Panpsychology

A Polyphonic Master Class

By AtheEisegete
Sam Harris forum thread Panpsychism, Jan-April 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Why I am I overwhelmed by an emotional rush when I am isolated in nature and in the presence of the wondrous beauty of the mountains? Why do I get a feeling up there that I can only describe as magical?

I would relate this to panpsychism. Consciousness can be seen as an emergent phenomenon composed of parts — which for want of a better term we may call "qualia" — that represent the psychic poles of bipolar entities that reach down to the very roots of the physical universe. This can work in a picture of the mind as arranged in concentric zones or circles — or "mindworlds" in my terminology.

In this picture, consciousness emerges in the inner members of a set of such concentric circles, whose outer members potentially circumscribe the totality of reality. This kind of concentric-circles view was advocated by consciousness scientist Alwyn Scott in his 1995 book Stairway to the Mind. A very similar view was propounded by the Oxford pharmacologist Susan Greenfield in her 1995 book Journey to the Centers of the Mind.

As people, we live very largely within the innermost of these zones, where the individual and personal quality of consciousness is prominent and where evolution by natural selection can work efficiently over the generations to optimize the mechanisms that enable us to rest content with these inner zones for most practical purposes. However, several experiential states cause us to break out of these zones and seek comfort in wider circles, so to speak, where of course the "us" here refers not to something separate from this cosmic cyclone of psychic zones but just to the emergent entity that tends to concentrate where the twistor winds tighter.

Psychic states that tend to cause such dilation or such a sense of the soul expanding are numerous and have numerous labels, which typically have a religious cast (since they are not well understood states). Among these are the states to which you refer, where you are isolated in nature and feel the presence of "wondrous beauty". These states seem good for a good reason, if my analysis makes any sense here.

Think of life on Earth as an outgrowth of the Earth itself. Think of each of us as a spiralling peak (of zones on a spiky ball, the Earth) that is rooted in the Earth itself. That is, our twistor systems of psychic circles spiral right down into the planet. As our moods dilate, the psychic music that formerly consisted merely of harmonies playing in the higher circles suddenly hits great bass notes, where the "rock" music of the deeper zones is excited.

So far so poetic, or not, but where's the science here? Well, evolution worked way, way back on our primeval ancestors to make them thrill to good prospects. Imagine the thrill when a microbe finds a food patch, or a bug stumbles on a turd, or a patriarch like Abraham sets off with his clan into the green fields of the great wide world. The soul expands to fill the space set before it, and the soul rejoices. This is the expansion of life in action, grabbing what it can and making the most of it. All this is deep in our genes.

So when you stand on a mountain and feel your soul exult, it is because somewhere deep in your soul a bass rhythm is excited that says — Space! Freedom! Opportunity! Go for it! — and triggers a cascade of pharmacological effects in your limbic system.

Alwyn Scott was an author at Springer, where I worked back in the 1990s. When I told him of my interest in consciousness studies, he invited me to attend the Brain and Self Workshop at Elsinore, Denmark, August 1997. That hooked me, and I started going regularly to consciousness conferences. I met Susan Greenfield at the conference in Skövde, Sweden, August 2001. We talked about science over breakfast and she told me what fun it was to sit in the House of Lords.

However, my mindworlds idea came more from two decades of contemplation of the logical works of Saul Kripke, whom I heard lecturing in Oxford and London when he was still a hot young messiah. Together with some of the more mystical pronouncements of Ludwig Wittgenstein (whose Tractatus really impressed me) and the psychological works of William James (who talked about worlds in his reflections on religious experience), these works gave me quite a revelation when I stirred in quantum theory (especially the consistent histories approach of Roland Omnès and others, along with the decoherence story pioneered by Springer author Dieter Zeh) and post-Turing computer science (especially David Deutsch, whose views on the quantum theory of possible worlds recalled not only Hugh Everett but also Kripke). This is a rich stew.

This reads a bit like a heroin story, replete with messiahs and revelations of how you got addicted and converted to a new age belief system where you were free to invent your own theory of mindworlds.

Never having smacked myself, I can't really endorse this, but I kinda like the terminology of messiahs and so on. The religious tradition has given such words ripely redolent meanings, just bursting with perlocutionary promise. Anyway, I'm cool with the disinclination to get too earnest here.

What if there is a self beyond that which we generally hold to be our self? According to the scientific view, I (my self) exist now, but did not exist in the past, and will not exist in the future; and so it may be said that, scientifically speaking, there is both existence and non-existence. But I say that this cannot be.

All this dickers around with time. What is, was, and always will have been. Thus it is in Einstein's block universe. The logic here can be cast in set theory using what I think is a neat pun. The word "exist" breaks to "ex-ist" and "ist" is German for "is" (as Heidegger and others well knew). So we have a transition from "it is" to "it exists" (that is, it was) and hence to the strata of history. The set theory is of course the standard Zermelo-Fraenkel theory of the cumulative hierarchy of pure well-founded sets, in the von Neumann-Bernays-Gödel variant admitting pure classes. Your ontology goes from classes to sets as you clamber up the cumulative hierarchy.

What you get is the ordinal scale acting as a formal stand-in for time. In fact, you get a nice ice-cream-cone universe with a fluffy top that gives wonderful visions of homology with the big bang. Let me add, before I wash my mouth out with soap and water, that God breathed out a transfinitude of sets, which crystalized into the ice-cream cone with the fluffy top, which became the Calabi-Yau manifold twisting in the quantum foam and inflated to all we know and love.

The self is layered, as many agree, and the layers go deep, as I assert. A good axiom for panpsychists is that subject and object are equal and opposite. Any object presents a set of "phenomenal" surfaces that form bricks in the walls of the circles of any subjects for which it is an object.

God, our Creator, has spoken and revealed Himself to us. To make sense of life, of origins, of truth, of logic, of morals, of the uniformity in nature, of personality, God is the only explanation. All the other explanations cannot make sense of these things.

This confuses three things that when disentangled reveal insights that enable us to make progress here:

Soia, the self of introspective awareness, speaks and reveals the self to us.
Goof, the god of our fathers, makes sense of life, origins, morals, and personality.
Bopp, the being of physical phenomena, makes sense of truth, logic, and the uniformity in nature.

These three entities are tied in a knot that invites precisely the confusion displayed above.

Soia, the self of introspective awareness, is an organizational consequence of the interaction of a hundred billion neurons connected via a hundred trillion synapses, where each neurons regularly fires rhythmic bursts of millisecond spikes to its neighbors in the human neocortex. Soia develops and deploys language and reveals facets of personality and character within folds of re-entrant circuitry that creates levels of reflexive awareness. Humans can easily make mistakes when attributing speaking voices and characterizing selves, and the human relation to Soia is generally unstable and ringed with paradox.

Goof, the god of our fathers, is a genetically anchored focus of purposive striving that results in concentric circles of selfhood and value. The outer circles define life and species identity, inner circles define family and kin, and the innermost circles define an organismic self analogous to the self of the immune system, within which self cells are genetic clones. Genes have cooperated to replicate for several billion years and have grown increasingly efficient at playing complementary roles in ever more complex organisms over evolutionary time. The phenomenology generated by genes for striving purposefully can be seen by humans as godlike, but in any case provides a good foundation for Soia.

Bopp, the being of physical phenomena, is the mysterious source of the intelligibility of physical phenomena, where arbitrarily exotic configurations of energy in spacetime apparently admit of arbitrarily deep mathematical modeling, all constrained by layers of logic built on an ontology that supports a reasonable concept of truth. The question of how far the inner coherence of the physical universe reaches is still under investigation and may reveal new surprises, but it is already evident that physical reality as we now understand it provides an ample foundation for Goof and therefore a good foundation for Soia too.

This trinity suffices to outline an explanation for all previous theology and metaphysics and therefore to provide a definitive explanation for all practical purposes that need concern us. A huge convoluted network connects and surrounds these three entities in our species' collective mindworld. At the periphery of this network is utter ineffability.

Why do you say three?

Astute question. The choice of three is a rhetorical device, to awake memories of the, ahem, holy trinity. In fact the number is rather arbitrary, since the rag-bag of phenomena the trio "explains" is huge and lacking any obvious ordering principle.

Actually, the physicist Paul Davies made a similar crude division of physics into the physics of the big, the small and the complex. That stayed in my mind, since Bopp is big, Soia is small, and Goof is complex. But this is not a precise mapping, just a vague similarity.

All this is, as I said, a diversion. The cutely diverting idea here, for me, is that of Goof as a manifestation of human genocentricity. What this nasty phrase means is as follows. The fact that we are, as Richard Dawkins puts it, lumbering robots dedicated to the replication of our genes, so apparently subversive of religion, finds its most vivid expression precisely in the religion Dawkins excoriates so mercilessly!

To be more exact, the shimmering ideal beyond the individual, beyond personal life and death, is a godlike "strange attractor" (to sneak in a term from nonlinear dynamics) that people use to celebrate cooperation and altruism, and to push for "family values" in politics. All this is highly suggestive to a scientist in the Dan Dennett mould.

My panpsychist mindworlds hobby horse is beyond all this, but once I saw Goof I thought it worth a pause for a bit of evangelizing for good ole Dawkins fundamentalism: Goof is great and Dawkins is his prophet!

Thomas Nagel suggested in his book The View From Nowhere that panpsychism might be true. Also, much more recently, Galen Strawson has been defending the view that physicalism entails panpsychism.

Thomas Nagel's view from nowhere is a neat phrase for a fascinating phenomenon, namely the attempt in classical science to defocus the subject altogether, as if to rise above all that finitude and achieve lift-off to higher realms. One of the last traces in classical physics is the observer in relativity (special or general), who traces a proper timeline and serves as a reference for velocities and accelerations.

Things got much hairier in quantum mechanics, which after the pixie dust settled revealed entanglement landscapes in which truth itself became relativized. Roughly, in a quantum multiverse with uncountably many branches, our trajectory carves out a big and growing entanglement of "classical" truths surrounded by superpositions (we carve out a "consistent history" in the Roland Omnès version of the story). As we entangle with stuff, it falls out of superposition. It's like when we open the airtight catbox to find Schrödinger's cat to be alive or dead, made classical, fixed. Anyway, the observer took a bow.

So, how is it with Nagel's view? Strictly untenable, I say. This goes with the logic of my mindworlds, but let's take it slowly enough to be sure we're on the same page. At best, we can approximate "suprasubjectivity" asymptotically, and in effect this is the quest in classical science. Einstein, bless him, got as near as anyone, with his view that time was a persistent illusion, but he never grokked quantum mechanics and it subverts his sempiternal block universe. By the way, Brian Greene glossed the block as a sliced loaf, where we subjects experience successive slices as we crawl along our little timelines. The sting in the tail is that you can slice the loaf every which way, depending on how fast you go!

