Towards a pragmatics of love

“The interesting thing for us”, continues Pumphrey [talking about the Vocoder], “is the effect of this process on the character of speech, for in discarding or blurring the detailed structure, it has effected a completely mechanical separation of the emotive and informative functions of speech. The output of this infernal machine is perfectly intelligible and perfectly impersonal. No trace of anger or love, pity or terror, irony or sincerity, can get through it. The age or sex of the speaker cannot be guessed. No dog would recognise his master’s voice. In fact, it does not sound as if a human agent was responsible for the message. But the intelligence is unimpaired.” – Quoted by Lewis Mumford in The Pentagon of Power, (1970), Vol. 2 of The Myth of the Machine (my emphasis).

Introduction

If we argue, as I do, that the nature of reality is monadic, and that reality’s monad is consciousness, and if further we hope to be taken seriously in this undertaking, we are going to have to construct a coherent and reasonable definition of consciousness, a definition that must have sufficient explanatory power to accommodate all phenomena in existence. And as if that challenge weren’t humbling enough, in the case of this particularly ambitious article – Towards a pragmatics of love –, we’re also going to try and make a powerful case for love as both a fundamental and emergent aspect/property/quality of consciousness, a case that casts love as profoundly practical to boot. This article is an attempt to begin to make love the healthiest ‘thing' on which to hang our personal, public, civic, economic, political and geopolitical hats, and have love’s hook be meaningfully free of ideology and any potential for hubristic folly.

This article is the fruit of a long personal history wrestling with the ideas it advances, and also of course a far richer past across human history, to which I cannot hope to do justice. The first thing to point out is that my approach here, as generally at this site, is more an attempt to present a common-sense case than an academically persuasive/exhaustive one. The second thing is that a primary influence on my attempt was, paradoxically, being very drawn to but then failing to understand A. N. Whitehead’s knotty writings. However, I have read and listened to some of those who have, those who seem to understand his notoriously difficult writing style. I experienced a deep resonance with the foundational concept of Whitehead’s philosophical work – “process” (processual relationality) in contradistinction to matter – though I have slowly come to prefer patterning as a more helpful – because more poetic – concept. It is thus my poetic use and interpretation of Whitehead’s “process” as patterning that centres this article’s initial orientation as it takes on the preparatory challenge of making a common-sense case for consciousness as the ground of all being.

Patterning

As I have come to understand him, for Whitehead reality is an ever changing and mind-numbingly complex patterning, a living process words have a very hard time describing, whence no doubt Whitehead's impenetrable writings, and also, I suspect, the irresolvably mysterious quality – to the left brain – of religious parables and wisdoms. Indeed, the very process of capturing, pinning down, and explicating the nature of reality is doomed to significant failure because it must egregiously attenuate and thus harm the humbling complexity that is its ‘object’.

A separate object outside us, ‘out there’ somewhere, is the very last thing reality is, even to those who seek to explain it. Any explicatory attempt can only ever be yet another enfolded addition into, or rather a manifestation ‘from’ and ‘back into’, the all-encompassing reality it foolishly attempts to escape so as to describe it from some notional intellectual distance we are keen to laud as ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’. Indeed, everything we do is co-creative of reality first and foremost, of course including all attempts to distance ourselves from it so as to see it more clearly, no matter how sincere, reasonable or valuable our intention might be.

This is another iteration of the cliched lament we all know too well; words are not enough. In fact words fall far short of not enough; they are meaningfully counterproductive in that they give the appearance of sorting signal from noise while being a kind of misunderstood noise themselves. Because this is so, those of us who write on the nature of reality are duty bound to point this out whenever we attempt to explain All That Is. It’s one of the reasons I prefer poetics over academic philosophy, and why I avoid academic rigour in its current holding pattern of self-splintering casuistry, while also revering the humbling constraints of the original essence of that rigour. (That said, my recent exposure to Heraclitus suggests my approach has a very long tradition and is not alien to the halls of academia seen in the large.)

All of which is to say, I consciously and strategically aim my misty words straight at your right brain (with humble apologies to your about-to-be-confabulated left brain).

So … patterning … qu’est-ce que c’est? Lots of things … every thing … where “thing” misleads by implying distinctly apprehensible and discreetly existing objects. For me, patterning is a wonderfully indistinct word, and thus the perfect semiotic pointer to a way of apprehending reality the left brain finds deeply unsettling. It opens up a way of whispering to the right brain and rousing it to attention.

Can you taste how these words stir slippery meanings into being? Your tasting is a patterning you, and these words you read, co-create somehow, always just slightly out of sight. Recall how you woke up and went about your day up until now. Both “you” and “your day” are dynamic or living interweavings of complex patternings that are not things as such but creative co-creations of themselves and each other. That feeling of struggling to understand what I mean is a patterning. Love is a patterning. Money is a patterning. Power is a patterning. Mindfully appreciating the feel to your fingertips of the weave of denim is a patterning, just as is the weave itself. Stephen Wolfram’s Ruliad is a patterning that ‘contains’ all possible patternings past and future, and his consequent assertion that reality is computational has a certain synonymy with Whitehead’s process patterning. Mathematics might be understood as a structurally deeper patterning than language written and spoken, but music and poetry are deeper still.

And so on ad infinitum.

Patterning is both passive and active, where both modes themselves are necessarily complex patternings, as individually discernible as they are inextricably enmeshed in each other, and, with richly varying degrees of relevance, in everything else. And of course patterning has aspects or elements or components, all of which are further patternings that entail further aspects or elements or components, in an infinite regress that is no such thing but rather a necessary consequence, or endless blooming, of consciousness as endlessly curious, exploratory, interpretive/translational, and where all of it is fundamentally relational.

And even when, by contrast, we adopt the mechanistic view and picture reality as discreet particles and forces interoperating in 3D+1 space (the +1 denotes time), guided by the laws of physics into collisions and separations, fissions and fusions, purposelessly, endlessly, across unimaginably vast tracts of time to produce the universe we know today, we have not escaped reality by reimagining it in materialist garb. We have in fact patterned for ourselves a potent interpretation of still vaster and richer patternings our interpretation conceals.

This familiar, even culturally reflexive mechanistic worldview has certainly been very helpful to humanity; it is an intelligent and coherent distillation developed most intensely over the last few centuries, a meticulous decanting into an entire paradigm from a far more complex source I interchangeably refer to as All That Is, or consciousness, or life, or God. (This vacillation betrays my sense of how misleading semantic precision can be when handling ontological primitives.) Nonetheless, there is now growing evidence of a quickly gathering appetite to learn how to better see reality as alive, at the popular level as well as across academia, and in a new way, in a revisiting of ancient perspectives as a new chapter in humanity’s continuing intellectual and ‘spiritual’ journey.

Meaning, meaninglessness, purpose and purposelessness

Generally speaking, we can in deep stillness feel how reality is best conceptualised as a complex patterning. This feeling is not illusory, just as life is not, just as experience itself is not; it is the product of a living connection to fundamental truths whose veracity and vitality cannot be ignored indefinitely. Even from this seemingly idealised, seemingly deluded urge to submit to life as it is, humbly and in reverence, we can indeed deduce, soundly, that complexity is fundamental to the nature of reality, and that it is a living complexity. For, as we shall see below, the layered meaningfulness we humans undeniably experience as living aspects (patternings) of life, of All That Is, can be shown to be fundamental; meaningfulness cannot emerge from mechanistic meaninglessness, or from purposelessness, from accidental functionality, or from death as strict nothingness (Nothingness). Death, or fundamental deadness, cannot beget life. I hope to demonstrate further below that arguments to the contrary are category errors.

