Conscious Action Theory

An Introduction to the Event-Oriented World View

Wolfgang Baer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317212270
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Metafísica filosófica

Conscious Action Theory provides a logical unification between the spirit and the material, by identifying reality as an event that processes personal experiences into explanatory memories, from which personal experiences are regenerated in a never-ending cycle of activity. Baer explores the idea that our personal feelings are undeniable facts that have been systematically excluded from the basic sciences, thereby leaving us with a schizophrenic division between objective materialism and spiritual idealism.

Cognitive Action Theory (CAT) achieves this unification by recognizing that the observer's existence is the foundational premise underlying all scientific inquiry. It develops as an event-oriented physical theory in which the first-person observer is central. By analyzing the methods through which we human observers gain knowledge and create the belief systems within which our experiences are explained, we discover a fundamental truth: all systems are observers and exhibit some form of internal awareness. Events, not the objects appearing in them, are the fundamental building blocks of reality. The book is comprised of three parts: the first addresses the paradigm shift from an object to an event-oriented world view, the second develops the foundations of action physics for an event-oriented world view and the third provides examples of how these new ideas can be applied to move our knowledge up the next evolutionary step of human development.

This book will benefit anyone questioning their role in the universe, especially those in interdisciplinary fields of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and medicine, who seek understanding of quantum theory as the physics of conscious systems that know the world.

Part I
The event-oriented world view

1
Introduction to the Event-Oriented World View

The main objective of this book is to integrate the observer’s subjective experiences, feelings, pleasures and pains into a rigorous theory of reality that expands rather than negates technical advances of current science. The first step toward this goal is a description of the 1st-person’s conscious experience that is concrete and unambiguous. Figure 1 defines the visual experience of a typical human (Baer, 1972). It shows an individual sitting in an armchair looking out through his left eye into the living room of an apartment. He sees his nose on the right side and his left hand is holding a book. This optical sensory display will be used in this book to represent all subjective experiences. Later parallel sensory channels will be added to include the full spectrum of human experience. For now, it will be used to show how personal sensations are generally connected to the physical world.

Figure 1 was inspired by one published by J. Gibson (1950) to investigate perception, which was in turn derived from a drawing by Ernst Mach (1867). It describes what we actually see but it was originally called “The Visual Ego of Ernst Mach”. Ego is a term coined by Sigmund Freud to refer to the control center of the human psyche. It is where actionable information is displayed, and desired intentions expressed. It has also been called “the third eye”, Hermann Hesse’s “magic theater” or Bernard Baars’s “global workspace” (Baars, 1997).

As these names suggest and the drawing implies, our everyday surroundings are actually phenomena happening in a component of the human psyche. It supports the belief that we create our experiences inside a bigger “Self” than the body we see. This bigger Self incorporates a mental display of our environment that includes the appearance of our body. We will show that our “body” can be identified with any appearance that functions as a control lever that moves by will and whose motions modify both our subjective experiences and the external physical reality to which they are connected.

FIGURE 1 The projection into Plato’s cave circa 1972 AD

The claim is not new. Long before these drawings were made and named, it was known that what we see is not equal to what there is (Hoffman and Prakash, 2014). The claim goes all the way back to the Plato’s cave analogy in which ordinary humans are chained – locked in their bodies – to look only at shadows projected on the walls through an entrance leading to a bright reality of ideals. Since Plato’s ideal reality could be identified with God’s domain, this division between what we see and what really is was espoused by the Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages. A change started around 1225 AD when Thomas Aquinas recommended an adoption of Aristotle’s natural philosophy. That view rejected Plato’s dualistic distinction and proposed that we are not seeing what he called “shadows” of reality in our everyday lives, but instead are looking directly at such a reality through the windows of our senses. Taking what we see for what is, is called the “objective reality assumption” that underpinned the emergence of science and the practical development of classic physics from Newton’s time onward.