Anyway, this does relate to the issue, because Einstein got much of his certainty about time from his Princeton chum Kurt Gödel (on whose amazing logical theorems I wrote a distinguished Oxford thesis half a life ago). Now Gödel also inspired Douglas Hofstadter to rave on at book length about "an eternal golden braid" that he reprised last year in his charming memoir I am a Strange Loop.

This is a metaphor I can run with! We are strange loops in the Gödel sense. Subjective time loops the loop, in a logical process I can reconstruct fairly cleanly in axiomatic set theory. And this is the logical scaffolding for mindworlds. On which more later.

Galen Strawson's recent writings inspired me to call this thread Panpsychism. Galen is the son of a distinguished Oxford philosopher whose books I studied with admiration half a lifetime ago. But he has some wits of his own, and his extravagant outpouring on panpsychism in the Journal of Consciousness Studies amused me. I am a longtime subscriber and contributor to the journal.

I have to quibble. Galen is no physicist, and he has no chance in tarnation of carrying through his project without a lot of support from physics, particularly the quantum variety. The rock-star philosopher David Chalmers, a couple of whose recent "End of Consciousness" parties in Arizona I enjoyed no end, especially when we created new verses for his signature contribution to philosophy, the zombie blues, has a more realistic appreciation of the enormity of this enterprise. For his approach, which gets deeper into math, Kripke logic and information theory, I have great and enduring sympathy.

So thanks for the word, Galen. Indirectly, I think, we are approaching the holy of holies, where an infinity of mindworlds swirl in a holistic quantum space.

Quantum mysticism is pre-critical. It cannot be criticized in the here and now.

After a few mighty struggles with the Galactic League of Superheroes (Planck, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Feynman, Deutsch et al.) and even mightier struggles with the Time Lords (Einstein and Gödel, plus their minor acolytes) I have returned from the mountain with graven tablets.

Bring forth thy stone tablets.

OK. Start with young Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his Tractatus said "I am my world" and "the world is the totality of facts, not of things." Facts are what makes true propositions true, and consistent sets of truths define worlds. For Wittgenstein, there was one set of facts and one world, but that was a prequantum view.

More recently, Saul Kripke developed a logic of worlds that generalizes the view and fits serendipitously with quantum worlds as envisaged by Hugh Everett. Last summer, in fact (that is, in this world), David Deutsch and associates proved that probability theory works as intended with Everett's views, so all this is now decent science.

It goes like this. Quantum reality is a "blooming, buzzing confusion," to quote William James. The logic enters with worlds, seen as consistent sets of facts. In the new view, these emerge from the confusion and separate gradually (at the quantum level) from their neighbors. To use words due to Roger Penrose, I shall call the prefactual confusion the omnium and call quantum entanglement quanglement.

As we cruise through time, we quangle with the omnium to create ever more facts (sounds political, I know, but this is basic ontology now). New conformations of reality come into being, and as time passes come into existence (conceived as being with a past timestamp). In general, our subjective worlds (which are as objective as anything in the omnium) grow bigger, or perhaps go through successive phases or stages or determinations. Think of either one bubble growing bigger or a series of bubble stages, each more or less encompassing its predecessors. These are mindworlds.

A mindworld is centered on a subject. Or rather, a mindworld is the momentary embodiment or extension or realization of a subject. A subject is reflected one-to-one (equal and opposite) in such an objective configuration, such a constellation of facts, such a quangled constellation of the omnium.

Worlds emerge just as a timeline emerges in the omnium. By an amazing (to me) stroke of luck, some physicists recently realized that you could formulate quantum mechanics in a time-free system, by reconstructing time as an emergent property of a suitable series of such nested mindworlds (they didn't use my word, of course, since I am still a prophet in the wilderness so far as tenured academics are concerned). This is important because it gives us room to unite quantum theory and gravitation (general relativity) in a single consistent framework — the holy grail of quantum gravity, the big TOE (theory of everything)!

So as time goes on, we quangle with more omnium and create more facts, thus blowing bigger bubbles of consistency, like rafts of sanity, in the phenomenal phantasmagoria. We emerge with our timeline and our world states. A world without a subject is a contradiction in terms. Scientists who imagine the universe before humans evolved are of course themselves the subjects, imagining an imaginary world that is intentionally (this is philosophical jargon for symbolically related, like word to thing) related to the imagined configuration of the omnium.

I am equal and opposite to my world. As worlds evolve, I evolve too, in a cosmic dance of quantum exquisitude. You and I, and others, the whole lot of us, inhabit similar worlds that to a rough approximation often look the same. So we can agree on quite a lot. Our worlds are in fairly thoroughgoing quanglement. Of course there is no perfect isomorphism there. But for some people, like lovers, there's quite a lot. The mathematician Hardy once said that all mathematicians are isomorphic. Basically, he meant they agree pretty exactly about what counts as good math.

Now, since worlds are emergent and slightly fuzzy at the edges, so am I, so are we. We are limits of our worlds, to use another Wittgensteinian concept. Our worlds tend to define us, asymptotically, and we tend to exist, but in fact hover in a state of being (until we die, perhaps, when you could say we fall into existence as has-beens).

Essential to this concept is circularity. The universe coils back on itself through me to see itself, as Wigner, Feynman and other fine men have said. This I can model with a logic that owes a lot to Gödel and Hofstadter — Douglas Hofstadter, you may recall, wrote a big, slightly mad book about Gödel and last year a nice book called I Am a Strange Loop. A strange loop is a logical loop that involves a change of levels, so it looks paradoxical, like a Möbius strip with a twist to give it just one side.

My own modest contribution to all this was first to see how worlds of facts could be given a formal semantics that mapped into layers of the cumulative hierarchy of pure well-founded sets in such a way that the ordinal dimension looked like time and the transition from being to existence was reflected in the ontological transition from proper classes to sets, but let's skip the pedantry for now. Second, it was to invent the concept of mindworlds and suggest a mapping to collective photon states in brainwaves.

That may be where Wittgenstein started when he was young, but I doubt if he'd have said such a thing by the time he was your age.

Many brilliant young thinkers do their best work when young, and Wittgenstein was no exception. He never repudiated the Tractatus and suggested binding it together with the Philosophical Investigations to represent his life's work. Consider Kripke's more mature reflections on the solipsistic tendencies of the Tractatus and deduce that the message there is still interesting (in a Kabbalistic way, perhaps) even if an older man might say things differently.

As I see it, old Wittgenstein simply bracketed his earlier work, by contextualizing and relativizing the transgressive narrative behind the numbered propositions. No repudiation there, and none possible consistent with the cultural pluralism of the later fragments. Basically, Wittgenstein never reached that height of monomaniac passion again.

I understand his predicament. My own warp-speed flights into the mystic realms of set-theoretic metaphysics were the highest I ever soared. Since then I have had my hands full working out the consequences and finding new ways to evangelize for the vision.

I liked the movie What the Bleep?! because it made quantum physics seems intriguing and gave viewers lots to get warmed up about. Who cares about the mad spiritualism so long as everyone's talking about it?

The Roland Omnès book Quantum Philosophy was fairly conventional, though I like the consistent histories approach and am convinced this is the right way to go, at least when complemented with an Everett-Deutsch story of branching paths and emergent classicism.

I am convinced that quantum theory has the potential to revolutionize psychology and one day put it on a firm scientific foundation. Psychology today is a mixture of empirical "tinkering" (as Ramachandran puts it) and folk ideas about the self and feelings and so on.

My prophecy: psychology and physics will merge in psy-phy.

In some ways, all of reality is like ideas, thoughts and so on. The quantum quacks, as I shall cheekily dub them, in What the Bleep overdid this line of thought, in my opinion, but I think it can be spelled out more soberly. Existence has a subjective side, a "qualia" side perhaps, and a more conventionally objective side, where thing that exist are rooted in the great externality. The subjective side of existents (note that "ts") may be hard to discern (what are the qualia for the Big Bang for example?), but recall that everything that surfaces in any way in consciousness has ipso facto acquired a phenomenal side, albeit at some arbitrarily convoluted intentional remove from its origins.

I'm beginning to understand why all those famous philosophers get accused of using impenetrable jargon! My usage of the word phenomena and its cognates is in polite deference to Immanuel Kant, who contrasted the phenomenal world with the noumenal world, or in modern terms the world of appearances with the reality behind those appearances. Since in his view the phenomenal world included everything we could ever practically know, the noumenal world fell away as something of a shadow, as Hegel and others quickly pointed out. But the problem with letting noumena go completely is that you get left with a potentially self-serving idealism, as indeed Karl Marx in effect pointed out. Hard facts remain, and if they look economic then you get left with Marxism and its ideological consequences.

So, back to panpsychism. The omnium is an eternal chaos that first acquires temporal order and classical facticity (sorry, that was a word from Heidegger) when we quangle with it via the sort of interactions that physicists tend to see as measurements. We choose what to study and bring that part of reality to sharp focus, while all around is the blooming buzzing confusion (words from William James) that I am calling the omnium (word from Roger Penrose).

It is our interaction with the omniatic flux that brings consistency and time into the picture. We make it make sense - or not - depending on how methodically we do what we do. We carve out a path in the blooming buzzing omnium. As a religious person might see it, a higher power guides our steps along the straight and narrow path and makes our timeline a good one.

Creating a consistent take on being and time is what all this is about — Being and Time was Heidegger's big book. This is no coincidence. He got the question right. But we can all dispute the answer(s) unto eternity.

My answer: psy(cho)phy(sics).

Christopher Hitchens and others will be happy to suggest to you the hypothesis that Jesus is a mythological figure. Apparently, C.S. Lewis had a fondness for the letter L, and seems to have limited himself to alliterative variations based on that. Let's move along one letter in the alphabet and ask if Jesus is man, myth, or metaphor. For the first of these, there is not even any credible historical record. You are left with myth, metaphor, or methadone.

Chris Hitchens I recall from my Oxford years. He and I had common friends, and for years I was unimpressed by his Trotskyite radicalism and his inglorious activities on Fleet Street. But he does have a way with words, and his God book has undeniable zest. So now I'm humbled in admiration before his thus-crowned life's work.

Still, when it comes to science and philosophy, Chris is no more impressive than C.S. Lewis, who is not, of course. On Jesus, most people are all at sea, especially most Christians. To update my image of the classic vision of Jesus, I read Pope Benedict's new book over Christmas. Since Benedict is philosophically quite smart, the book is surprisingly good.

