04/16/2022. The Afterlife. Consciousness. And God (Oh My!) Blog

Excerpts from an Amazon review of my book Zen and Artificial Intelligence and Other Philosophical Musings by a Student of Zen Buddhism. The excerpts below focus on two essays in the book; the first, The afterlife, presents my theory of a non-supernatural explanation for an afterlife; and the second, The nature of consciousness and God, that offers a scientific explanation for human consciousness and God. I added footnotes below for clarity.

The afterlife: The bold claim here is that, just prior to brain death, the dying brain presents a lucid hallucination of an afterlife that lasts for an eternity in the subjective brain-time of the dying individual. The author offers that scientific evidence for both the Near-Death Experience, and for the brains ability to create lucid hallucinations “more real than real life,” can be taken as fact and are non-controversial. Far more controversial, but highly original, I think, is the idea that subjective brain-time can expand to the point of extinction. This claim is based on notions of “divergent times”: one proper (objective) and the other mentally subjective, and on the theoretical model of a “Mixmaster universe,” in which an infinite amount of information can be processed in a finite amount of time, and therefore: “Any entity who’s subjective or information-processing time 'ticked' at the rate of Mixmaster oscillations would live forever in that time.” — theoretical physicists John D. Barrow, and Frank J. Tipler. The author notes that, according to experiments, moments just prior to brain death, the brain experiences a “brain tsunami” (spreading depolarization), of near infinite global, neurophysiological information in proper time, and suggests that, when limited by the linear information processing capacity of a self-aware agent within the hallucination (40 +/- bits per second) the dying brain’s subjective brain-time time---as information encoded in the spreading depolarization---is forced to expand to the point of extinction. This is consonant with the Mixmaster model and with NDEs.

The nature of consciousness and God: Does self-referent mediation and linear expression of global, non-linear information cause that information to undergo a phase transition into phenomena? Somewhat unwieldy, the essay held my interest simply by virtue of its thought-provoking originality. This essay expands on the ideas presented in the earlier essay on the afterlife, reintroducing the “mediation and radical conflation” of information. The author asserts that “self-reference creates, created the world.” And at the center of this self-reference is the Logos,[i] the Word made flesh. The essay’s title is “An Attractive God.”[ii] The author sees God, the Logos, not as an intelligent agent, but, based on self-organization theory and complexity theory, as a self-organized, on-going process and hierarchy of complex calculations (perhaps even murmurations of complex calculations), scaffolded from the sub-atomic to the syntax of language and a semiotic self: that is, that the Logos is the first “attractor,” and that It and all the nested properties contained within it, are anatta, non-self, and shunyata (empty). [iii]

[i]The Christian Bible, states: And the Word was made flesh and made its dwelling among us - John 1:14, in the original Greek, the Logos: the principle of divine reason and creative order. In my interpretation,this Logos of the Bible is that which in the human brain mediates information. So please note that when I use the word Logos in this essay, I am not referring to the supernatural entity described in the Christian Bible. It should become clear as we proceed here that in my scenario the Logos is the word Christian imagination has given to describe a kind of mental algorithm, a self-organized attractor, emerging from a combination of neurophysiological information and semiotic action, responsible for manifesting phenomena. A Buddhist might call it anatta: non-self.

[ii]According to Self-Organization Theory (SOS), order in an interconnected system of elements arises around what are called attractors, which help to create and hold stable patterns within the system. The murmurations of starlings as they make “ambiguous undulations” over a cornfield represent just one variation. What holds the starlings together? The attractor. The attractor itself does not exist in a material sense; the attractor is constituted from the interactions of the parts. Any seasoned Buddhist should recognize that the self (anatta) is an attractor and like an attractor does not exist in a material sense. It is shunyata—empty. The subjective self, anatta, is a dynamic, self-organized process of neurophysiological and semiotic activity. Anatta, non-soul, functions as an organizing principle for the neurophysiological murmurations of synapses, and the semiotic murmuration of signs.

[iii] One of the most important texts of Buddhism, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, or The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way, was written in the second century by the Indian philosopher Nāgārjuna. Its central argument is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else.