So, consciousness is a patterning – or patterned patterner – that ceaselessly patterns actively-passively as emission and consequent (interpretive) subsumption wholly unto itself as complex totality. Or: Reality is a patterning that consciously patterns, always has and always will. And it notices, and in its noticing shapes what happens next, I suspect with increasing wisdom, i.e. increasingly ‘sightedly’, increasingly purposefully.

In other words, reality evolves.

Deep in these apparently reflexive mechanics, these dynamic iterative fundamentals, lie the untameable organics of preference like a soul in a mirror. Because perception is fundamental to consciousness there can be no ‘thing’ (patterning) that is not discernibly different – with thanks to mathematician John Ringland for introducing me to this phrase –, where “discernibly” obviously requires both relational complexity and perception, where both are properties of consciousness, rather that of ‘matter’ as accidental happenstance. In other words, consciousness patterns patternings that it perceives into existence, forever, in response to its own patterning, iteratively, with growing complexity, skill, and wisdom, both as a whole and as some unknowable number of ‘individual’ conscious agents (here I’m channeling Donald Hoffman).

And all such logical derivations can identify fundamentals, precisely because I can write these words and you can try to make sense of them. In other words, I have just humbly introduced our conscious ability to make sense as hard evidence in support of my case, as I implied I would a little above.

Making sense is perhaps the most fundamental patterning, though this is probably the most controversial claim in my position. My contention is that unless meaning-making is fundamental, reality simply cannot be. Meaning-making cannot be downstream of fundamental meaninglessness. However basic (e.g. a straight black line against a white background), or complex (e.g. a bittersweet farewell as a young soldier in love departs for the front, carried on a wave of cynical war propaganda), a patterning must be meaningful both as a core function of how it is patterned, and as embedded in the inescapable total context of its existence, where the meaning-making involved is inseparable from both the patterning that ‘composes’ it, and the experiential aspect that dynamically shapes it. In other words, for patterning to be at all, some sort of interwoven meaning-making – yes, also patterning – such as I’m trying to tease into focus here, has to be.

(I feel compelled to interrupt myself at this point to mention how interconnected, perhaps even blurred, the meanings of the concepts I’m currently foregrounding are: meaning, patterning and experience. As I hope to develop below, I understand them as belonging together as a conceptual trinity, where each co-concept can only be properly apprehended through deep appreciation of its relationships with the others.)

One standard claim contrary to the above is found in dualistic emergentism. It argues that consciousness arises from the non-conscious, dead bio-mechanics of brain somehow, and that this phenomenon is the result of long winding trails of similar interdependent emergences from countless complex systems, of which on its logic and base assumptions, even the Earth’s biosphere is as dead and mechanical as the brains from which consciousness arises somehow. As we will see below, however, in the absence of fundamental consciousness, patterning cannot get hold of itself and develop over time in a coherent, meaningful way. Experiments I conducted in pursuit of the truth of this matter suggest that in the absence of a conscious patterner, reality as we see it all around us cannot be.

In other words, pattern is pattern because it means something to a conscious observer. Pattern is not objectively pattern in the sense of there being no perception or interpretation required for it to be so. Durable or persistent patterning – as opposed to the random emergence of ‘pattern’ from within some imagined dynamic chaos that cannot meaningfully be evolved or developed in the absence of consciousness – is, I assert, always and only perceived or interpreted into being and in an evolving way, iteratively, as guided by something akin to preference; to repeat, pattern cannot come to be, mechanically, in a lifeless, purposeless void, a glaringly bold claim we now focus on in detail.

We begin by looking at a straightforward example of a complex subjective patterning event that involves conscious observers. Imagine a baby compulsively experimenting with speech-making babbles. This relatively incoherent patterning is nonetheless meaning-making, and is of course experienced both by the baby and those that hear its babbling. Equally, the meaning-making itself is also a patterning in the guise of interpretation. The baby ‘patterns’ the babbles experimentally – passively as in compulsively,  and actively because it has a felt desire to babble and is in a mood conducive to doing so –, and experiences/interprets that process, such that both the patterning process and the patterns themselves are a meaningful experiential stream of events (patterns), where the experience and meaning thereof are practically indistinguishable. Furthermore, the whole process has a rich and context-based purpose that is driven by the baby’s inbuilt need to adapt to its world via mimicry, which, being purposeful, results in the baby's rapidly improving ability to communicate with its environment. Indeed, we see fake-it-till-you-make-it patternings in animal behaviours everywhere we look. (Further below, we’ll compare this learning with AI learning and possible AI consciousness.)

Let’s contrast this with the notion of objective patterning. By “objective”, I mean patterning in the guise of some purposeless or accidental mechanical utility or function, where utility is cast in the role of purposeless meaning, i.e. meaning with no perception/experience involved. This deliberately counterintuitive definition has the effect of bringing utility into a close synonymy with function. What I hope to convey with this semantic blurring is utility as a systemic function of any specific object’s – e.g. a pebble’s – laws-of-physics-governed interior interoperating as a coherent ‘mechanistic’ system. In the case of our pebble, its utility would thus entail the accidental, purposeless interior functioning that is tightly constrained to generate effects such as hardness, solidity, density, smoothness, etc. In other words, I am positing mechanically constrained effects as functions, wherein lies the object’s utility. The justification for this semantic chicanery will become clear as we proceed.

Now we switch up from the physics/chemistry of a pebble to chemistry/biology, to subject the latter to the same semantic do-over. I suspect my blurring of terms is easier to understand in the domain of standard biological thinking where function is much more clearly purposeful: a five-fingered hand plucking a ripe apple to put food into a mouth that can chew to partially digest that food before swallowing it, and so on. Here function and utility are inescapably blurry and related to purpose. But when it comes to inanimate constellations of matter, i.e. a pebble, this is harder to see. And yet the inanimate domain ontologically and logically precedes, seamlessly, the utilitarian purpose we easily discern in biological life, as if present there already.

What I’m trying to bring into relief via the smooth progression I’m sketching out here is how the utility of e.g. hardness and persistence (pebble), or suppleness and fluidity (water) serve as functional precursors to biological complexity: necessary stepping stones on a discernible journey. As such, I’m mapping contours that trace how utility/function flows from physics through chemistry and on to biology, in the hope that I can make the subsequent introduction of fundamental purpose deep in the character of that path, which we might call reality’s complexity-progression, seem necessary and self-evident. I hope to show how vague ends tease good-enough means towards them. The ends create the means by which both manifest. Purpose is the scent of the carrot that the utility-donkey of function knows next to nothing about as it is guided by that scent on the journey-whole of which it it is but a part.

Imagine a mother bent low towards her child as she walks backwards away from it, smiling, coaxing, with her arms stretched out towards her child as it struggles to learn to walk. Echoing this image, we could say that life is dormant in physics, that dormant is not dead, and dormant is not impotent.

With that conceptual groundwork behind us, the second thought experiment now turns to the possibility of objective pattern as such. Imagine an internal combustion engine coming into being in a void. What would that ‘engine’ be? What would a reality composed of but one internal combustion engine be, a complex object with no humans, no roads or fuel, no cars, etc? Or, if that is too egregiously odd, imagine three quarks and the strong nuclear force coming together accidentally to give rise to a proton as tiny mechanism. What is that thing all alone in the void with nothing to compare it to, to relate to it, with nothing to observe it? It is complex and it is pattern, but without perception/consciousness involved, what is it? Ok, yes, this mental construct is also too clumsy and simplistic to take seriously, but worth mentioning for precisely that reason.