On reflection, I have to admit that although of course the standard sources on Jesus are hardly reliable in any normal sense, the picture emerges, as Benedict insists, of a historically real person with a distinct and vivid personality, despite the fog of unreliable narrators.

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice." — C.S. Lewis

This is a false trichotomy. Jesus was merely a man, but a divinely inspired man. He was a lunatic by everyday standards, but a lunatic in the service of the Abrahamic God (the strange attractor in the genocentric reality of human mental space). And in the terms of ancient folk psychology he was a devil, a fallen angel, fallen to Earth to rant with disquieting serenity about his "father" in heaven. Jesus was a man with a mission, who stopped at nothing, even a painful death, to underscore a message he righteously regarded as supremely important. So, Lewis, where's the choice? I see no need to choose in view of this triune reality.

A tendency to Tie Things Together (TTT) is one of the most useful attributes humanity has. But thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Heisenberg and Schrödinger are perhaps the most over-interpreted philosophers in history. For instance, Schrödinger was not explaining details about how things work as much as he was explaining how absurd the world seems to be when viewed through a fine enough lens.

Indeed, TTT is the origin of concepts and the origin of organized mind (as well as disorganized, but let that be for now).

Panpsychism arises from this hard fact. Everything we see or know or become in any way acquainted with becomes something for us through our minds. In this sense, not only physics but life, the universe and everything are all psycho (logical or illogical).

Materialism must be right in this sense. The stuff of minds cannot be other than the stuff of things, or the possibility of causal interaction goes down the tubes. So all we mind is stuff with a psycho side or dimension or quality or xyz.

Panpsychism is in this sense trivially true. But its implications for a properly formulated psychophysics are probably nontrivial. What are the implications? Dunno. I'm not smart enough to see full glory. But I'm trying.

Magical thinking is something I never do. Yet TTT is almost that already.

Faith is a means to unknow or to persist in ignorance of things you would prefer not to know.

Consider where people archetypally or paradigmatically have faith. They have faith that they will survive their own death. They know they will die but they would rather not know. They know that begetting their next kid will strain their finances but they would rather not know. They know that having sex with the choir boy is bad but they would rather not know.

People of faith can see plain truths as well as anyone else, but they regard eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge as dangerous. They can understand that eating too much makes you fat and transpose that understanding by analogy. So accepting the truth of evolution is regarded as trespassing on the property of the gods.

Why did faith evolve? It seems counterproductive. Well, we all know things we'd rather not know. I know I'm going to die. Given that that is a fact, I'd rather know it and plan accordingly. But if there's a shadow of a doubt, well, faith is a tempting option. Ditto with getting the lady pregnant just by having sex with her, or going broke just because I bought a new car, or getting lung cancer by smoking ... the examples are endless. The mechanism is ubiquitous.

So why did faith evolve? For the same reason optimism did. Without optimism we'd all die of sheer misery. If I accepted the odds that all my efforts will end in abject failure and ignominious death I'd save myself the bother and give up now. We stake all on long odds. Faith helps us do that.

You seem to have a jolly old time throwing out words that seem to have no other purpose than to inflate your own ego. If you would be so kind, why don't you try to restate your idea once more and this time try to actually communicate with us.

Well, indeed, I recall that Victorian parliamentarian Benjamin Disraeli said of his colleague William Gladstone that he was "intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity". However, I am sure that James Joyce would have reveled in the felicity of this rotundly Victorian phrase as a description of his own divinely inspired glossolalia.

But your protest is well taken. An act of informative intercourse is only consummated when the relevant information has been transmitted, and the sign of this consummation is an acknowledgment by the recipient. I must persist until I receive an OK.

Now we're back to Wittgenstein's early work, which he at least somewhat repudiated.

He did, but was that wise? The Tractatus was an attempt to catch in a metaphysical gem the worldview of Fregean logic. Fregean logic was the biggest extension of logic since Aristotle, and took us far beyond the possibilities of syllogistic reasoning and Boolean logic. Gottlob Frege's apparatus of quantification, with his functional notation, and its application in foundational studies to formalize the pioneering set theory of Georg Cantor, took us into the new realms charted by Russell and Whitehead in their fat trilogy, Principia Mathematica.

Wittgenstein followed all this keenly. He was as impressed as they all were by the power and scope of the new vision. And rightly, too, in retrospect. For from it flowed Kurt Gödel's astonishing theorems, as the barrier to completion of David Hilbert's 1900 foundations program, and Alan Turing's theorem on the halting problem, and hence the whole wonderful world of computers.

The whole digital revolution had its revelatory origins in the formalized logic that found its visionary consummation in the oracular gem of the Tractatus. It was a big achievement.

Yet behind it lay the solipsistic self-aggrandisement of a smart rich boy from Vienna. Ludwig saw that he could never top it, never even defend it rationally against the armies of flatheads who complained pedanticaly about this or that trivial detail. Recall that the whole logical positivist movement found its inspiration in that crystaline vision. Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan had similar ideas. Think of all the controversy stirred up by all that.

No, Wittgenstein went soft and woolly. To support this I need only point to his writings on mathematics. There were glimmers of insight there, but the mathematicians I have discussed it with have poo-poo'd it, I think rightly.

Wittgenstein's later work resulted in much in today's take on linguistics and cognitive psychology.

I have my own take on Wittgenstein, of course, and this may be unorthodox in parts. Certainly a lot of people found the later Wittgenstein much more congenial than the earlier, and for good reason, since the spin-offs from his fragments (and that is all they ever were, just reams and reams of bits of paper with remarks on them, a few of which he assembled into the Philosophical Investigations and the remainder of which were picked over by his disciples after his death) were as you say, today's standard views on many issues in linguistics and cognitive psychology. I have certainly not lied about how many mathematicians react to his later work, and this for me colors the likely value of the rest.

Wittgenstein repudiated his earlier views only in the sense that he saw them as an illusion. But he saw every systematic view as an illusion! He just sank into a swamp of relativism and fragmented insights. Lots of good stuff there, of course, as some philosophers have found, such as my former research supervisor Crispin Wright (who wrote a book on Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics), but with the best will in the world (so to speak) I found nothing there that I could really get my hands on as a contribution to understanding mathematical praxis.

Wittgenstein somewhat repudiated his earlier position, essentially because it was just too way out for public consumption, but he never subjected it to any serious criticism, just moved on to rather general stuff.

Just as individual rationality comes to terms with the absence of an afterlife, so it comes to terms with the fact of species extinction. When it's all over, there won't even be anyone around to read the history of all our strivings.

Let me expound a potted version of my post-millenial eschatology. It's all happening! All will be well in the best of all possible worlds! Prophetic guru Ray Kurzweil points the way!

We, the human species, are creating our successors. They are currently called robots, but they will evolve fast, very fast, to embrace our entire genomes as fun things to tweak and grow as pets. They will become androids with robot bodies around biocores built on tweaked genomes. They will call themselves Homo superior and will find good reasons to make haste clearing the trash of pretechno feral humans.

Nietzsche, move over: Thus spake Zaross. Yea, verily, the androids will inherit the Earth.

Try talking to a machine the way you talk to us.

Touché. The annual farce of the Turing test shows the problem. This is why a robot will need a biocore to get smart enough. The Kurzweil scenario is that genomics, nanotech and robotics will all evolve fast and synergize. We (and it will be we, maybe Western or Chinese humans) will build robot suits for ourselves. Hell, we're doing it already — we call them cars. We will soon (in evolutionary terms) become inseparable from them. Imagine a world so polluted that the life-support systems in the cars are all that stands between life and death. Whatever the detailed scenario, the effect will be the same. A synergistic lifeform with a biocore of some sort and a robotic exterior will have its consciousness permanently online. That leaves precious little room for individual deviancy, which in a world of exploding fundamentalists will be seen as progress.

So these androids will be in effect all tech (the bio part is just a name for DNA tech) and always online. The real control will be a distributed superconsciousness in the net, or rather in the Global Online Dominion (a tad beyond Google).

It should seem obvious to us that intelligence conveyed an evolutionary advantage in the past. However, we may be able to determine our own fate if we become smart enough.

If you think you're not smart enough to determine your own fate, you're not smart enough. Yea, verily, the smart shall inherit the Earth. And build androids to help them do it — and live in their cars and fill the atmosphere with engineered viruses to keep down the cave dwellers. Won't be long now — The Singularity is nigh!

Seriously, guys, tech is getting better and better every day in every way. My team develops a search engine that will soon be able to parse a sentence! At this rate, in just a few more rounds of Moore's law, the machines will be writing classics by the billion. Ah, irony is a fine thing. Will they get it? Or will the last man standing be a comic?

I dub thee hypocrite!

Well, there's a come-on if ever I heard one! How about checking out my metaphysical endowment and seeing how hypocritical a glossolaliac can be?

Sigmund Freud, in my opinion rightly, opined that civilization was built upon sexual repression. For this reason, I find it sinister that a British government organ today (approximately) pronounced that we should all have sex every day to reduce our chances of heart disease and cancer. Is this good science or a bid to keep down the malcontents? An attempt to persuade all those angry young Muslims to pleasure themselves to images of scantily clad lovelies in order to reduce the suicide bomber rate, perhaps.

Sounds like bogus science to me. I go with Mohandas K Gandhi, who opined that not ejaculating was the key to spiritual health and well being. He even subjected himself to the torment of sleeping with nubile young ladies to test his powers of resistance, and was old and wise enough to remain chaste!

I think I could go for that — if only I could find a supply of bashful cow-eyed virgins to practice with.

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit.

I fear there is some merit to this claim. I am an earnest follower of all the latest fashions in the field of foundational physics, and last summer David Deutsch and David Wallace proved a remarkable theorem that, if true, makes the Hugh Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics with branching universes and so on seem much more mathematically respectable than ever before.

Sadly, when you study the theorem, it piles up a series of definitions of matters pertaining to "subjective probability" that even I (who long ago wrote a small thesis on probability theory) could see depended on some rather subtle intepretation. So I'd say the status of the Everett conjecture is almost as moot as ever, despite the prima facie plausibility of Deutsch's arguments for his views.

As for my own efforts, on which some readers here have perhaps already had their fill, they depend on some tricky issues in mathematics and philosophy where reasonable men may differ. I still think I'm right, but others who think they understand think I don't understand whatever it is they think they understand, I think, if I understand them correctly.

So don't take my word for it. Think these things through for yourself, as Gautama Buddha said.