The belief that “we see what is” dominates popular thinking to this day but it has been challenged by quantum theorists since the beginning of the 20th century. Quantum physicists no longer considered reality to be what we see. Rather, a murky probability amplitude, described by Schrödinger’s wave function “y”, has been resurrected as Plato’s ideal reality while measuring instruments have become the entrance to our cave. Figure 1 should therefore be interpreted as a modern-day version of Plato’s cave. We are the little men or women chained inside our skull. Plato’s shadows are the configuration of objects and sensations we normally experience around us (Pinker, 1997, 84).

Unfortunately, the paradigm switchback to Plato’s world view has not led to a quantum theory applicable to the macroscopic world of everyday experience until now. This book provides such a theory. It does so by first reasserting the Platonic distinction between what we see and what is physically real, and second by quantifying the physical connections between what-is and how-it-is-perceived. This book claims:

1. reality is a process that connects what-is with what-is-perceived in a cyclic event, and
2. such events rather than particles are the building blocks of a universe, as well as ourselves.

I understand that this assertion requires a fundamental change in scientific thinking. It implies that we are more than the body, which we obviously observe. I know many readers will reject this premise outright. I ask those readers to peer past their noses with the right eye closed as shown in Figure 1 and note that we are seeing the result of a measurement process that transforms sensory stimulation into an actionable “Now” information displayed in what has been called our mind. This “Now” is all we experience. We cannot directly see our physical sensors since they always happened one process step ahead of what is actually presented to us. Nor can we directly see the muscle actuators affecting the physical world until their activations propagate signals back to our sensors and then processed into our next Now display again.

When we first opened our eyes after birth, we practiced exploring our sensations and built a reasonably consistent display of our experiences. Reinforced by parents and teachers, we were taught to operate under the assumption that external reality is exactly identical to what our mental display shows us. This works well for the rest of our lives so long as all we want to do is optimize our material existence based upon the tools our ancestors have evolved so far. For those who want to know what we really are, how we work, how to fix us when we break or how to climb the next step in the ladder of evolution, a larger view of ourselves becomes necessary. We must integrate our subjective conscious experiences with the physical world and conceive of both as a single existence. This book shows why and how to achieve that goal, and its success will justify the change in thinking I am asking the “Reader” to make.

1.1 The paradigm shift in our concept of reality

The early-life process just described is a learning activity that builds a concept of the environment we believe to live in and the actions we can take to make our living experience more satisfying. The result of that activity grows our current classic objective model of reality shown in Figure 1.1-1.

The optical mental experience is surrounded by a thought bubble, which represents the Now experience when one’s eyes are closed. This space contains sensations of thoughts, dreams and displays of other sensory modalities.

FIGURE 1.1-1 The classic objective reality model

We currently assume the cause of our 1st-person experience is a classic physical objective world represented by the icon on the bottom of Figure 1.1-1. The body of the observer is standing on the earth surrounded by space and stars. This is the Kantian “thing-in-itself”, i.e. a permanent physical reality that is supposed to exist whether our body in it is alive or not. The objective scientific world view tells us that when we are alive and conscious, our physical brain generates our 1st-person sensations. This brain is represented by the small oval inside the head of the individual in Figure 1.1-1. The standard view nicely documented by Velmans (2000) states that physical signals emanating from the surface of the apple propagate to sensors attached to our head. The resulting stimulation is processed by the brain and projected into the sensation of the apple represented in the upper 1st-person’s perspective. Velmans assumes these projections collocate sensations and their physical causes at the same point in objective space. In Figure 1.1-1, projections into the thought bubble are outside the physical universe in conformance to Descartes’s dualism, which assumes that mental experiences are not made of the same material and are not located in the space of real things. Whether mental sensations can also stimulate effecter cells that produce changes in objective bodies or whether such experiences are purely epiphenomenal is controversial. In any case, the mechanism for this projection or the sensation projected is not part of objective physical reality and is not explainable within current science (Stapp, 1993).