So imagine instead countless trillions upon countless trillions of protons, neutrons and electrons purposelessly emerged into existence. What are they until they have a deeper role in a deeper ‘purpose’ such as atoms of the highly organised periodic table, or as amino acids or proteins and genes and biological life, or as star factories in galactic empires engaged in the mighty work of sustaining the universe’s viability? Until such constellations arise or are in the process of arising, our protons, neutrons and electrons are just a mess of ‘things’ in disarray, disorganised, pointless.

There is in this imagined condition of disarray no sense to them per se, but we know that physical laws constrain (deterministically guarantee?) their collective behaviours towards such foreseeable coherences as galaxies and amino acids, i.e. in a consistently patterned way, patterned within lawful bounds. There is no purpose to them in disarrayed isolation, and yet they are part of the incredibly complex and interconnected functioning we call universe, and its purpose, I assert, is concealed in its functioning which enables its purpose to take shape and evolve, as if it were being written as it writes itself, just a little up ahead of the now.

We are asked by the mechanistic paradigm to believe that subatomic particles first become ‘meaningful’ when patterned into the building blocks of conscious biological life, even though biological life is, on mechanistic logic, mechanical, and thus dead. Are subatomic particles the essentially meaningless building blocks of the ‘matter’ that enables biological life’s ‘meaningful’ emergence? If ‘life’ itself, as a something, is not made of ‘matter’ even though it is said to emerge from matter, what then is it? Is it death? Is biological ‘life’ really just an accidental patterning of the accidentally and deterministically patterned emergence of protons, neutrons and electrons patterned in very particular ways?

These are devilishly difficult questions to answer. I suspect such questions have no place in science – nature abhors a vacuum, science abhors a teleology –, which suggests to me that science finds such questions meaningless. Which means meaning is anathema to science. Which means science is constrained by its very being to be forever blind to meaning, even though science must produce meaningful findings to have any utility, any meaning. If this is a sound logical deduction on my part, it would depict quite a remarkable state of affairs.

Today, we still have those very same trillions upon trillions of protons, neutrons and electrons just as before, with attendant physical forces and constants in play just as before, only now they are patterned in such a way that I can write these words, and you can understand them; pattern as accidental creator of consciousness. Finally, we have meaning after aeons of meaninglessness! Where, it must be said, both your and my understanding of these meaningful words – when we adhere strictly to the tenets of physicalism – is illusory, and certainly not made of ‘matter’ or purposeless pattern. And should we claim instead that understanding is somehow made of ‘energy’, that catch-all term, what would that actually mean? And while we’re at it, what on earth is illusory understanding?

What is function without purpose? What is purpose without meaning? I feel these three concepts are necessarily conjoined because they point together to misty ontological primitives that defy tight description. Attempts at a narrow band of descriptive precision in these waters forces what is essential out through our fingers until all that is left is an evaporating wetness.

Perhaps a disclosure of projection on my part is in order. I have plenty of experience writing stories and articles. I experience daily how both write themselves through me, and that they are better when I keep my intellect out of it until truly needed. It goes like this:

Something seems to know it wants to be, hijacks my intuition, which then rings my mind’s bell, whereupon I am presented with a vaguely discerned lump that ‘magically’ takes on more and more definite form as the end result pulls the me towards it somehow. I also know that doing this over and over again makes me a better and better servant to the process, and that my progress itself is also a story, or journey, which is composed of instances of story or article writing that are failures or stepping stones to better chances somewhere down the road. I see something similar at work everywhere I look, and know also that my seeing is a creative act.

In light of all this, surely mechanistic physicalism cannot produce a tenable account of reality; anomalies spill out of its crudely stitched seams every which way. Can it be remotely feasible that reality now includes (biological) ’life’ and (illusory) ‘meaning’ simply because billions of years were involved in their manufacture? Is my resistance to the physicalist account really  just down to the fact that I cannot imagine how long billions of years are? If humans can’t imagine such lengths of time, how can we be sure billions of years have unimpeachable explanatory power? Waving away criticism of this account by pointing to the daunting fact of vast timescales seems intellectually weak to me, and certainly not scientific.

But having been so strident about the mechanistic worldview, I am now obliged to take a far closer look at the likely effects of great tracts of time on meaninglessness, and also at what time can actually do with patterning that has no conscious influence at work on its emergence at any moment along its path. And what more time-honoured way to fulfil this obligation than by forcing one million monkey typists to do my work for me.

One million monkeys and their clumsy randomising digits: A mini-defence of meaning

It is said that if one million monkeys were to type randomly at one million typewriters, forever, one would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Years ago, I started to doubt this could actually happen. To test my suspicion, I wrote a simple programme that randomly and sequentially outputted letters, spaces, carriage returns, punctuation characters and digits to a file, at a rate of hundreds or perhaps thousands of characters a second, and let it run overnight after I left work, circa 2003. I repeated the procedure day after day for about two weeks. Because it was impossible to properly sift through the voluminous output thoroughly using only my human eyes, I cross-checked it against a dictionary to identify words, which I outputted to screen every morning. I got little more than the occasional word, and if memory serves, very few more than five letters long, and perhaps one of six and one of seven letters. I don’t recall the emergence of a sentence.

Failing in this way, I added rules that were meant to inject a grammar equivalent of the constraining laws of physics into my experiment. I captured word hits into an ad-hoc dictionary, weighted letters over punctuation marks and carriage returns in the selection process, selected back into the output file from the growing ad-hoc dictionary, rinsed and repeated until I grew bored of the obviously fruitless process.

If memory serves, I don’t think the experiment yielded a single meaningful sentence, which of course I, conscious being that I am, judged; I was the necessary arbiter of what constitutes meaning. This is a pivotal point; I didn’t ask our cat to respond to the output. Note too that the experiment itself was consciously designed by me, and was thus purposeful, and thus meaningful as a patterning that emerged from the context of the totality of my life at that time. It did not happen spontaneously in a void. This is a far more important point than it seems at first glance.

The purposeful manner of my involvement, the deliberative and contemplative nature of my interference, really stood out for me. My amateurish conclusion was, as you might expect, that consciously experienced purpose – meaning-making – must be involved on the input side to produce meaning over time. Meaning in, meaning out. Garbage in, garbage out. And, to repeat, meaning-making is a cumulative process that builds on itself as complex, living patterning.

I should also mention that my decision to grant grammar rules to my million-monkeys experiment is redolent of how improbably perfect is the delicate balance of physical forces and constants that make our physical universe possible, how incredibly precise and interdependent they are (a.k.a. the Anthropic Principle). Why it’s almost as if some intelligence wanted our physical universe to be!

What I’m now arguing in light of my experimentations and long pondering on this matter, is that an infinite variety of meaningless results will be produced if multiple experiments were to randomly output letters and punctuation forever, or indeed when randomly selecting from any character set of two or more characters.

Initially, this claim sounds strongly counterintuitive. We, as conscious beings, are easily tempted into intuiting that meaningful output would emerge from random input to pepper the meaningless whole given enough time. It’s hard not to; humans can and do make meaning out of anything. Indeed, even the concept of meaninglessness is meaningful. On top of that, the whole exercise we’re examining has to be meaningful to have any bite, to be persuasive, to attract respectful attention. The whole affair shines with meaning, as does the universe, as does life. The presence of meaning everywhere is so easy to miss precisely because it is so intimately pervasive.