Freud was just projecting his own neurosis upon the world.

Whether you can accept this Freudian statement depends on a series of collateral beliefs that may or may not be coded in your neuronets and that one can only advise you think through for yourself. I see it as one of the wisest things Freud ever said.

Human civilization is a social order built upon social conventions that among other things constrain and regulate the expression of our sexual urges. Consider how religions, especialy the Abrahamic religions, issue endlessly detailed and obsessively nuanced instructions about how people should conduct themselves sexually, and consider how now, in our secularizing world, people are still subject to massive propaganda about what forms and varietes of sexual expression are politically correct or fashionable or taboo.

Being here in Germany, I readily recall how Nazi propaganda anathematized non-procreative sex among German youth, as if they were doing so in order to train a generation of hardened fighters to take on the decadent races of Europe in mortal combat.

WTF are we talking about? Did you bring up Ludwig as part of some progression toward something? Why not a philosophy thread? We already know that quantum comedy isn't funny in the macro world. Did you want to start a science thread? I was looking forward to hearing more about bopp and goofy and their friends. I thought you were going to do some mental stuff. I thought you agreed that a TOE was not needed to explain the human mind.

WTF is the problem? I announce panpsychism, limber up with Bopp, Goof and Soia, reconstruct being and time from quantum qualia in the omniatic flux, deconstruct the transgressive narrative behind logical positivism, celebrate a brilliant idea from yours truly about faith, fend off a perverse attack with a discussion of civilization and its discontents, and launch on a manic rant culminating in wild hosannas to the Global Online Dominion. If panpsycho is truly pan, then this is all in a day's work for a trainee psycho.

If this is not mental stuff, I don't know what is. But I take your point and shall try to do justice to this central theme. First, to swat another fly, the omnium is just the plenum of life, the universe and everything. It is all that is and could be and could have been and so on. It is all the worlds that were and are and ever shall be. It is the state space of the universe, the space that wannabe timelord Julian Barbour calls Platonia, in which, as he puts it, the quantum mist settles around the traveled paths.

To mental stuff. I would happily tell wayward anecdotes about Bopp and Goofy, but first let us deal soberly with Soia, the self of introspective awareness, which Douglas Hofstadter sees as the phenomenal manifestation of a strange loop and which Daniel Dennett sees as the outcome of cranial pandemonium as cognitive demons implemented in neural wetware slug it out in the Darwinian jungle of the neocortex.

My rational epiphany here came at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, New York, in September 2002, where at a New York Academy of Sciences conference orchestrated by neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux a panoply of Nobelists and other luminaries from Gazzaniga to Damasio to Dennett regaled us with thrilling tales of neuroscientific progress which I wrote up as a breathless report for the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

My culminating paragraph from that report: "The cerebral EM field is still terra incognita. This is the critical weakness in the neurological concept of self. Perhaps the photonic self will one day be seen to rise as far above the neurological self as the neurological self rises above the genomic self. Perhaps we shall even glimpse a hierarchy of selves, soaring through the hierarchy of Buddhas into Cantor's transfinite paradise."

As you may guess, my own thing here is the cerebral EM field, which because its quantum properties are interesting I call the cerebral photonic field. My own, ahem, Photonic Theory of Consciousness (see the eponymous PowerPoint show I presented at the Towards a Science of Consciousness conference in Prague in July 2003) is in my view a more plausible candidate theory than the microtubular "Orch OR" (for "orchestrated objective reduction" of the wavefunction for the conjectured microwave laser action in the cerebral microtubules) theory formerly advocated by renowned mathematical physicist Roger Penrose and Arizona anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.

This really sounds nutty as a fruit cake, now I come to mention it all.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Wow, I see some heavy old baggage here. As a scientist, I tend to see love as a human affective state indicated by elevated levels of various neuromodulators and so on, and find it hard to relate this to a conjectured entity deserving of worship, sacrifice and so on.

I find the definition amenable to quite reasonable parsing within the scope of a scientific theory of genetic determinism, whereby human action tends to be genocentric, and where the conceptually baffling attractor for human striving is a transgenerational fetish historically described in the terms that have accreted around the Abrahamic God, also known as the God Of Our Fathers (GOOF).

This idea is my own post-Dawkinsian memetic initiative based on a highly eisegetic reading of parts of the canonical GOOF literature.

Howard Bloom's The Global Brain gets at what you're trying to get at without relying on an ancient and abstract metaphysical doctrine such as panpsychism (which has no bearing on any scientific work) as a foundation.

Sure, I enjoyed Bloom's book, despite the amazing tide of notes and references. I thought his central thesis had some inspirational merit.

I think there is something to be salvaged in the venerable doctrine of panpsychism, not as a banner for a great movement but just as a useful oddball label for a position that leverages that central oddity.

In short, mind dilates to accommodate the care devoted to its calming. If the mind has a temperature, defined as the average EM energy of its constituent thoughts, then a calmed mind can approximate absolute zero, 0 K. Perhaps then we experience a phase transition to quantum coherence. To my knowledge, no-one has yet investigated the conditions under which deep-radio photons (in the dekahertz range generated by brainwaves) exhibit quantum behavior. Such a coherent state delocalizes (the spherically symmetric wavefront is a null geodesic) and might seem like "cosmic mind".

This is a wild idea, of course. Panpsychism is way out west in the wackiest "Burning Man" voodoo. All the more reason to give it a spin, imho.

Let me attempt to contextualize this GOOF statement within the larger domain of the axial age and justify the GOOF interpretation as the better adaptive trait as compared to that of contemporary axial age philosophy. The psyche (soul) is healthy when it loves and is unhealthy when it does not love. In terms of Plato's charioteer: The white horse (roughly Freud's ego) must become enlarged and the dark horse (Freud's id) must be submitted to the purposes of the white horse.

It seems clear enough to me that the GOOF tradition was adaptive in a world where war and chaos were rife and extremes of group solidarity were required for survival. It is also arguable that modern socioeconomic systems based on science and technology still need a human tradition of this sort to remain viable. This is entirely consistent with my genocentric perspective on the GOOF tradition.

Loving relations are expressions of the bonding that in biological terms makes a superorganism from cellular parts. The microorganisms that learned to cooperate "unto death" as the bodies of megafauna found a survival strategy that was no less viable than that of the individualist microorganisms that surround us still as free-living microbes. A single global GOOF-based superorganism is a long-term possibility, in my genocentric view, and indeed precisely on the basis cited above that God is love, under some suitable interpretation.

As to the psychology fostered by Platonism versus Goofism, your white and dark horse idea has a modern version that has appealed to me for all the years since I first read Julian Jaynes' intriguing but flawed masterpiece The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. The modern version is that each of us has two minds, a big one and a small one. Very crudely, the big one is confused with God, somewhat as in Jaynes' version of history but with a less schizoid spin, and the small one is the analog self of willed action and everyday selfishness, which is to say the referent of words like "I" and "me" in our everyday speech acts.

In contrast to the antique polytheisms, Goofic monotheism subtly encourages this solipsistic confusion of the big self with the Goof by inflating the phenomenal veil of the Goof to cosmic proportions where only Platonic ideals remain as the hidden content of the Goofic noumenon, so that nothing tangible remains to contradict the solipsistic autocracy. On this reading, Jaynes is guilty of a simplistic reductionism by mapping this psychic duality of self to the physiological division of the brain into cerebral hemispheres.

The division of big self and small self is part of human socialization. Those whose big self has not been inflated to godlike proportions are accused by religious mavens of being pusillanimous, while those whose small selves are insufficiently autonomous become stumbling dupes. Yet the selves must integrate and fuse into a single personality. A stress on love is a natural way to encourage this fusion. Insistence on such a psychology for those who would join "the body of Christ" may well be adaptive in some definable sense.

I am not inclined to interpret the Abrahamic tradition in the manner that you are referring to Jaynes. A gestalt switch may throw a whole different light on the developments in this sphere. For instance, Abraham appears to be ahead of his time in that, unlike Agamemnon, he does not sacrifice his child to the god. This saves his progeny from the agonizing that we see in the Greek tradition.

Not being deeply steeped in Greek mythology, I cannot judge your comparison with Agamemnon, nor does Abraham's aborted sacrifice much move me. The key idea for me is of God as the ultimate patriarch, as an idealization of Abraham's own presumed status. We saw an analogous phenomenon among Mormons as they trekked to Salt Lake City and made patriarchs of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Moreover, their concept of God as a former man and men as trainee gods brings the petrified idealizations of orthodox Christian theology down to Earth with a jolt, again perhaps recalling the Abrahamic experience.

But returning to Julian Jaynes, the takeaway message for me was that the history of religions from Homer to the present is the history of a steadily diminishing role for the "gods" in human life as humans get their mental acts together and integrate the respective mental lives of their left and right hemispheres. The physiology here is that the hemispheres live potentially independent lives, as shown by the experience of people whose corpus callosum no longer conducts high-bandwidth interhemispheric traffic (as researched by Nobelist Roger Sperry and further pursued by Michael Gazzaniga).

The unconfirmed hypothesis behind Jaynes' story is that early humans were by modern standards schizoid, with a normal left brain running daily operations and the right brain somehow set apart as "the home of the gods". The left brain experiences the output of the right brain as mysteriously authoritative divine commands, and so on. All this is somewhat dubious physiologically, since humans thus burdened might be expected to function with imapired efficiency as survival machines, and it is very hard to test convincingly. Anyway, Jaynes points to a remarkably vivid development in the ancient literature from gods conceived as external dictators to an integrated inner god embodied as conscience or something similar.

My priority in all this is to find an understanding of the legacy of monotheism that can fit smoothly into modern life and help us make good use of the Promethean fires offered by science and technology. If humans are not rational egoists, as they are caricatured in much modern economic theory, but robot servants of their genes, as in modern molecular biology, then a conception of the ancient gods as inner phenomenology generated by genes struggling to harness a burgeoning brain may be fruitful. Human brains expanded fast in evolutionary terms, and we can imagine our genes found it hard to steer our behavior, via feelings and emotions, as effectively as they do in the other animals. Modern civilization represents a definitive breakout from that steerage.

So, my big "aha" moment here is to see that the Abrahamic God, the GOOF, is a much better reflection of the genetic imperative that still seeks to steer us than other gods, because it directly reflects the transgenerational impact of our genetic heritage and biological future. Hence Richard Dawkins, the leading public advocate of genocentricity, becomes in effect a prophet of GOOF — despite his vociferous atheism! Ironies will never cease.

I was once religious, partly because I was unable intuitively to understand anything whatsoever about how humanity could have come to be without leaning on deistic (if not theistic) crutches in my thoughts on the matter.

