I have a terrible tendency to read several books simultaneously, causing much mental overlap and leaving the floor of my room a constant litter of half-read compendiums. At the moment, the book which has most prominently grabbed my imagination is Michael Frayn's 'The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe', and as you can tell from the title, it's right up my metaphysical street.

(The book isn't perfect by any means, but this is not a review).

At the end of the first chapter Frayn discusses the relationship between subjective experience and the objectively posited 'real world' of entities and events:

Things we can't see, people who are absent, are not merely conditional objects of our perception. They are independent of us; they have an asserted life of their own. They are like children who have grown up and passed outside our jurisdiction and control. If I imagine you, then yes, I remember you as I saw you when you were here, I visualise you as you would be if you were here now, I imagine you as you are now; I see you from a selection of the single viewpoints I have or should have. But I don't have to imagine you to talk abut you, or to keep you in mind. The way I think about you when you're away is a bit like the way a physicist thinks about particles. He can't have in mind what he would see if he looked, and he can't imagine it, because the particle has no definite state - and in any case would change its state if it were looked at. That doesn't stop him talking and thinking about the particle, though.

There is something rather familiar about this version I have of you, which is not conceived from one single particular viewpoint at one single particular time, not even really from a combination of different viewpoints, but which is an idea allowing me to see you from close to and from far off, from the back as well as the front, from the inside, looking at me, as well as from the outside. It is not a portrait of you. It is an icon of you.

~ Link to 'The Human Touch' at Amazon UK / Amazon US

Frayn's conception draws rather splendidly a model of consciousness which I first came across in Max Velmans' brain-exploding enterprise 'Understanding Consciousness'. For Velmans, and for anyone taking Frayn's example to its obvious conclusion, consciousness - that is perception of the external world in the subjective realm of the human mind - cannot be understood unless a holistic position is taken.

The cat I see walking up the stairs is significant, not because I recognise it as a cat, but because the very iconic idea of it is composed entirely in my mind. I have a history with cats, I may even have seen this particular cat before, but until I look at it, stroke its fur with my fingers, the cat as an absolute entity in terms of human caprice does not exist. Sure, the cat has a reality all of its own, it exists independent of whether or not I see it, but the thing I see, the idea of cat-ness I posit, and other humans like me posit, is an icon of perception. This means that what I subjectively posit as the cat and what I have the ability to objectively understand as the cat are one and the same thing. The contents of my mind is the same as the cat itself as icon: my consciousness extends beyond the region located between my ears and out, into the world at large.

I have often mused that when I stick my hand deep down into my rucksack and root around for an apple, my consciousness actually exists at the tip of my fingers and throughout the smoothness of my palm. What's more, in building a picture of the inside of the bag through the shuffle of my hand, my consciousness comes to exist throughout that space. This conception, although simplistic in nature, draws for me the best representation of the role of the human mind on the universe. My telescope allows me to spread out my consciousness; to send it shimmering on a wave of photons which arc back, perhaps billions of years, to particular cosmic events which had no human resonance before I pointed my eye towards them. The human conception of this universe is growing ever larger with ever discovery we make, every new way we invent and interact with the realm of our existence. If consciousness could be seen, could be draw in outline by an alien eye, then perhaps stretching out from the Earth, and down into the atom, like fingers searching for an apple, our consciousness would be seen forging a reality in its wake. And perhaps, as Frayn's analogy with the particle suggests, the human mind changes reality as it interacts with it; that without the human mind an entirely different reality would exist in its place.

This little shift of perspective, although not enormous, further fortifies for me the idea that consciousness is somehow crucial in the manifestation of reality. That reality is relative to the minds which inhabit it. How deep this symbiosis goes, and how inevitable it is in the evolution of the universe as a whole not I, or any human mind, is capable of assuming. We are the sum of the contents of our minds, a contents which manifests our universe; our reality; our self-realised prison of perception. Breaking out of that prison merely requires we try to see things in as many different ways as we are capable:

Ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science... This loosening of thinking seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief in a single truth and being the possessor thereof is the root cause of all evil in this world.

~ Max Born, 'Symbol and Reality' in Physics in my Generation

Categories: Science, Weird, Consciousness, Perception, Books, Reality, Human, Universe, Quotes, People, Simulacrum, Ideas, Nature