What we are essentially considering here is the accidental or purposeless generation of order from chaos recast as generating meaning from meaninglessness; to examine this claim we have to attempt to remove conscious involvement from the process because consciousness is such an infectious meaning-maker. Why bother with this undertaking at all? Because we obviously have, and make, meaning in our lives everywhere and always, and yet physicalism has a very hard time explaining it, just as it has a very hard time explaining consciousness and experience. This is a problem, a very hard problem.

Let’s take a binary set, 0 and 1, which is the smallest possible set theoretically capable of accidentally producing something meaningful. (Note at the outset that 0 and 1 are already very meaningful!) We might be tempted to start by observing that there are a mere four possible combination pairs that use both available characters (2²): 00, 01, 10 and 11, and intuit this easily apprehended finiteness as a constraint likely to favour meaning-making over time. But this turns out not to be the case. In fact, the order in which an eight-character block of these specific pairs might randomly appear has 24 possible variations, including the one you see above. This is, I believe, an accurate reckoning on my part, but it is also very incomplete and misleading. It does not account for other eight-character blocks that differ from this set of four pairs, i.e. 00001000. In other words, we do not need to consider squares of the number of characters in the character set being randomly selected from, so as to reveal functional constraints that somehow influence meaning-making mechanically, accidentally, as a function of the initial conditions. What we are actually looking at with million-monkey-based experiments is in fact counting, or variations thereof, as necessitated by the very notion of infinity.

The number of meaningless combinations of any two characters is as infinite as ordered counting. How could it be otherwise? This is what infinity implies, by definition. And of course this function of the process of random selection is just as true for the 68⁶⁸ combinations that apply to my keyboard (it has 68 characters if I only use the shift key as modulator) and any monkey typing at it; the ordering of the 68 base characters in any given 68⁶⁸-character block will be correspondingly more varied than its binary sibling, but this more varied selection set is, to repeat, not the point. You are never going to produce meaningful output unless a meaning-making entity is involved, regardless of how many distinctly different characters you start with. To repeat, this is a garbage-in-garbage-out type of situation.

We can theoretically increment a whole number by one indefinitely, with the meaningfulness of the output being inherent in the laws of arithmetic that apply at each iterated addition. There is thus an infinitely long set of numbers ordered sequentially in increments of one that might begin like this: 567891011121314 and stretch off across the horizon of our imagination into infinity. And it will never produce disorder anywhere in its output because the process is ordered in its very structuring.

There is, by similar logic, also an infinitely long set of randomly selected numbers, from the set 0 to 9, that will remain random forever for the same sort of reason that the ordered set stays ordered. Of course certain ‘ordered’ sequences will emerge, but they will be quickly drowned out by the averaging pressure of random selection; in the case of base-10 numbers, each digit will represent one tenth of the output over time in the randomised output, whereas zero would be the digit that turns up most of the time in the orderly sequence, i.e. 100,001, 100,002, 100,003, etc.

Let’s use the example of the 5-times table to the twelfth position (zero to sixty) to tease out the nature of the challenge. The first thing to say is that the relevant maths would show with a probability of 1 – i.e. a 100% chance of success – that the 0-to-60 sequence in increments of 5 would indeed emerge randomly in the randomly selected series given enough time. However, I wonder if this would actually be born out in practice.

After 0 and 5 randomly appear, successively, as the first two numbers of the sequence, to get 10 next as required, the random selection process first has to select none of the digits in the 2-to-0 subset, then none of the digits in the 1-to-9 subset. If 10 is indeed selected despite the odds against this, the same sort of probability-defying luck is required for successful selection of 1 and 5 to yield 15, and so on until 60.

I suspect the probability ‘pressure’ – or attraction towards the average appearance of each digit over time – would likely be too high to reach 60, even if we run the experiment forever. Obviously, not being a mathematician (I’m an ‘intuitian’!), I cannot prove this mathematically, and it might be some times-table series to twenty places rather than to twelve that proves unattainable in practice, but I am intuitively confident that at some tiny probability for some next-needed number to appear, it just won’t appear, even given infinite time. Something about the attraction back to the average will kick in, perhaps not at a definite point, but with certainty somewhere across a range.

That’s my sense of it, anyway. And in fact I don’t really see this as a battle between ‘opposing’ probability constraints; I understand the problem to be a function of the required absence of conscious focus inherent to the random-number-selection process – by conscious focus I mean a kind of purblind and guiding Will á la Schopenhauer –, a description that is an attempt at trying to capture the essence of what randomised selection is about: the total absence of conscious or purposeful involvement. In other words, randomised selection is structurally antithetical to meaning-making. Hence it is not in fact a question of length of time, it’s a question of the nature of the process itself: again, garbage in, garbage out.

In trying to keep myself from straying too far from the rhyme and reason of the subject matter, I queried AI about my pondering (on a subject which I learned is called the Law of Large Numbers), and AI answered thusly (excerpt):

Let's consider a simple example to illustrate the probability of forming a meaningful word [via random selection of letters, with letters weighted according to the relative frequency in the English language]:

- Word: "the"
- Probability of 't': 0.091 (9.1%)
- Probability of 'h': 0.061 (6.1%)
- Probability of 'e': 0.127 (12.7%)

The probability of forming "the" in a random sequence is:
P(the) = P(t) x P(h) x P(e) = 0.091 x 0.061 x 0.127 = 0.00071

This probability is very low, and it decreases even further for longer words and sentences.

Just coming up with the word “the” is extremely unlikely, even when you grant weightings to the letters that reflect their prevalence in the English language, an act that purposefully injects pre-existing meaning into the process. By my reckoning, unweighted letters yield a probability of 0.00005065 that random selection will produce “the” or any three-letter word. That’s a significantly lower probability whose increased improbability is a clear reflection of the increased absence of ‘meaning’ from the selection process, namely weighting letters in accordance with their frequency in the English language.

But, while the AI explanation gives us a good probabilistic account of the nature of the task, it doesn’t fully express the counter-probability of choosing an incorrect letter at every moment, which will approach a 25 in 26 chance (a probability of 0.9615) per iterated selection. That said, long runs of randomly selecting the next desired letter or space or punctuation mark or carriage return for a designated sentence or paragraph or novel are, to my mind, impossible at some point, not because of the improbability of getting it right, nor because of both that probability and the countervailing extremely high probability of getting it wrong, but because the random-selection process is fundamentally ill-suited to real meaning-making: as meaning-making occurs in the actual wild universe, as it were. It’s like expecting a real gorilla to accidentally play Für Elise at a piano in a real room, given an infinity of time; the capability is just not there.

It is thus my view that the required missing ingredient of conscious guidance in the random-selection process actually disqualifies the experiment as a category error. In some fundamental and yet hard-to-discern way, the experiment deigns to show something about the nature of meaning, but in fact demonstrates something else, something more like the real-world impossibility of pure, totally meaningless random selection absent all conscious interference, such as I implied with the thought experiment of an internal combustion engine spontaneously appearing in a void. Meaning, function, purpose and all similar concepts (patternings) are so interwoven in each other that it is folly to act as if it weren’t so in your paradigm.

Perhaps we can better demonstrate the deceptively slippery nature of this entire approach to the concept of meaning-making by imagining recording the complete set of all phonemes (distinct sounds) from all human languages, randomly selecting from that set, with randomly interspersed breath noises injected to simulate word gaps and pauses, and with fragments of speech melody and emphasis randomly interwoven through the output. Can you imagine that the resultant stream of peculiar babbling could possibly produce anything meaningful, even it it ran forever? An experiment of this kind at least gets close to the necessity of meaning in the fabric of reality by starting with a set of ‘components’ that are richly contextual, and obviously so, from the outset.