I see religious thinking as analogous to the way children think within a family. The locus of authority is in one or more others, and the self is accepted as dependent on the other(s). Given the numerous concentric layers of authority in modern society (employers, government, scientists and so on) it is unsurprising that many — most — people remain psychically dependent in many ways their whole life long. They are "infantilized," to use the term author Mark Steyn provocatively uses to describe the status of European males in a welfare state.

Such delegation of authority is wild and quite low-level in many schizoid individuals, if I understand them correctly. Even regions of their own brain seem to be experienced as uncontrollably other. And that is dysfunctional, of course, so much so that Jaynes' idea that ancient men were routinely schizoid is implausible. Rather the contrary. Just as American cowboys from a few generations back would have found the infantilization of modern man quite disgusting, I suspect that conversely we would regard healthy alpha males from the deep historical past as excessively self-contained and robust, and not at all schizoid, if we could meet them.

Returning to modern schizoids, as you say there is a huge range of presented syndromes, doubtless with a variety of aetiologies and different prognoses under appropriate medication. But given the technology we can use to study such individuals, I guess they should often be regarded as valuable assets in the sense that they can give us a window on the operation of various brain processes that are easy to overlook in "normal" people.

Whatever, Jaynes has done us a valuable service in pointing our that the whole archeology of consciousness is still terra incognita. Religion will doubtless be prominent in that archeology, if and when we get around to it.

Consciousness is a concept we use for our most universal waking state of mind, when we are aware of all that buzzes around us and have our acts together. We can lose it with a bang on the head or a drink too many. The state need not be generated in our heads. Our brains may be more like TV sets tuning in to the universal vibes. We know that the logic of the self is indefinitely extensible. The action-perception cycle can be small and tight, as when fast reflexes are in play, or big and dilated, as when contemplating the eternal questions. We can be selfish and live for the moment or be big-hearted and act for the greater good of the planet.

As I see it, all these possible circles of the self define mindworlds. Reality is just the set of all actual and possible mindworlds. So panpsychism, in the sense that reality is made of the same stuff as mind and features in an infinity of mindworlds, some of them in our little consciousnesses and others just part of the undiscovered ocean of prefixed consciousness, where the prefix comes from the set (un, sub, infra, ultra, super, hyper, ...), is on this view almost trivially true. Given the definitions, of course, which is precisely where a smart JCS contributor would seek to trip me up by asking me what features in prefix-consciousness correspond to quarks or black holes or big G and what possible scientific evidence could support such nonsense.

God is known by His properties which are summed up by the word love. In Moses vision of who God is, God was revealed in the heart which is the human psyche or soul.

Heart = psyche = soul? This is vague anatomy!

Moses understood that what can be known or found about God consists in ethics.

Understood or proposed?

Moses also understood that the ethic was written in the human heart.

So why do we need the ten commandments?

Moses promised that anyone who would seek for God would find him.

By what right can Moses promise me anything?

God's essential attribute or property was his willingness to extend himself (i.e. love).

If so, then God is a biological phenomenon, a ghost of our genes.

This is who God is, as far as my knowledge of Him goes. When I took the time to look for Him, I found Him in the act of loving as He loved me.

I love Him and He loves me, or rather I love myself.

Our soul was given to us by God and has the attributes of God within it.

Or rather an act of love created us and we are lovers.

I find all this to be a murky and unscientific procedure that results in a fuzzy and unsatisfactory conclusion.

For all its fine detail and noble rhetoric, the Bible is not a textbook for finding God or anything like it. It is a miscellany of historical fragments, some good, some bad, that need to be poked around with an extremely long stick before one takes anything there at its apparent face value. However deeply one immerses oneself in the literature of the axial age, one cannot overcome the basic hermeneutical problem of, ahem, inadvertent eisegesis.

It seems clear to me that you are reading "God is love" into the unreliably narrated fragments of Mosaic thought in order to reconstruct the God of Jesus of Nazareth. But Jesus was precisely an innovator! Of course, those old axial writers (we are in a new axial age, in case you hadn't noticed, and it blows the old one away in terms of the changes it heralds) didn't admit to contradicting each other, so they set up the whole story as fulfillment of prophecy and so on, but the inner contradictions in the Bible are too whopping to paper over.

In short, if you try to find God this way, your own soul gets in the way. You end up imagining God loves you even more than you love yourself and knows even more than you do and so on. Just an idealized superego.

Modern psychology deflates our God talk more radically than Copernican astronomy or Darwinian biology do. It says you can't talk about the great "I AM" without talking about yourself.

We all love ourselves. It's what keeps all our cells working together. But if that's the best we can do for God, we haven't escaped the Dawkinsian claim that all we are doing is helping our genes along. Human civilization is just the extended phenotype for the social organism called Homo sapiens, and all our gods are fetishes to help keep us breeding true.

My understanding of Moses' version of God is that he is understood partially through torah (law). This is the conduit through which a man may ascend the 'stairway to heaven' (see Psalm 1, for instance).

For OT Jews, God is law. Follow the rules and be OK with God. The rules were revealed to Moses, who came down with the tablets and so on. Much like the Mormon story of the golden plates, come to think of it, except that most of the Mormon rules came later.

Love is God within the human heart but our apprehension of God is dependent upon our willingness to become as he has revealed himself: To love the stranger, the widow and the orphan in very practical terms which are intended to bring them to our level.

This formulation can only work if "love" is conceived very vaguely. We know enough about the physiology of love to be blasé here and say that confusing God with such stuff may be a way to feel good but has no cognitive cash value. In terms of being a prescriptive proposal to guide our action, fine. We can help ourselves to act more compassionately, which may in the long term make us feel better inside, too. Again, however, this says nothing about the ultimate nature of physical reality.

Lucretius (an atheist from 50 BCE) made a distinction between the material world and the nature of man where pleasure and pain were the guidelines for becoming more human. Plato was a panentheist who saw God in everything. God is observable (from this vantage point) in nature as well as in human nature. However, he is also conceived to be beyond this in his infinity (transcendence).

The utilitarian philosophers in Victorian Britain saw us as driven by pleasure and pain, too. The traces of this view in practical decision making appear as division into costs and benefits, profit and loss. All now godless. But Plato's finding divinity in everything has a deeper ground. In this sense at least like modern scientists, he seems to me to have seen all aspects of nature as cognitively inexhaustible, as opening up potential infinities on deeper analysis (for example consider the infinite precision required to specify the Platonic geometric forms to which all physical forms approximate). But again, we can regard all such infinities, in chaos theory and fractal geometry for example, as godless. God seems like a ghostly fantasy in comparison with such infinite clarity.

Wisdom is said to be "calling on every street corner" (Proverbs 8:1). This is a metaphor for God's immanence. If this is true, we should be able to find wisdom. In that context, the key is to meditate on torah (see Proverbs 3:1 "do not forget my teachings"). But Jeremiah says that Torah is written on every heart (Jeremiah 31:33) which means that all that can be known of God is right there inside the heart of the man who will go and look for it. Knowledge, in Jeremiah's sense, is a function of love.

The Sufis often understood the immanence of God very vividly. Here and now, in love too, as Rumi appreciated. My former colleague Andrew Harvey, now a distinguished mystic, is very perceptive on this aspect of the divine. All this may be very elevating, but to me it is not knowledge.

I didn't find this stuff easy to understand when I first put my mind to it. I think that I do understand it a little better now.

Sure, such stuff takes time to get into, much like any branch of modern science. For me, the sparks fly when these emphatically not "non-overlapping magisteria" (to quote Stephen Jay Gould) are juxtaposed. Knowledge must survive such juxtaposition.

It seems that panpsychism is a tough sell.

See What the Bleep?! and have all your worst fears confirmed. Verily I say unto you, we have a religion in the making.

It seems that there are two equally dangerous sides in Europe. First of all the right wing nationalists, those who are essentially racist. They are not bothered especially by Islam but more about any alien culture. This is the kind of sentiment that led to the Danish government deciding to deport those two men who planned the assassination of the artist making the Mohammad pictures. Thats obviously misguided because it shows how the current Danish government puts the focus on their being immigrants.

Immigrants who show such contempt for the culture they immigrate into that they plan murder for such reasons should be deported, no question about it. Otherwise, the welfare state will end up paying for all the trouble they cause, not to mention paying them to breed another generation of poorly socialized misfits. As a taxpayer, I object strongly to helping pay for the care and maintenance of people who hatch criminal plans to destroy the way of life I know and love. Get rid of them!

I'm really disturbed by the fact that there are no outraged crowds marching the European capitals in light of Iran's demand for an apology over the cartoons. Where are all the Europeans calling for us standing up to freedom of speech? On that point, the Danish government should be applauded for telling Iran that an apology is never going to happen.

That would be taking the sayings of Ahmadinejad more seriously than they deserve. A tolerant smile for his babbling idiocy is more to the point. As for his rantings about Israel, that is another matter. There he can be dangerous, and there his effort must be resisted with military force.

Fortress Europe should be a metaphor for a fortress around democracy, liberty and reason. A wall not against people but for human equality and liberty.

But a wall against bad ideas will soon become a wall against people. Perhaps this is not such a problem. Why should we import millions of people with primitive mindsets just to try to secure our pensions? If we suffer a demographic problem with aging workforces and so on, then let's try to solve it more creatively than by importing what are in effect wage slaves, who unless we find a way to transform them will of course be dreaming of building a new caliphate. Well, perhaps we should let small numbers in, to refresh our own body politic, but only on the condition that they let themselves be reprogrammed to abandon their mosques and burkhas and korans and start new lives.

We should not tolerate criminal behaviour. But every human being is also equal to the justice system. We don't exile Europeans who commit crimes, we should not do the same to European immigrants who commit crimes. If we imprison every national criminal and exile every immigrant criminal, that sends the message that immigrants only commit crimes because they are not like us, while national criminals commit crimes for other reasons. I don't like that message.

We don't exile Europeans, true, but I was defining immigrants as non-Europeans. Once they have European citizenship, they are no longer immigrants and we have to make the best of them. If they commit crimes but don't have citizenship, I say throw them out. If they fly in from Islamic nations with the evident intention of committing murder or similar crimes, we should treat them like enemy soldiers.

We need to change the mindset that democracy and equality are values granted to us by government. Every citizen has the right to enjoy these values, and every citizen has the duty to uphold them. Some people come here from cultures vastly different from mine. When they come here, they must be informed that they will be expected to help strengthen the foundation of this society, and will have to abandon aspects of their old society that clashes with the ones here.

