is the prime-prime-prime cause etc. It’s “turtles all the way down”. Obviously, this solution is implausible.
3. Reality contains its own cause. This solution makes sense because if there is a prime cause for reality to exist, then such prime cause must itself be real and therefore must inevitably be part of reality. However, this requires an assumption for the existence of a self-referential causal loop within the fabric of reality.
4. "New mysterianism" - there may be a cause for the reality to exist, but we do not know it and may never know it because of the lack of sufficient cognitive capacity to know it. Just like #1, this position is another way to admit our inability to provide any plausible solution to the problem.
Now, how can we apply the option #3 to idealism? Here is the proposed scheme:
1. Let’s start from the Bernardo’s idealistic paradigm, from the original state of non-metacognitive MAL that, by its instinctive will, imagines/manifests the world as its own excitation and dissociates into alters in order to experience it. The question can be asked: where did this will to create came from? Why exactly this will to create the world in the direction of evolution of sentience and not any other kind of will (for example, a will to simply rest in the peace of its unexcited state)? In Bernardo’s version of idealism this question remains unanswered. We will return to this question later in #4.
2. Consequently, within the arrow of time from the perspective of the alters, the process of evolution of the world progresses and the alters evolve into sentient beings with progressively higher developed cognitive abilities until they become able to attain metacognition and realization of their own fundamental nature as consciousness.
3. At some point in the evolution the cognitive abilities of the alters become so powerful that they make the MAL itself also highly evolved and metacognitive when they merge with it at the end of their evolutionary paths. This soul’s evolution may involve ascending through multiple hierarchical levels of cognition. At the end of this evolutionary process the MAL reaches the state of omnipotence and omniscience beyond the limits of space and time that monotheistic religions refer to as “God”.
4. At this point the MAL knows that in order for itself and for such omniscient state to exist it had to go through the whole process of evolution from the instinctive to metacognitive state through the development of cognition of individual alters, so it was necessary to have the telos and will to evolve implanted in the original non-metacognitive state of the MAL. However, at this point MAL abides beyond time, which allows it to act at any moment of its own evolution and of the historical apparent axis of time of the apparent world. This makes it possible to for the MAL to retro-causally “implant” the telos and will to evolve (and may be even the very ability to have conscious experience) into its own original instinctive state whereby creating its own cause to evolve and exist.
Now, this paradigm gives answers to a number of metaphysical problems:
1. The problem of prime cause is obviously resolved: the MAL creates the cause of its own existence by creating the process of its own evolution from the primitive instinctive state into the final omniscient state. This answers the question of “why there is something rather than nothing”. Everything that has an existential possibility to exist does exist. In other words, the existential possibility is the same as existential necessity. Is the reality of self-causing, self-manifesting and self-aware consciousness is definitely the reality that have the existential possibility of exist, the proof of it is our own existence as conscious self-aware thinking activity. But the existential possibility of such reality must be contained within this reality, which means that such reality is self-caused.
2. The question in idealism whether or not the MAL is metacognitive and even omniscient (aka “God” in the theological idealist paradigm) is resolved, and the answer is that it is both non-metacognitive in its original state and highly metacognitive in its final state of evolution through time. It also provides a naturalistic explanation for the evolution of the MAL from the instinctive state into the final God-like state and reconciles the naturalism and evolutionism with the theistic premise of the existence of metacognitive God. God indeed exists beyond time in its omniscient and metacognitive state, but it has evolved into that state naturally by creating its own cause to exist and evolve.
3. The problem of suffering and evil is resolved. The MAL realizes that in order to exist it has to create its own cause by undergoing the process of evolution, but such natural evolution inevitably involves suffering of sentient beings. Note that the MAL knows that it itself would be the only and single subject in the universe who would experience the suffering, so it has all moral rights to decide for itself whether it would choose to undertake the suffering. However, the MAL knows that the only alternative choice to such evolution would be the choice not to exist, because if the MAL would choose not to undergo such suffering, then it would not be able to exist through the self-caused evolutionary process. In other words, the choice to exist inevitably involves the choice to suffer. This can be called “the Divine courage to exist”.
4. Based on #3, this paradigm also gives a meaning and justification for our human suffering and a sense of purpose for our human life. First, by personal development of our cognitive abilities and growing intellectually and spiritually we participate in and contribute to the evolution of the MAL. But even deeper than that, by agreeing to live as alters and undergo the suffering and troubles of our human lives we agree to participate and contribute to making the very existence of the reality of consciousness possible, we participate in and agree with the choice of the MAL to exist which would not be possible without the evolution of consciousness with our participation in its inevitable suffering. Simply speaking, we say “yes” to the choice of the MAL as conscious reality to exist.
I do not claim to be the one who discovered this idea and I have to give credit to people who approached this idea long before. I believe the hypothesis of self-caused reality was first suggested in the Western academic philosophy by Bertran Russel and then John Weeler attempted to apply it to a physical model of the universe within the framework of physicalism calling it “The Universe as a self-excited circuit” (Wheeler, J. A., “Beyond the Black Hole”, in Some Strangeness in the Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievments of Albert Einstein, Woolf, H. (Ed.), Addison-Welsley, 1980, p. 362). I myself learnt about it from Christopher Langan’s paper "The Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe: A New Kind of Reality Theory", and even though I do not subscribe to many other propositions of his CTMU, the “reality contains its own cause” hypothesis seemed very appealing to me and I realized that it can nicely fit into the idealist paradigm. But far before Russel, Wheeler and Langan the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart had this insight in his famous quotes "God cannot know itself without me" and “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”