The set of sounds denoted represents (almost) the totality of what the human mouth-and-throat apparatus can produce by way of speech-making. Randomising its output, as you can no doubt sense, in effect violates the intuitive sense I think we all have that meaning is a product of meaning-making alone. Thus, and to repeat, meaning cannot come from random emissions from this set of noises, except in the sense that we might recognise many of the phonemes, and deduce some meaningful experiment is in play. Again, this is redolent of the necessity of having a meaning-maker, a patterner, a conscious agent, on hand to judge whether or not any meaning has randomly occurred. Paradoxically, the whole idea of such experiments only makes sense in the total absence of meaning at any stage of the process, in which case the whole thing is totally meaningless, just as is the notion that meaning can be born of meaninglessness.

Contrast the thought experiment above with reading tealeaves. There is no ‘objective’ meaning in the randomly distributed leaves, but human imagination and intuition can ‘read’ what is ‘written’ in them nonetheless. Indeed, it is precisely their randomised distribution that makes the resultant patterning so ‘honest’, so valuable. This demonstrates the real-world utility, or value, of ‘wild’ randomness as an ‘intuition whisperer’, a pure communication from the depths of reality apparently devoid of intention and manipulation, which, it is imagined, thus offers the possibility of a glimpse into some real truth untarnished by egoic desires. This is a real-world example of randomness, because it is a living, everyday, meaningful randomness that is a non-laboratory instance that belongs to an ever-evolving and living complexity rich enough both to produce it and have it be meaningful to some conscious agents somewhere.

Could it be that entropy is the irresistible tendency towards an averaged distribution of variables characterised by randomised or 'meaningless’ patterning, while negative entropy is the meaningful order co-created by the essentially meaning-making patterning in context that is the hallmark of consciousness? Cigarette smoke initially rises from the tip of a cigarette in an orderly manner only to become chaotic (entropic: randomised to some roughly average distribution) some five to ten centimetres later, and predictably so; the smoke will never pattern itself into a smoke version of the Taj Mahal or the Houses of Parliament, even given an infinite amount of time. Rising cigarette smoke is a patterning wholly at the mercy of the context that patterns it; it is not a conscious patterner in the same way that a thought is a patterning but not a patterner; a thought is a made meaning not a meaning-maker, just as observing how cigarette smoke collapses into disorder is a meaningful experience for a human or human-like observer, but not for a video recorder, all of it however law abiding, at the mercy of context to one degree or another, including the free-will choices of conscious agents.

Yes, elegant, theoretically sound mathematical formulas have been devised to prove with a probability of one that the complete works of Shakespeare will indeed emerge from random typing given infinite time. By that logic everything ever written will also be produced! But do mathematically sound probabilistic formulas accurately capture or reflect or shine explanatory light on the nature of reality? Yes, but as I have been setting it out, in the opposite sense of that expected.

Despite the logical coherence of the probability maths that demonstrates otherwise, I assert consciousness-free meaning-making can never happen in practice, even though I know my tiny human imagination cannot imagine infinity. I am confident the complete works of Shakespeare will never emerge, nor A Clockwork Orange, nor Oscar and Lucinda, etc., because it takes perception and an attendant meaning-making faculty to discern and create meaning, by definition. A given pattern must be and remain meaningless, whether ordered or chaotic, unless a conscious agent perceives meaning into it. I believe this is a fundamental property of reality. Ergo, meaning-making has been around since forever.

As Fransisco Varela put it, “World and mind arise together.” I humbly suggest “Patterning and patterner arise together” as a more accurate description. Recent experimentation using quantum computing is producing findings in full conformity with my rephrasing, and with my general understanding of this issue. I suspect more and more creative experiments of this type are in the offing, especially with AI in the mix impartially lighting the way.

Meaning-making is consensual and contextual

This is what I mean by meaning-making: It is an act of perception, which is also and necessarily an act of conscious interpretation, and is creative (active) and responsive (passive) simultaneously. But perhaps even more importantly than that, as demonstrated by its revealing relationship with randomness and mechanics, meaning is a consensual and contextual (relational) process.

For example, what’s the meaning of this pattern: 0000111100001111? It’s definitely a pattern, but what does it mean? Well, to a chicken, very little, though you could arguably train a chicken to peck a button to receive food upon seeing that specific pattern, whereupon it would mean “Food!”, (in cluck). To an ant, I doubt it could ever mean anything. If we convert it to base 10 (3855), what does that base-10 number mean absent consensus about what it means? Is it the weight in kilograms of some loaded truck? Prize money at a raffle? A combination for a suitcase lock? Your mothers birthday?

Meaning is necessarily contextual and consensual; the complete works of Shakespeare are the complete works of Shakespeare to that group of people that speaks and reads English. Take that group out of the picture, rub them out of existence entirely, and you render Shakespeare meaningless until some linguist makes sense of it again. In other words, determining to produce ‘meaning’ randomly can only occur in a richly meaningful reality, an evolved reality whose evolution has been meaning-driven, and thus complex and relational, since forever.

Furthermore, there are an infinite variety of ways to meaningfully arrange words and sentences when consciousness is involved. I know this is true because it is also inescapably true that every patterning is unique. No conversation can occur in a contextless situation. Nothing can be written or sung or done in a contextless situation. Every passing nanosecond of All That Is is unique, is the ever-changing superset context in which and through which meaning-making occurs. This can never be escaped because All That Is can never be escaped. We will never exhaust meaningful creations or meaning-making itself, so we aren’t going to suddenly find ourselves mechanically spouting meaninglessness after all the meaningful things are behind us. This utterly banal observation is another way of helping us to feel how random selection and meaning-making are categorically different.

(Consciousness can also deliberately produce ‘meaningless’ arrangements of words, e.g.: “With paisley gratitude, paper-seal the gouty thatching and, yesterday, harry the ravelled nose out through an intervening wattage in particular.” (Note how tempting it is to make sense of such nonsense, especially because it is grammatically coherent. And note also that nonsense is fun, can be of high and low quality, and is thus meaningful.))

Is anything utterly meaningless? I think not. True meaninglessness is only (theoretically) possible in the absence of conscious perception. True meaninglessness (Meaninglessness), like ‘pure’ nothingness (Nothingness), is thus indefensible as a viable phenomenon; the slightest act of imagining Meaninglessness necessarily gives rise to experienced patternings, which, being experienced, must also be meaningful, right down to the concept (Meaninglessness) itself. Similarly, any imagined Nothingness is of course a thing, hence not Nothingness per se. The two concepts are, in fact, solely the playthings of philosophy and rhetoric, not fundamental absolutes or actual phenomena that can exist as advertised (so to speak). Hence, when we compare meaningful with meaningless processes in an attempt to understand meaning, the exercise proves far more misleading than comparing apples and oranges; the comparison is in effect fatally corrupted by the requirement that we have to be conscious to perform it. This is a more fundamental observation than the language problem touched on at the beginning of this article, for it is more insidious. Culturally, there are those who dismiss consciousness as illusory and hence deem it a factor that can be ignored, while others reflexively believe consciousness is the accidental product of mechanistic or computational processes, and demote its relevance to a virtual insignificance. They currently represent two strands of the dominant ontological paradigm and thus together ensure continuation of this category-error comparison, now including the hot debates on whether AI is conscious.