Every citizen, of course. Many have exotic backgrounds, no problem, adds to the spice of life. But immigrants who agitate to destroy what we have devoted centuries to building up deserve no mercy. Until Islamist ideology changes its tune, we have a war on our hands. We must be tough.

The philosophical angle is again avoiding the rise of xenophobia. It's not only important to remain fair and to fight prejudice but it's also vital in order to fight those among us who are overtolerators. They are the ones defending Islam because they think it's racist to attack it. If we don't acknowledge that Islam is not a foreign culture but a religion, then we are not going to solve that situation.

Islam is a totalistic culture with political implications. It is precisely the problem that is it is not just a religion as we otherwise know religions. This is the point Sam Harris has done us the great service of emphasizing.

We need to evaluate Islam in the terms we used to evaluate Fascism and Communism, as a politically dangerous ideology that has the potential, if we continue to give Islamic regimes enough oil money, to become a militarily dangerous threat of some sort.

We delude ourselves if we compare it to our now largely benign Judeo-Christian heritage.

Christianity and Islam are exactly he same, they is just a progressive offset between the societies in which they reign.

Sorry, but they are different, and a differentiated approach is essential to get at the key issue here, which is establishing the preconditions for free, tolerant, and rationally minded cultures that live peacefully together. Old Testament Judaism was a tribal ideology of no particular interest to other people. Jesus of Nazareth opened it up and Roman emperors gave Christianity their seal of approval. Since then, Christianity has become sufficiently domesticated to be tolerable within a rational society.

Islam has a quite different history. It was spread by the sword. The Prophet was a military leader. After centuries of attacks by Islamic groups against halfway Christianized Europe, the Christians finally organized themselves sufficiently to fight back in the Crusades, and since then there has been an uneasy truce. Christianity is a religion of peace and love, Islam is an ideology of jihad and submission.

But even among secularists there is a tendency to make it about West versus Middle East, Christian values versus Islamic values.

At present, the issue is indeed localized as West versus Middle East, in the same sense that the struggle against Communism became localized as West versus East.

Let's make it about secular values against religious dogma, and then let us not set ourselves into a bad position from the start by helping reinforce the idea that we've declared every Arab to be a terrorist.

Point taken. The problem is not Arabs, the problem is the ideology that currently has most Arabs in its grip. Pakistanis are not Arabs, but Pakistani Islamists are as dangerous as any others. Most Indians are ethnically close to Pakistanis, but if they are not Islamists they are as delightful as any other people.

Islam and Christianity are no different in terms of how dangerous their core beliefs are. The only difference between them is that Islam is sheltered by totalitarianism.

Not true. Look more closely at the core beliefs. Christianity has accommodated itself to containment within a rationally organized society, Islam makes claims that can only be contained within either feudal and corrupt systems or totalitarian regimes based on violent repression, or at least so it seems so far.

Islam is still in the phase that Christianity was 500 years ago. Christianity of that time would be just as ignorant, just as hateful, just as totalitarian and just as destructive as Islam is today.

The big difference is that Christians 500 years ago did not have access to weapons of mass destruction. We cannot wait 500 years while they catch up. Long before then we'll puke up an Antichrist who terminates the whole mess with extreme prejudice. Either they grow up fast or someone finds a tempting hi-tech solution.

Islam is a more pressing enemy right now. That does not mean that Islam could not go through the same transformation as Christianity has. Indeed, it is really our only hope that it can.

We don't have 500 years. Homo superior will consign all fundamentalists to the dustbin of history well before then.

Let's break the fundamentalists apart and not unite them.

Yes, by preventing the Christians from aligning with the Islamites and staging an Abrahamic revival, just before hordes of Chinese robotanks sweep across the steppes and clear us all away.

Your witty and interesting post amuses me. I need to know if the invitation was addressed to females in general.

This, dear readers of all persuasions and genders, is indicative of human psychology at its most atavistic. It suggests all too clearly the extremity to which one may be driven by seeking too earnestly to follow the wise advice of Mahatma Gandhi. More yet, it tends to confirm the veracity of the protestations of romantic love contained in the sublime poetry of Rumi, and suggest the pinnacle of yearning for God to which Jesus in all his innocence was driven. Psychology thus extremized can seem to move reality itself.

Which brings me back to panpsychism. When reality moves, it does do in consciousness dilated to transhuman extremes, from which it is but a bagatelle to perform the induction to infinity and say all is mind, reposing for the most part in deep, deep sleep, waiting for her panpsychic lover to kiss her awake.

Amo ergo panpsyche est!

I'm getting the feeling that you are advocating a slightly less nuanced view than I would hope we applied on global politics.

No advocacy intended. Radical changes are transforming our history at an exponentially increasing rate. Our technology has changed the world enormously in the last century. The next century will be much more transformational. We need to be prepared.

Are you for a complete occupation of all Muslim countries? Because it seems that you are rejecting any notion of another way.

Occupations are so last century. Cable TV and the web are doing most of the work for us. Bush 43's mistake was to think we needed boots on the ground to plough over the old way of life. We should have been in and out in weeks, and let the Iraqis sort our their own post-Saddam fate. We could have given them several hundred billion in reconstruction aid and still have come out ahead.

Let's not take the fear train all too quickly.

Who's talking about fear? I'm saying militant Islam is a threat and we need to toughen up to meet it.

There doesn't seem to be a solution short of genocide.

Saddam once warned the Iraqis that if they lost the fight against America they would be reduced to the status of Native Americans on reservations. Since the Iraqi people are a people with a proud warrior past, they will not go down without a stiff fight. What we need to do is convince them that their best course now is to accept Western ways and make a success of themselves from within the charmed circle of free peoples. But we have to let the hotheads burn themselves out first. This will serve as a test case for other Middle East communities. I see no reason for panic but plenty of reason for hanging tough.

The democratic world stood behind the United States going into Afghanistan. That situation has forever been wasted now, thanks to the warmongering of the Bush administration.

The trick here is not to care about short-term popularity. To sort out the Middle East, we need to keep our hand in the flame, so to speak, and take the pain while the hotheads burn themselves out within our grasp. British colonialists kept the peace in places like Iraq for many decades and took some serious setbacks. To come out on top you have to hold on and not flinch, until sweet reason wins the day. And if your opponents refuse to see reason, you have to let them go down fighting. We just need to be sure we keep the moral and military upper hand and not let the hotheads get their hands on nukes.

You sound more and more like Prince Charming.

Blogging is a hazardous enterprise. So much can go wrong, so many misunderstandings can be kindled. For example, my ambition to initiate a serious philosophical dialog on the logic, physics and psychology of mindworlds seems sorely out of place in this forum filled with wise guys, always ready with a witty crack to deflate the ego of a wannabe soothsayer.

I am sure that the vision of the future of Star Trek did a lot for me in romanticizing a future of reason, where science is upheld as the core value, where people strive to better themselves and to live by more enlightened principles.

Yo, I'm down with that! Star Trek rocks!

I'm starting from zero with panpsychism. I'm cool with the notion of everything having an awareness that is appropriate to its nature but that seems to do little to shed light on the human mind. From what pool does this awareness arise from? Or is it so idiosyncratic as to make its existence functionally irrelevant to us?

Panpsychism is hard to make rational sense of, I must admit. Kids often experience a primitive animism where even furniture can have a looming presence like the Ents in Lord of the Rings, and passionately idealistic lovers can sense the presence of the beloved behind just about any mask, even a desert landscape, so there are imaginative handles to grasp that are more than straws, I think.

Think of reality as having two levels, one below us and one above us. Below us is a domain of objects, which we're so used to that we see it in pretty sharp focus and know our way around in it and tend to think it's the only reality. Above us only sky — no, precisely not. And not just "God" either. But a domain that in our fallen state we can only grope at with such metaphors. Here I mean "fallen" not only with angel-out-of-heaven overtones but also with the resonance of Martin Heidegger's Geworfenheit (literally "thrownness"), which he coined to suggest the way we seem to have been thrown into the world (not just squeezed out of a womb, but that image is good here) and seem doomed to make the best we can of it. Here we are, in reality, almost drowning in it, and with only the Shining, the sky, G-d, the wavefunctional domain of all possible futures superposed in virtuality, or whatever, above us.

Logically, this is the contrast between particulars and universals, as reflected in the linguistic contrast between subjects and predicates in sentences. The subject term in a sentence denotes an object or a configuration of objects, and the predicate term qualifes it, or says something about it, or (as Gottlob Frege put it) asserts that it "falls under" a concept, or in my own jargon, imposes a further determination upon it. My drift is that all objects are determined up to some level. They have properties and so on. But there is always room for more, and when we say something about them we indicate or explicate or contribute further determinacy. The informativeness of an informative sentence is precisely that additional determinacy.

The movement from the initial state of determinacy presupposed or denoted by an informative sentence to the final state, where the additional determinacy is now posited as inhering in the previously only initially determined state of affairs, is a fact, in what I hope is something like Ludwig Wittgenstein's sense (as stated with oracular brevity in the early propositions of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus). To assert a fact, as he said, is to point to the existence of a state of affairs. He also said the world is the totality of facts. In my gloss, a mindworld is a totality of facts. I have relativized and dynamized Wittgenstein's picture in order to conform it to Kripkean logic (Saul Kripke, you may recall, revolutionized modal logic a couple of decades ago).

So, it takes two to tango. A fact is a movement between two states, an initial state characterized as a particular in a factual proposition and a final state further characterized by means of a universal in the proposition. This is a move between two adjacent levels in an ontology that can be modeled in axiomatic set theory. The move represents an epistemic advance. I see the movement as part of an epistemo-ontic process by which reality grows like a huge blooming plant. We humans are tiny points on top of this plant, growing with it. If we are little godheads, the huge plant is a massive one. If we are conscious, it is superduperhyperconscious.

This may or may not have resonances with such works as those of New Age physicist Amit Goswami and other thinkers from the Hindu tradition who find it obvious that the entire universe is a ocean of consciousness.

What the Bleep Do We Know?! shows quantum mysteries selectively to shore up metaphysical points. Those points suggest that quantum-derived possibilities affect the wider world, that human thought is the ultimate arbiter of physical reality, and that by manipulating thought properly, people can achieve harmony and even shape the structure of matter.

For me, the signs that we should not give up hope are summed up in the keywords decoherence, consistent histories, emergent classicism, and quaternionic hidden variables (not to mention my own more metaphysical contribution of symmetry-breaking crystalization in the fluffy top of an ontic ice-cream cone emerging from the epistemotemporal dilation of a primordial strange loop).

