Science elucidates reality... or does it?

[Dean]

As an excursion into musings more exotic than already is, it occurs that, since similarly (not exactly) shared realities may be possessed by shared codes or patterns of neural firings among brains, hypothetically the notion of mirror neurons can be extended to that of synchronised neuronal tissue as a naturalistic basis for telepathy or collective consciousness. It is tempting to posit entangled neuronal states, except that information exchange is not possible with entanglement, otherwise in a materialistic world entangled states could be technologically prepared. In some idealistic world, however, synchronised states could conceivably precipitate naturally as parallel emergence involving two or more separate brains.

 

[Kelly Jones]

Hi Dean,

Well, bravo for your persistence. But I think you haven't really given enough thought to your scenario. You're assuming that if you know absolutely everything in the Universe (all universes), then you'd have a perfect model for what reality looks like. Your approach is to try to create an empirical identity for reality. That is, you're trying to build a picture based on sensory information.

Let's just explore your hypothetical scenario, and humour your approach. Pretending there was any evidence for telepathy, which there isn't, the scenario requires every person's consciousness to be part of a Borg organism. So we run into a number of problems.

(1) How does any individual consciousness in the Borg test that the experiences fed to it are actually valid? How does it peep outside its own consciousness to see if these other consciousnesses are actually perceiving correctly? They can't. Each bubble is still separate.

(2) Since consciousness is necessarily selective, identifying by focussing and excluding, it would be impossible for the validity of the picture to be tested, because as soon as any consciousness were trying to test the validity of another consciousness's experiences, it would be excluding all the others it isn't testing. When it moved onto test another consciousness, the former subject would be again excluded. It is literally impossible for consciousness to test the validity of all brain constructions, because it would be an endless task.

(3) A universal consciousness must needs include absolutely all consciousnesses that have existed and will exist. But consciousness appears to require brain, body, etc. and most of these have decomposed or don't exist yet. So a cosmic consciousness is physically impossible.


Getting back to the problem with the scientific method, the senses can never provide an absolute picture, even if one hypothetically accessed all the consciousnesses in the Universe, because one couldn't be sure what was happening outside one's consciousness. Consciousness is intrinsically selective. It is consciousness *of* something. So the hypothetical scenario still fails the test.

Understanding the nature of Ultimate Reality cannot happen using scientific method. One cannot hope to know what is ultimately real using the senses. One has to turn to pure reason, and definitions, instead. Fortunately, one can make valid, logical definitions for Ultimate Reality, so it's quite possible to understand. Just not using science.

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