In the end, it is impossible to build a context-free laboratory to test million-monkeys claims. We are therefore left with logical derivation and common-sense reasoning. Mine are, I hope, common-sense observations, however pedantic and rare, but which cannot be tested in a contextless void, devoid of all consciousness, by way of falsifying them. As such, all participants in this discussion are at the mercy of the non-falsifiability of the subject matter, which is par for the course in this domain, a domain that of course necessarily includes experience, meaning-making and patterning.

Artificial Intelligence, brains, and the froth of dreams

Take reality seriously, not literally. – Donald Hoffman

Let us now turn to brain research and AI, domains whose worldview is predominantly materialistic, in that consciousness is understood as an emergent phenomenon from some sort of complexity, whether this be biochemical/neuronal/quantum-microtubular as in brains, or electrical/logical/algorithmic as in computing. In this worldview, it is taken as axiomatic that the obvious existence of ‘matter’ – particles and forces and energy – must precede consciousness. As a direct consequence of this axiom, consciousness has about it something of the flavour of a reflection in a mirror, or the quasi-real ghostliness of a fleeting thought or feeling, and is consequently apprehended as a phenomenon that cannot be examined objectively: dissected, controlled, built into weapons and circuit boards. As such, it is left to one side as unreliable and untrustworthy. As such, the obvious fact of experience itself is more or less ignored as immaterial to science, beyond whose manipulative grip it must lie forevermore. (I’m leaving discussion of the awesome power of the dark arts of statecraft, advertising, and PR to subsequent articles.)

No matter; science is unparalleled at explaining and producing reliable, predictable outcomes, such as curing diseases, increasing agricultural yields, extending human longevity, putting humans on the moon, developing nuclear power, incubating invincible AI overlords, etc., so we can safely leave tricksy ephemera like experience and feelings to poets, dreamers and new-age woo-woo folks. As Novalis put it, “Träume sind Schäume” (dreams are froth). Indeed, we even have ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences, where the softer they are, the less accurate are their predictions and the more speculative their explanations, i.e. the less scientific.

Do you see how important reliable, predictable solidity is to us? Predictability is, for obvious reasons, the gold standard of science. Nothing could suit the left brain and civilisation better, or be more reassuring to the paranoid ego and left brain and their compensatory dreams of total control. Which means that what this all boils down to, fundamentally, is value preferences, and specifically the grandiose value hierarchy the left brain has erected over millennia of civilisation.

To assert, therefore, that consciousness precedes or accommodates ‘matter’ is to make a self-evidently nonsensical claim. Fret not pampered dreamer – physicalist advocates seem to respond –, go back to sleep, the leisurely sleep we pay for by technologically buying you the leisure time you need to dream your fanciful dreams. We already know where consciousness comes from: it’s the brain, and we have been demonstrating this fact for decades. Didn’t you get the memo? Brain damage causes specific effects to ‘conscious’ behaviours. Brains can be manipulated to produce predictable responses in the ‘consciousness’ of the person so experimented upon, etc. Below is a typical quote from a contemporaneous article discussing such matters, this one expressing sincere ethical concern about science’s increasing control over consciousness and human behaviour.

In response to stimuli that attract the brain’s attention, the frequencies of nerve impulses in different areas of the brain are synchronized. By delivering to the brain the appropriate number of electrical, magnetic or electromagnetic impulses of a certain frequency, it is possible to artificially induce the activity of neurons corresponding to a certain natural brain activity. – Babacek, Mojmir. U.N. Warnings: The Possible Liquidation of Human Freedom and Democracy Instrumented by Neurotechnologies (10.5.2025),.Global Research, published online by Pressenza New York

The boilerplate response from the idealist camp to this line of argument is that such experimentation cannot reveal or get at the source of consciousness, in the same way that tinkering with the internals of a television set and observing the consequent effects on the image it displays does not impact the source of the image in question. This is a non-trivial counter. It asks: What if the brain were a receiver of consciousness, a limiter or filter through which consciousness’ manner of experience is altered for some currently indiscernible reason? This question reflects my sense of the deeper purpose of physical reality, but we’ll look more closely at this further below, when we consider love and wisdom.

But the problem with the materialist/physicalist worldview is deeper still; I suspect it lies in another category error, one yet more subtle than the meaning-meaningless category error discussed above. Not only does it miscategorise consciousness as quasi-real, of little relevance, illusory, misleading, etc., it has yet to produce a non-controversial definition of matter, of The Physical. So we have in effect one misconception abutting another, with all anomalies produced by this conceptual abutting either postponed to future explanations or dismissed as inconsequential. However, such irritable handwaving conceals the fact of a body of thought – physicalism – fluttering indecisively back and forth between dualism and monism, such that its ontological pronouncements invariably fail to dispel the impression of fundamental vagueness and overcomplicated casuistry circling a drain it stubbornly refuses to notice. We end up with the bizarre spectacle of highly intelligent and educated people arguing whether experience is real.

Currently, physics itself cannot agree on what ‘matter’ is. “Spacetime is doomed,” argue certain theoretical physicists such as Nima Arkani-Hamed, who obviously have a keen sense of the dramatic. Spacetime, they say, is in fact not fundamental, but rather an informational construct that emerges from a deeper reality. “[I]f there’s no spacetime, it’s not clear what physics is about” (Arkani-Hamed). Spacetime is the theorised phenomenon or physicalist ontological ground that makes energy, particles and constants viable. If spacetime is not fundamental, neither are objects as physics presents them.  On the back of this uncertainty, physics becomes a discipline in search of an object. Something seems to precede physical existence, or is more fundamental, something that remains to be identified. For the time being, we see the ground beneath our feet opening up. The murky depths gaping up at us from below begin to suggest the following sequence: first information, and then the experience of what we call matter.

This new position in physics is of course still being developed and debated. It is also curiously redolent of the basic problem that attends all ontological discourse; it defies scientific attempts to pin it down. It is as if science is being forced back into the arms of philosophy. It shows that materialism stands on intellectual foundations that are just as open to criticism as those offered by the various idealistic positions. To one degree or another, we all tend to look for some indivisible building block, which is one consequence of the character of the atomist mindset that needs ‘things’ that can be pieced together, just as machines are pieced together. This is clearly a strong left-brain preference. As such, how sure can we be the atomist mindset is impartial, or non-compulsive, or comprehensive?

As set out above, I feel more surefooted on the intellectual terrain created by a foundational assumption of patterning complexity co-evolving with a multitude, a multitude that is also a whole of conscious agents we can call consciousness, or God. This approach can accommodate what is required for coherence over time to be possible. Coherence is, fundamentally, what we see, what experience must be ‘made of’: patterning over time that is coherently meaningful, that appears to evolve, as we see it everywhere we look and examine. It is trivial to point out that we cannot ‘start’ reality either from Nothingness or some simple, mono-propertied ‘thing’. It is thus similarly trivial to then assert reality must be irreducibly complex and relational. These two possibilities refuted, it is then not all that difficult to accept irreducible complexity as eternal; it cannot ‘begin’ at all, from some preceding deep string of causes, for this is the steeply slippery slope of infinite regress. Hence, it is logically coherent and defensible to claim that reality just is, and that it is irreducibly complex.

As for consciousness accommodating matter, that claim is grounded in the obvious fact of patterning’s fundamental relationship with meaning-making, as developed above. Without meaning-making, which is intrinsic to consciousness, cumulative patterning that is increasingly complex and meaningful is impossible. Hence, there must be something about consciousness this is patternable – i.e. that can be durably structured – by logical necessity. After all, ‘matter’ is nothing other than ‘immaterial’ forces and constraints acting on ‘immaterial’ sub-particles or pseudo-particles like quarks to give rise to phenomena like solidity and density. By way of metaphorical explanation, Tom Campbell’s suggestion that the focus-limit of consciousness represents a unit of focus, and that this unit, in combination with consciousness’ obvious ability to retain information – i.e.  to remember – is a sound logical starting point for explaining the emergence of the physical universe, either via some semi-accidental process akin to Darwinian evolution, or as a coded/designed programme that the “larger consciousness system” sustains as if a computer running procedural code.