Quantum possibilities demonstrably do affect the wider world (think of the quantum Zeno effect, or quantum tunneling, or the use of entanglement for encryption and computation). As for human thought, Roger Penrose sketched a fascinating scenario involving wavefunction collapse in the microtubules leading to gravitonic symmetry breaking of the spacetime continuum at the Planck scale. I have criticized the Penrose scenario and proposed a perhaps more biologically plausible variant involving the photonics of dekahertz brainwaves, but I must admit to having attracted no very penetrating feedback. In either of these scenarios, our thoughts, if properly equilibrated, would indeed be capable of nudging reality in certain circumstances.

Quantum physics is about matter at its most fundamental levels and matter's interactions, not about spirituality.

This presupposes a metaphysical dualism of matter and spirit that is strictly untenable at the philosophical level, as much of the debate in the philosophy of mind since Descartes tends to confirm. The modern question is whether the warm, wet environment of the living brain can sustain a sufficient level of quantum coherence to give rise to any observable effects. I think the Penrose scenario survives this issue less well (bearing in mind the critique of Max Tegmark) than my own.

The movie suggests that the quantum idea of matter embracing all its possible states at once applies to the larger world of people and rocks. But above a tiny size range, quantum properties collapse, and particles start to behave in the way described by classical physics — more like bowling balls than fuzzy clouds of wave functions.

This is not quite right. Quantum effects have been observed to reach at least up to micro scale, well above the nano scale of atoms or the femto scale of particles. An experiment involving satellite-based interferometers with megameter baselines is planned to test for superpositions at larger scales. More to the point, the behavior of particles remains fuzzy despite the emergence of approximate classicism at larger scales. Classical behavior is only defined at larger scales, rather like temperature, which is undefined for individual particles. The same goes for the "flow" of time, which again is only well defined at larger scales, where indeed relativity makes the emergent classical time dimension strictly equivalent to a spatial dimension. Here there are deep mysteries, and the field is still work in progress.

Quantum mechanics rules out the possibility of hidden variables. Moreover, the movie proposes no plausible physical mechanism by which thoughts influence matter.

There is a new twist in the hidden variables story. John von Neumann apparently ruled them out, and John Bell proved a theorem showing that hidden variables with real or complex variables would generate statistics that have been ruled out by experiment. But quite recently Joy Christian has proved that entanglement relations are preserved correctly by quaternionic hidden variables obeying a Clifford algebra.

As for a plausible physical mechanism, I agree that the Penrose mechanism seems implausible. But the Ross mechanism has not yet been seriously examined.

What happens at the quantum level, stays at the quantum level.

I beg to differ. Indeed I am tempted to opine that the entire classical world is a vast entanglement generated by quantum interactions. If this is so, the consistency of the classical world is no surprise — we make it. But this is powerful ammunition for the fundamentalists who claim that God is logic (their take on John 1:1) and that consistent explication of Biblical doctrine is the key to sound theology.

I tend to see the collective timeline as something we make too. Without the long-term linearity of entanglement generated by consistent adherence to sound doctrine, the calendar timeline would devolve into circles and thence the spaghetti of prehistoric time. "With the cross of Jesus going on before," we can march in lockstep along the straight and narrow way into a more Euclidean future.

I seem to have caught an evangelical meme. Excuse me while I cough it up.

I think that there is a good deal of overlap in terms of, for instance, the ancient law codes and modern ethics. I am a strong adherant of what Popper calls critical rationalism.

That ancient and modern laws and codes should be broadly similar is in effect a corroboration of the evolutionary view of ethics as codifications of reproductively adaptive animal behavior and emotions (contrasting emotions and feelings after Antonio Damasio) that must have evolved well before human civilization (the work of Marc Hauser is salient on the animal parallels) to be so deeply rooted in us. Religionists who congratulate themselves for making us moral are thus evidently in error. The key moral law, as Kant argued, is the the requirement to accept as law the universalization of the maxim of one's action. This parallels venerable Jewish ideas.

A pagan goes to two leading rabbis, Shammai and Hillel, and asks each one to teach him the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot. While Shammai rebuffs the man for his insolence, Hillel replies, "What is hateful to you, do not to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah, while the rest is commentary thereof; go and learn it."

I would argue that something along these lines is necessary to let any action sink from consciousness, where it must stay until it has been sufficiently clarified to sink safely into subconscious or rote behavior, into an automatism that allows us to get on with our lives freed from obsession about that topic. Such a rule makes good engineering sense for a learning system based on a neuronet.

As for Popper, I studied philosophy for two years in his department in London many years ago, when his views were still unfashionable. Since then, his evolutionary view of knowledge has become conventional wisdom, I am happy to say.

In Jaynes' "bicameral period" the god replaces the ego of the alpha individual within a group.

There is something in this analysis, of course. In Oxford academic convocations, they keep an empty seat to remind them that God presides over their meetings. Modern science has taken this removal to an extreme by working so far as possible with "the view from nowhere" (in Thomas Nagel's fine phrase). As I contemplate physics, however, I see traces of "somewhere" in the "observer" of relativity and quantum theory. There has to be a distinguished spacetime point (in principle arbitrarily selected) to serve as origin (or zero) and there has to be an actual state (an eigenstate of the wavefunction) in contrast to superposed virtual states (that collapse on measurement). Still, if this is a trace of God it is pretty attenuated.

We are dealing with the complexities of mind and the split between mind and spirit. Studies in neuropsychology have demonstrated activity in what Sagan is calling the R-complex can be isolated from activity in the limbic cortex.

I have huge respect for Carl Sagan as an astronomer and cosmologist, but I don't know how closely he followed neuroscience, which has anyway progressed enormously in the last fifteen or so years. I have tried to keep up with it by going to a few recent conferences, but it is a complex field. I suspect the story one can tell in tems of the "R-complex" and the limbic system is a drastic simplification. The mind is layered, with evolutionarily older layers responsible for relatively basic behavior, and the neocortex, especially the frontal lobes, the main focus of consciousness and deliberative thought. Any behavioral complex as rich and deeply anchored as religion must correspond to orchestrated activation at many levels.

The comparison to the limit of calculus gives definition to what is meant by knowledge. We have faith in a given observation as part of a pursuit of knowledge which lies out in infinity somewhere. This is very similar to the Parmenides idea of Being as a limit that we can never attain but which is reflected in Becoming. Sagan opines that the limbic system is a reliable means toward the end of knowledge. Elsewhere, he has said, "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."

The idea that truth was approached asymptotically in scientific work was one of Popper's salient metaphors. And the idea that real things lie at an unattainable infinity relative to their phenomenal counterparts was central to Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft. His noumenon was criticized by many later philosophers, and its traces in modern views such as those of Saul Kripke, with natural kinds having essential properties constant across possible worlds, seem far removed. I prefer to see a historical development here, following Hegel, whereby the views of Parmenides and other presocratics became fairly deeply buried under successive later "approximations" (to use that metaphor again) to the truth (Hegel's Absolute, itself succeeded by the Marxist millennium). As for the limbic system, let's wait for neuroscience to update that.

If you agree with Andrew Harvey, we are pretty much on the same page. Bad religion relies upon the R-complex and, for that reason, it leads to all sorts of trouble. But the founder of the faith relied upon the limbic cortex. The problem, as I see it, is that most people don't like to think or dare to dream.

Andrew Harvey is a nice guy with some good views. But he's no scientist. Fantasy and wishful thinking decorate his writings (indeed often they grace them and lead to divine flights of rhetoric). If it's truth you want, hard science is the way.

Mysticism is not about inventing clever theories. If you seek mysticism, go cold turkey on obstacles along your path.

These are wise words, thank you.

There is a loose part rattling around in the machinery of someone who lays down the kind of verbal salad we have been treated to here. Perhaps that loose part is the godhead, but I'm not betting on it.

No loose parts here, except the moving parts, which are designed to spin free. I just got fed up with dull words that no-one bothers to read.

A spiritual quest is not a walk in the park with Jesus. And "god" is not a shameful word, just a word with wild semantics. I see myself as a scientific philosopher, and sometimes the job means getting my hands dirty.

By the way, "scientific philosopher" is a bit of an oxymoron. With respect to science, philosophy works like the bootstrap code that gets one of your data banks up and kicking. One does not run the bootstrap code over and over again, hoping for a new and better operating system to take over. Unless, that is, one has indeed written a better operating system. Your verbal salad does not qualify.

To understand a word I said, recall that "spirit" = Geist and read Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes. Just for starters.

As for your views on philosophy and science, you evidently don't have a clue what you're talking about. I've done time with serious science and heavy philosophy, and I can tell you authoritatively there's plenty of room in plenty of scientific debates for a notch more philosophical sophistication.

As for my "verbal salad" qualifying or not, it depends on how well you can reconstruct its semantics. To me, some of it is just fun, sure, but most of it means quite a lot. If others find it tough going, well, tough. As Einstein said, make it as simple as possible but no simpler.

Einstein searched in earnest for a theory of everything, and the search continues. But that seems to me to be a search for some version of God. What are you searching for? How much have you achieved in finding it?

The search for the Theory Of Everything in physics is analogous to a search for "God", in one of the senses of that much abused word. But it is a search constrained by logic and evidence, within the discipline of a methodology, which so far as I'm concerned makes it quite different from irrationalist fanaticism.

Atheism is the refusal to recognize the significance what most people most of the time seem to mean when they use the word "God" — and in that sense I am emphatically an atheist, too. But I see the quest for a deeper meaning in life as a noble pursuit that I am not ashamed to call my own. I have spent enough puzzled years contemplating the science of meaning, to the extent that we have it in modern semantic theory, and the philosophical problems with such a science to know how little real significance need attach to a personally felt meaning, once found, but I am sufficiently convinced that both the quest and its goal are essential to life as we understand it that I shall not be dissuaded.

What have I achieved in the course of my efforts to date? Precious little.

Do you position a panpsychic philosophical take as a potential solution to certain current or future problems? Does a panpsychic approach assist in prediction of natural phenomena? Does it potentially assist issues in psychology, or is it primarily a methodology with goals toward aesthetic appreciation of human knowledge and awareness as it has accumulated? Or maybe you're attempting a potential theoretical framework analogous to string theory?