This fact is known as Chalmers’s (1997) “hard problem of consciousness” and is exemplified by Levine’s (1983) “explanatory gap”. The gap implies science has no explanation for how a physical activity of any kind in the brain can produce the sensation of an object several feet in front of that brain. For this reason, our Figure 1.1-1 follows the conventional practice of cartoon literature in depicting the connection between the physical world and our mental sensations with a sequence of bubbles. These indicate what we all believe, i.e. that such a connection must exist, but we are not sure how it happens. Solving this problem requires nothing less than a new world view in which events containing conscious sensations replace objects as the fundamental building blocks of reality. It is the goal of this book to present such a world view along with a new physical science that underpins its practical applications in the future.

The next step toward achieving this goal is to recognize that the description provided by the classic-reality model shown in Figure 1.1-1 is flawed and incomplete. The representation of reality as a three-dimensional instance of space surrounding objects is not accurate. A careful examination of the facts (see Chapter 2) will show that the processing steps required to explain our 1st-person experience involves a flow of action between those sensations and our memory holding our model of whatever we believe explains those sensations. In other words, the lower portion of Figure 1.1-1 cannot represent the real physical world, but instead represents our model of that world. Science and specifically the physics underpinning our science does not describe Reality, but rather describes our knowledge of Reality in our memory. We wake up every morning by loading the content of that memory into our immediate Now display until we are surrounded by the sensations describing our world and our situation in it. Whether our eyes are open or closed, the Now display of that knowledge fills the mind space, represented by a thought bubble, and guides our actions throughout the day.

Conscious Action Theory (CAT) replaces the mysterious bubbles connecting our sensations and the physical world. The mystery is replaced with a flow of action through measurement sensors and command actuators connecting those same sensations to our internal memory model, which explains those sensations. Following Pinker (1997, 134), consciousness is “building an internal model of the world that contains a [S]elf”. Our traditional independent physical reality then becomes a physical component of a thought process under our control. This shift makes the process of creating and updating that model the central activity of human intellectual progress.

CAT proposes a processing cycle, shown in Figure 1.1-2, in which our sensations appear during one phase while the explanation of those sensations happens during another phase. An array of sensations occurring in our Now is processed through an explanatory activity into a model of reality, which is concurrently examined by a Measurement Activity that generates a new sensation in a continuous event loop. Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum theory, thought quantum theory was about the knowledge an observer has about the physical reality and not that “Reality” itself. That knowledge, our memory framework and our capacity to manipulate that knowledge have been carefully honed through our evolutionary history to present us with an actionable information display we use to control our activities. Accurate or not, it works to a degree, but has always been a component of our thought process, not the totality of what we are.

FIGURE 1.1-2 Event-oriented Model of Reality with separated sensations and visualized explanations

What we are is a flow of action passing around a sequential time loop. This is the description of our bigger Self. We are Hofstadter’s (2007) strange loop. This loop is the event we execute during conscious operations (Walker, 2000). We are the event happening, which provides the context for both the objective thing and the subjective personal experience felt by that thing. It is also the event that replaces the “thing” in Kant’s “thing-in-itself ”. Kant’s thing-in-itself is no longer the a priori physical reality that continues to exist as an independent object whether we are alive or not. Kant’s reality has now been replaced by the “event-in-itself”. Events continue to exist as independent activities whether our objective body appearing in that event is alive or not. The event-oriented world view does not deny the concept of an external independent existence. It is not solipsism. It merely replaces the objective visualization of those entities with their visualization as events. “Reality” is no longer a set of objects moving in a three-dimensional space but a set of interacting events that incorporates the appearance of objects and space within those events.

FIGURE 1.1-3 Object to quantum to event-oriented paradigm shift

The implications for science are a fundamental paradigm shift from an object to a quantum and on to an event-oriented world view graphically depicted in Figure 1.1-3. What science has been describing in both classic as well as quantum physical theories developed during the last half-millenn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• PART I The event-oriented world view
• PART II Modeling reality
• PART III Implications and applications
• APPENDICES
• References and notes
• Index