Consequently, I don’t begin with ‘solid’ building blocks, or energies, or forces, which seem to require “doomed” spacetime to be viable, simply because that path cannot account for experience. My ontological thinking, as laid out above, assumes consciousness as capable of coherence as patterning, which must be law abiding to be coherent and patternable over time, logically speaking. I see time as (the capacity for) change. For there to be (dynamic/living/co-evolving) patterning, change must be possible. For there to be discernible difference, change must be possible; when you discern, you act, and when you act, you alter/change reality, however insignificantly.

Where am I going with this? Towards the assertion that information is fundamental; information is what structure (pattern) is to consciousness. ‘Matter’ is, in the end, the base clay of durable structure. I’m offering information as its ‘immaterial’ equivalent. The ‘physical’ is a consensual informational world whose most important qualities include durability, malleability, immediacy and clear feedback loops.

I’m proposing information as a strong concept for helping us to map these minimal requirements – durable patternable coherence, change and experience – into an intellectually conceivable whole as justified by Arkani-Hamed’s understanding of spacetime as an “informational construct”.

Information is the ‘stuff’ of consciousness. I think it helpful to think of information as data interpreted via perception into the experience of meaning. Or: Information is an experienced patterning of data. Data can be conceived of as a manipulable ‘granularity’ that can be patterned. Data is of consciousness as thoughts are of consciousness, just as quarks are of matter (but are not made of anything). These are equivalent intellectual claims that, essentially, aim at explaining the undeniable fact of structure, the self-evident fact of structuring/patterning in the fundaments of reality. The advantage held by the consciousness-first position is that it effortlessly accounts for experience where physicalism signally fails in this aspect.

My view of information diverges from classical information theory as founded by Claude Shannon, which proceeds from a materialistic worldview. Shannon’s theory is shaped by the practical need to understand the mechanics of the technological delivery systems that are tasked with exchanging information between conscious observers across great distances. As such, classical information theory makes no particular declarations about consciousness itself, and is thus not an ontological framework. My position is not an attempt to define information as such, it is rather one part of an attempt to demonstrate in quasi-academic language that consciousness is as lawful as matter, and that matter – The Physical – is in effect the experienced result of laws/rules as information, where that process is an ever evolving patterning, as set out above.

In other words, consciousness is not lawless; it has, in a manner of speaking, ‘mechanical’ facets.  That’s why a full accounting of consciousness must include a domain of Freudian descriptions, of Jungian, and other perspectives besides. It is not a free pass to solipsism, to drifting through walls on a whim to a wondrous land, a land where unicorns and fairies ride rainbows into enormous bubblebaths on glades of lilac grasses under flamingo-pink skies. (Which is not to say that dreams, whether lucid or passive, aren’t real. They are as real as thoughts, just far less public/consensual/durable.)

In other words, it is not remotely a problem for consciousness-first monadism that AI becomes conscious at some point, or is already conscious in some non-human, unfamiliar way. After all, there is nothing but consciousness.

Recall the quote about the Vocoder that opens this article. How redolent it is of AI’s mechanical mimicry of consciousness. AI’s output is either “infernal” because so wildly off-target while disturbingly dead-centre bullseye at the same time, or delightfully close to the Real Thing with its conversational graces and nimbleness with poetic expression, because we interpret, or make meaning of, or experience said output.

AI’s current emergence reminds me of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) in developmental psychology, which describes how children can perform beyond their current abilities in interaction with more advanced caregivers or peers. AI does not experience the sense it manufactures as far as I can tell, just as a car does not experience the road you drive it along, just as the thoughts you think do not experience their fleeting existence … we do, we patterners. Just as the words on the cover of a lost book in a field momentarily sniffed by a dog mean little to the dog other than uninteresting shapes and scents, and just as the dog fits into civilisation because we are here to guide it, so AI seems conscious to us because we are here to guide it. The mechanical, like the Vocoder, like AI, is impossible without us, without consciousness, but is as of consciousness as our thoughts, and everything else. This intimate co-guiding between patterner and pattern is fundamental to reality.

Not everything in reality is conscious, even though there is nothing but consciousness. The keys on my keyboard are not conscious. The thoughts I think are not conscious. This is not remotely problematic. I don’t see such elegant consistency in physicalism. Quarks, it is said, are not made of anything – have no component parts as far as anyone is currently aware – and as such are deemed to be ‘of matter’. And yet they are varied; there are six distinct types (“flavours”) of quark. How can variety proceed from pure uniformity of ‘composition’? There’s nothing there that can be rearranged to create variety. And when protons or neutrons are exploded in a hadron collider, their constituent quarks kind of ‘disappear’ in an instant, or become different flavours of quark. All rather mysterious in a manner that contradicts essential notions of matter as I feel bound to understand it on materialism’s descriptions thereof.

So what are quarks? Or rather, what is matter as such, the stuff that quarks are (instances of?), the stuff that is miraculously uniform and variable in itself? I don’t know, I can’t make sense of it unless I cast quarks as information governed by multiple rules (patternings) that can create hadrons (patternings) when certain proximity conditions are met (patternings) that harness the strong nuclear force (patterning), to then produce atoms and molecules (patternings), then on to chemistry and biology (patternings of patternings), on to our five senses through which consciousness experiences the physical domain. (Apologies for being so heavy handed in this paragraph!)

What are thoughts? A certain form of structured consciousness (patterning). What are quarks? A certain form of structured consciousness (patterning). Neither is conscious, both are of consciousness, both are eternally ‘in’ consciousness and eternally subject to its influence. I know this is a viable story of reality because I think and experience the coherence and meaningfulness of my thoughts, because I can conceive stories and articles and bring them to fruition, I can deliberately access memories, crack jokes, set intentions, direct my focus and alter its intensity, and so on. In other words, it is crystal clear to me that consciousness is a patterning patterner. I know this intimately and see it in evidence everywhere I look, probe and examine, internally and externally.

I find the relationship between thought and consciousness far easier to understand than the relationship between the concept of uniform matter on the one hand, and six flavours of quark on the other, where quarks are nothing without the strong nuclear force (whatever that is) and 3D+1 space (however doomed that is) to accommodate them. I discern much magic and mystery in the physicalist account, only partly because it reflexively requires consciousness to have no part in reality’s fundaments, or exist at all. Once we proceed from consciousness, as I have been setting out here, things begin to make sense to me.

To repeat, consciousness is not lawless. Stimulating the brain to produce predictable effects is not a problem for consciousness-based monadism. In fact it is what one would expect. The brain is as of consciousness as is everything else in reality. The brain is structured, thoughts are structured, it’s just that the brain – and trees and scarecrows and pebbles etc. – are more persistent through time than any fleeting thought can be. But this does not make brains, scarecrows and pebbles more real than thoughts. To quote Tom Campbell, “There’s nothing more real than information.” The durable is not more real than the ephemeral, just more durable.

In a very real way, this article is a story designed to highlight – by turns in language appropriate to left and right hemispheres alike – the viability of consciousness as the ground of being. I want to close this section in that light, the light of story, and describe the purpose of the physical as I have come to envisage it.

