Reality = Space + Time + Consciousess

This was a genuine Eureka! Moment, in that it was a new realization that came to me while having a bath. At the time I was re-reading the essay Real Naturalism in Galen Strawson's Things That Bother Me.

Strawson's essay draws the conclusion that any account of reality has to include an account of experience. Experience, or consciousness, is the only thing we can absolutely conclude is real. The universe it enables us to apprehend may be an illusion, but the fact that we experience is not.

Current science tries, usually with great success, to account for reality within the bounds of the four dimensions of space and time. Yet within spacetime nobody has so far managed to discover the place where consciousness, or experience, occurs. They can maybe point to events in spacetime inside the human brain that correlate to experience being had, but they cannot account for what any being who has experiences knows experiences to be - by way of being the being who experiences them. 

There are many, neuroscientists and others, who argue there is no distinction between events that correlate to experience and actual experience. They argue that what conscious beings know experience to be is in fact an illusion, or a hallucination, and that the reality of experience lies in the particular way that neurons are firing in the human brain - the firing neurons are real, but that delicious taste in your mouth as you bite into a ripe strawberry is a hallucination generated by the firing neurons. This is something that Strawson takes apart in his essay The Silliest Claim - this being the claim made by those who see no distinction. I agree with Strawson, but across the wide spread of consciousness studies we are in the minority. If I put myself in the shoes of someone arguing for it being a hallucination, I imagine them thinking: what else could it be? If it is not a phenomenon in the brain then what is it? Where else could this phenomenon reside?

At least four dimensions are needed to make an account of reality. These are the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time that comprise spacetime. However much we understand about neuroscience, and right now our understanding improves greatly year on year, we get no closer to understanding the nature of conscious experience within the limits of those four dimensions, other than to say that it is a hallucination.

So, to account for a consciousness that is not a hallucination perhaps we have to look outside spacetime. Let's assume that hypothesis is true.

If consciousness lies outside spacetime then it needs its own dimensions in which to exist. Maybe it needs more than we need to account for spacetime.

Yet the thing about dimensions is that they tend to intersect. According to our hypothesis, when I am conscious of experiences, I am at an intersection between a certain location in spacetime and a certain location in consciousness.

At this intersection, just as I am just a tiny part of spacetime, my consciousness is a tiny part of - we lack a good word here - total consciousness? - universal consciousness? Let's go with universal consciousness as a firm nod to one of my favourite musicians, Alice Coltrane.

Universal consciousness is a collection of dimensions in which consciousness exists. Spacetime is a collection of dimensions in which physical reality exists. Conscious beings such as humans represent a point of intersection between these two sets of dimensions.

At this intersection, just as nearly all of spacetime is something about which we can only make inferences from scant data, so too universal consciousness is something about which we can only make inferences from scant data. In the latter case, those data come from our own experiences, together with what others tell us of their experiences.

The point of my Eureka! is that just as we can only make increasingly well-educated guesses as to whether there are other planets with life on them or what dinosaurs were like, things that are far from our local vicinity in spacetime, so too we can only guess at the true nature of universal consciousness. We are only privy to that part of it that intersects with us in spacetime, in the form of our conscious experience. But in order to start making educated guesses about consciousness we first have to believe that it is a real phenomenon, just as we now believe that the dinosaurs were real phenomena. 

What happens when we die? Our deaths are events in spacetime: we have moved from a point in time where we were a living being in space to a point in time where we are a dead being in space. There is no reason to infer that our deaths require an equivalent event within universal consciousness. 

Human beings exist in spacetime for a period of time. For the duration of that time that they are conscious they  also exist in universal consciousness. So just as they are an intersection of space and universal consciousness they are an intersection of universal consciousness and time. Assuming our hypothesis is true we are proof that the dimensions of universal consciousness intersect with the dimension of time with which space intersects.

Our births and our deaths also show that the we intersect with the dimensions of space for a limited period of time. Yet they do not prove that those aspects of us (our consciousness) that intersect with the dimensions of consciousness also do so for a limited period of time.

Consider a sphere visiting Flatland. Flatland corresponds to our 3D space, the sphere corresponds to a part of universal consciousness. The point of the sphere's first intersection with Flatland corresponds to a human embryo becoming conscious. As the sphere grows into a larger and larger circle, so that embryo grows and is born. As the sphere eventually starts to shrink again, so that human grows old. And when the sphere finally shrinks back to a point, the human loses consciousness.

The sphere, the repository of that human's consciousness that exists within the dimensions of universal consciousness, has moved away from the physical reality of space. But just as in Flatland the sphere no longer exists within the dimensions we can perceive, to assume that the sphere has ceased to exist is to be in denial that it ever was a sphere, to instead maintain that it was simply a circle that grew from a dot and eventually shrank back to a dot. Yet if we can make the mental leap and see that growing and shrinking circle as a sphere from another dimension, then the obvious assumption to make is that the sphere was just passing through. Nothing we witness indicates that the sphere only exists for the duration of its passing through: the obvious inference is that it existed before and will continue to exist afterwards.

A common complaint about higher dimensions is to ask why we don't see spheres manifesting in our own spacetime. Yet if those higher dimensions are dimensions in which consciousness exists, then human and other conscious beings provide exact examples of higher level dimensions manifesting in spacetime. Don't go looking for spheres growing and shrinking in 3D space, look for conscious beings being born and dying - they are all around you.

If our hypothesis is correct, then so too with human consciousness: there is every reason to assume that it will continue in some form or other after our physical death, and indeed that it existed in some form or other before we were born.

At present, science is reluctant to conclude that consciousness cannot be accounted for within the same dimensions of space and time it has successfully used to account for so much of the reality we experience (aside from the reality of experience itself).

At the same time, because concepts like god cannot be accounted for within the dimensions of space and time, science calls these concepts supernatural and denies their existence.

The idea that reality = space + time + consciousness provides not just a route to breaking out of the impasse reached in current consciousness studies, but also allows for a reality in which something very much like god - what I have called universal consciousness - becomes a key part of its definition.

If we redefine natural to mean what can be accounted for within the dimensions of space, time and universal consciousness then we open the door to the possibility that many phenomena that we currently discount as supernatural prove to be legitimate aspects of our newly defined reality.

Of course, if science manages to show that human consciousness can be accounted for just within the four dimensions of space and time, then that door closes, god does not exist and when we die our consciousness dies with us. 

This is a high stakes game we are playing here.