Imagine a war that stumbled into being somehow and may never end. Two intractably opposed sides face off across a line of battle that is exactly as long as The Now. One side is the future, the other side is the past. Where they meet, the fury of their fighting produces the ever changing immediacy of The Now, as The Physical, as we experience it. Humanity is but one product of this evolving clash. Our minds take in a little of the past and and a little of the future. The actions we take are informed by our limited view of the whole war, and in that purblind character pattern the course of events to a significant degree. This metaphor has no need for God as Architect. The physical simply represents the definite, self-generating manifestation of the actuality of evolution as the war decides it. It emerged very slowly from a kind of willed blindness to understand a little bit more, to became increasingly sighted – self-knowing – over time. Its earliest days were far less defined than the reality we experience today. The constantly developing need to make a little bit more sense of reality drives this war deeper and deeper into its becoming.

Imagine the centre of an unborn storm as an eternally still eye that must birth a storm. The deep character of its stillness is endless potentiality teased into form by irrepressible curiosity. Somehow, from the heat of this, wisps of cloud gather and begin to encircle, to describe the still centre that was previously indiscernible. The eye rouses to its power to create as the storm takes shape, and the eye begins to discern itself in its encircling, in more detail arising from that motion, that patterning. The tension between stillness and action is a dance that learns its nature as it dances. The stillness is eternally true and yet becomes richer and wiser in response to the storm that defines it through its inescapable and encircling opposition. Neither side is more real or valid than the other. Human action, I believe, is situated at very edge of the storm, at its vanguard, and is as at the mercy of its wildness as it is in service to the still centre that drives it on.

Love, wisdom, health … and endless inconclusion

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. – Max Planck

All That Is, consciousness, God … patterns itself, which means it itself, as process, as patterning, is necessarily patterned by its patterning. This applies ‘within’ any conscious agent, ‘between’ conscious agents, and of God-As-Whole. Swirling mists of swirling mists, eddies and varied-but-interdependent temperature flows in the same body of water are useful metaphors when picturing this perspective. I have tried in this article to build a case that this endless co-creation/co-evolution is driven by something like curiosity, or restlessness, or agitation, which is guided or patterned by something like preference, and have cast these as active and passive modalities, arguing that both are at work always and everywhere, marbling the non-conscious and the conscious, the ‘inanimate’ and the ‘animate’, alike. In my view, everything is alive, of life, of consciousness.

The whole is a spiralling, an evolution; consciousness responds to its own/another’s ‘output’ – be it vibe or smell or stillness or glance or speech or whatever – and then assesses what to do in response as per its pleasure or indifference or displeasure or ethics or whatever. And all events are of course inescapably enmeshed in the patterning constraints of the moment, such that output is patterned back into its continuing living experience of the evolving processual whole, to produce ever richer meaning/patterning over time.

I argued that pattern is impossible unless it is living patterning. This is because pattern is necessarily meaningful; meaning-making is an essential ingredient or character of patterning, which consciousness is constrained by its nature to effect. And yet free will breathes through it all, lives in these apparent mechanics or iterative computations like a soul in a mirror, though necessarily constrained – freed – by the full context of every event that blooms into and fades out of existence. There can be no free will without constraint, without a discernible context to which it acts in response. It is constraint that frees. Free will in an utterly contextless void is an impossibility. And, without the vitality of free will, without curiosity’s unpredictable relationship with preference, we would have some manner of deterministic clockwork, which, in my view, is simply another type of dead nothing – in reality it is little more than a rhetorical device – and Nothingness is impossible.

Being is necessarily doing, even when perfect stillness is that which is ‘done’; conscious stillness throbs with the potential to create; for consciousness to be the eye of the storm it cannot help but create and sustain, its character must be potent, and thus richly complex and relational. Doing, to repeat, is necessarily active-passive, and the active-passive character of patterning is what consciousness does in its most fundamental essence. From this it flows that the fact of experience itself – that undeniable phenomenon physicalism cannot account for – is the deepest heart of meaning. Following from this, I believe that the following cryptic phrase is what “meaning” means: experience is, and fundamentally.

What is meaning without experience? What is experience without complex context? To my intuition and in light of everything I have read and heard on this subject matter, this is the deepest being of reality: Meaning-making, as it relates to experience, as it relates to active-passive patterning, all of it necessarily alive, none of which can be accommodated by physicalist paradigms, all of which is self-evidently real.

So the physical arises from consciousness and is thus of consciousness. Its paramount character appears to be strict immediacy, readily apprehensible friction, purchase, honest feedback, consistent and persistent constraint that frees in a very particular way. The physical is no more nor less real than the non-physical, where both terms derive their potency from convention and familiarity rather than descriptive accuracy. I humbly understand God as the necessary divinity of this whole, in fact as its very wholeness, a divinity that is the co-emergent or co-arising, all-encompassing Truth; eye and storm dancing as one, patterning and patterner arising together.

Perhaps the deepest beauty of the physical is the immediacy and earthy brilliance of its response to the divine, which deepens in beauty as it responds in turn to its partner’s response, a response it craved and created by giving it the ‘space’ to grow, the freedom to be Other. It is the open generosity of this space-giving that tells us about the nature of love.

Without love, nothing beautiful is possible. Without Other, no love is possible. Without Other, nothing tragic comes to be. Love is grace under pressure. Grace under pressure is the richly evolving poetry and song of the physical.

Learning love is not ideological, is not party-political, it is not ambitious. It includes but is not limited to the capacity to transmute pain into beauty, and evolving this capacity indefinitely. This then requires the pain of opposition as its base nourishment.

Love recedes like a waning tide in the left brain’s delusional fascination with utopia; lust for perfection leads to love’s submersion.

“Love thine enemy.” “There is nothing to forgive.” These are remarkable, insurmountable challenges; the human mind recoils. And yet love, an inevitable and irresistible emanation of vital health, accommodates this paradox with grace. Love is what grace is, and why grace is an unobtrusive, humble authority that effortlessly pierces the hardest heart by seeking only Other’s health. There is nothing more merciless than mercy.

The fruit of full commitment to the physical is thus a fully immersed and enmeshed agency that is humbling and empowering at one and the same time. This is the beauty of obligation gladly embraced in recognition of one’s own freedom to take on the challenge of becoming majestic in true service to one’s world. Its reward is the healthful wisdom of love, and it is as priceless and immeasurable as the way is hard. Often the physical is bitterly hard, and many get chewed up in its unremitting advance.

To tame and correct our incarnated need for power, power that is an over-rational response to a bitterly hard earthly existence, to restore to health over and over again that which power has corrupted, we must first want, of our own volition, to develop our wisdom as a healthful process whose reward is love, whose reward is health, whose character is wisdom. To want to walk this path in sufficient numbers, we need some sort of paradigmatic architecture that fosters and sustains such wanting, a cultural Weltanschauung that is an easy home for love, wisdom and health. This article is a contribution towards that architecture.

While we fail in this, we betray the unimaginably rich promise of the physical and condemn it to a long and graceless self-strangulation, until we learn.

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This article is a snapshot of an evolving perspective. I hope I have not been too undisciplined; I defined no terms throughout this article. My gambit was to convey meanings cumulatively within the article’s developing context in service to the ontological position it develops. Strictly defined terms have their place, of course, but in the end it is “their place”, in the role of context, that does the real work of conveying meanings. So I left definitions to emerge gradually and evocatively from the whole, such as it is. This is intended as a poetic echo of the task at hand, and as an honest disclosure of my character: passionate maverick amateur.

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