Well, one could almost say "panpsychism" is a label waiting for something new to attach itself to. Apart from the gloriously eccentric Galen Strawson, who among other things is responsible for the following gem:

Metaphysical thesis #36: "Reality is substantially single. All reality is experiential and all reality is non-experiential. Experiential and non-experiential being exist in such a way that neither can be said to be based in or realized by or in any way asymmetrically dependent on the other (etc.) (Equal-Status Fundamental-Duality monism)." Journal of Consciousness Studies 13(10-11), 2006, p. 223

I am not aware of any sustained attempt to argue the position in serious modern work. David Chalmers mentions it sympathetically in passing in his classic The Conscious Mind (Oxford, 1996), and since he is himself such a sympathetic chap with a relatively coherent position, I feel inclined to nibble the bait.

Most modern scientists of mind are materialists, and tend to sweep under the carpet the conceptual problems of moving from third-person to first-person attributions of mentality. Following Daniel Dennett in his 1991 classic Consciousness Explained, one can distinguish, ahem, autophenomenology from heterophenomenology. The auto word describes attempts to describe one's own mental states. By contrast, the hetero word describes the mental states of others, on the basis of the auto babble they broadcast to the investigator, who considers the babble neutrally as if it were fictional. Scientists describe mind in hetero terms, whereas traditional Husserlian phenomenologists, stream-of-consciousness novelists, and assorted wackos describe mind in auto terms.

This division between 1P and 3P attributions of mentality is hard to bridge. The London psychologist Max Velmans makes a brave try with a neo-Kantian approach that I find hard to get my head around. Others simply give up and say here are two separate worlds, à la Descartes, leaving the mess for others to sort out. I say be monist, admit within it a fundamental, logical duality, indeed a conceptual symmetry (shapes of metaphysical thesis #36 here!), and see where it goes. This is more correctly called panprotopsychism or panpotentiopsychism, but I think we can all agree that panpsychism will do just fine as a label.

For David Chalmers, the hard problem is bridging the chasm between the 1P and 3P worlds. It's a hard problem, which I tackle by introducing the concept of strange loops from Douglas Hofstadter (who as it happens was David's thesis advisor). Since this takes us to the mathematics of Gödel's theorem and axiomatic set theory, I shall break off here and simply refer to various of my philosophical papers (in Mindworlds).

As you see, this is still deep within philosophy. But I hope the payoff in terms of a unitive psychology on a scientific foundation is clear. As spin-off, we shall have no problem with the idea that suitably architectured computing infrastructure (in a post-Google world) can be the substrate for mind. We shall upload our minds into such infrastructure and merge into a potentially immortal panpsyche. That's good enough for me.

The biblical world view has assisted in creating fertile soil in which concepts of universal mind can grow. I think we start off as children treating the objects in the world around us as though they had mind, consciousness and personality. We become more one-dimensional and blind as we grow old, unless we consciously fight against it.

First, to bash the biblical world view again, we can take it as a prototypical mythology indicating some atavistic strains in human psychology that a future evolutionary neurobiology will enable us to explain to our greater satisfaction. One of those strains is the childish tendency (recall that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, so there is history to be mined in this tendency) to animate the world of things, which we need to separate from my cautious neomaterialist panpotentiopsychist binary-aspect monism. True, all of us grow old and lose certain perceptual sensitivities, and on the way run the risk of letting our minds fossilize around positions that are strategically hopeless, but if we remain aware of the roots of the positions we eventually embrace there is hope that the final positions will retain the shimmering possibility of ultimate resurrection.

Imagine arranging one's psychic landscape like furniture, perhaps like chairs for a game of musical chairs. Life in a human body is analogous to music. In one of my (much) earlier metaphors, the play of electromagnetic ripples over the neural layers of the cerebral neocortex is a kind of Platonic music, itself analogous to the celestial music of the spheres (if not identical — I doubt that Plato would have wished to separate them), and the metaphor suggests that as life slows down and the neurons begin to calcify (or fossilize, if you will) the music stops, layer by layer, and as in a game of musical chairs one is left sitting, or not, at the end. And here I am, not sitting on a professorial chair.

I don't know who gets you and who doesn't. You seem to have gotten something, and now feel like infecting others. If you have written with clarity about the subject at hand, link us to it. Or write more here. No one wants you to shut up.

This has got nothing in particular to do with anything I can imagine denoting with the word "God" or its cognates. Nor is it a doctrine I am concerned with propounding. On the contrary, I want a discussion. But being deeply immersed on the relevant arcana, I want a discussion on my terms, without digression.

So let me whip up my word salads with any fancy dressing I like and don't fret about words you don't often see.

You sound just like any nutter on a street corner with or without a megaphone.

The only nuttiness in my story is the thrill of feeling at home in the universe, surrounded by a psychic luminance of irrefrangible splendor.

Consider E8 and the crystaline perfection of its apparent reflection of the Standard Model plus more besides, such as gravitons. No good explanation yet, and no quantum theory, and not much else either, but still way cool.

Sadly, the math is proving rather hard for my softening brain, so I really can't enlighten you much there. But I'm trying. It makes a change from the boredom of eternal numinous splendor.

There's a bit of a divide between those who ponder the notion that "pondering" is worth pondering, and go whole hog for it, and those who try it a little, get it, don't find it all that irrefrangibly refulgent, and give up, leaving the whole-hoggers to root around energetically for diamonds scattered among the clods.

The semantics of this "G-d" word have puzzled me for years. Some people seem to know what they mean by it and even succeed in deriving wise sayings from that purported knowledge. So I persevered. And now I think I have a sensible interpretation that makes some such purported knowledge, at least, defensible. Naturally, the word is so beset with false and confused interpretations and sheer demagogic charlatanry that one hesitates to use it at all. But the core significance is so interesting, and the need for a word with that significance so hard to deny, that I guess the best thing is to make the best of it.

Still, it's hard to explain, and the last thing I want is to cite a reading list that happened to work for me but in all probability would fail to do so for anyone else. I want to mull it over until I can find metaphors and so on to make my interpretation (since it probably is mine, and partly idiosyncratic) come over vividly enough to work well. For me, the messiness of the whole business was materially reduced by the discovery of Goof. Genocentric evolutionary theory can really shed light on this whole tangle. That's where I want to get my thoughts more coherently together. If I can convince Richard Dawkins, I guess I'm home and dry.

From the inside, independently of theoretical biology, the feeling is one explored in various ways by just about all philosophers and deep thinkers. The hall or mirrors of discursive thought gives out somewhere, and one is left with a constructed self dissolving into the shining, as it were. The sensed blend of integrated autonomy with dependence on the great externality is an identifiable state of being, not perhaps of mind or of body, since these are precut concepts that hinder union with the shining, but of being, which soon burgeons forth into familiar categories and leaves one back in everyday reality, just a tad more enlightened. Fascinating!

Why would the concept of critical thinking be a part of philosophy?

Because philosophy without critical thinking is worse than shit. On the other hand, critical thinking without philosophy is like a weapon without a safety catch.

Philosophy isn't science. I should have thought this would be obvious.

Actually, philosophy is where science came from. Philosophy is the ripe field of dung in which all new sciences grow and flourish. It happened again and again in recent centuries.

Thanks to a rather old-fashioned British education system, I have four prestigious degrees in various branches of philosophy. Without a very critical approach ("90 percent of everything is crud" — Kurt Vonnegut) I would have sunk without trace. As it was, my prior background in math and physics saved me.

Plato put the words "Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter here" (or similar, with due regard for translation) over the portal of his academy. Updated, this means study math and physics before you even think of philosophy. Math and physics encourage critical thinking.

A cautionary tale. In Germany and in other European countries they teach philosophy in schools. To get a sense of what this means, read the 1991 (1995 in English) bestseller by Norwegian high-school philosophy teacher Josten Gaarder called Sophie's World. Nice enough book, but philosophy for kids is about as much fun as religious studies. A bit more rational, and at least not offensively mad, but dull, dull, dull — unless, like me at a more advanced age, you're passionately concerned to correct the obvious errors of all previous thinkers.

My advice to school boards: stick to math — but take care to teach it well!

There does seems to be a personal response from the universe that makes one feel at home. The reception of this response is typically experienced at the edges of consciousness, and is more often than not drowned out by the "sound of our own wheels" making us crazy.

For me, "personal" is a dud word here. When "I" fuzz out and the radiance suffuses all, the person has gone — unless it's me again, by the back door!

For example, when Moses claimed God told him "I am that I am" be very skeptical. Moses heard himself and spooked himself. The error snowballed through the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition until here we are facing Islamist nutcases who think their own mad voices are Allah telling them to kill us.

Instantaneous transmission of information is one of the phenomena that confirms the interconnectedness of all things. But at its core, the cosmos is alive, with the sound of music and wisdom and knowledge.

This may be quantum entanglement — in my speculative gloss, via deep-radio photons generated by our brainwaves — and suggests there is lot yet to be discovered as psychology slowly becomes a hard science.

As for the cosmos being alive, well, it depends on what you mean by "alive." We're alive, and we're in the cosmos, and the line between us and it is hard to draw (entanglement again), so yeah, sort of, almost by definition. But knowledge and wisdom, or their lack, are very human things, and the cosmos surely has better things to be alive with than such foolishness. At least I hope so.

How are you defining philosophy? I don't mean the dictionary definition. I had always understood philosophy to mean questions about the meaning of existence.

Philosophy is the search for truth in all matters of importance. It splits into epistemology (the theory of knowledge), ontology (the theory of what is or exists), ethics (the study of the good), aesthetics (the study of the beautiful), and perhaps a few oddments (such as metaphysics and the history of philosophy) besides.

Much of philosophy devolves eventually to the exact sciences. Mathematics was part of philosophy from Pythagoras to Euclid. Physics was part of philosophy from Aristotle to Newton. Biology was part of philosophy from Aristotle to Darwin. Psychology is just separating from philosophy now, with the emergence of the exact methods of neuroscience. And so on.

The main philosophical breakthrough in the last century has been the realization that many apparently substantive philosophical questions are at least in large part questions of language. The search for truth and meaning is transformed when you separate off the linguistic aspect of the story. Here is the new theory of truth:

A sentence "S" is true iff S.

For example, "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Here is the new theory of meaning:

Meaning is use.

More exactly, the meaning of a chunk of language is to be elucidated by examining the usage of that language in the relevant linguistic community. The meaning of an indicative sentence may be defind in terms of its truth conditions.

As for the meaning of existence, this is a phrase that lacks truth conditions and binding usage precedents.

When a text is flexible, such as is the case with fiction and poetry, learning to read with flexibility is a good thing, but I doubt that students need to be exposed to a completely eisegetical approach before they are doing university work. Jobs as eisegetes will be limited until everyone learns to read, and until no one really needs to work to earn a living any more.

I agree with the first sentence but wish to comment on the second. A deliberately eisegetical approach to personal or leisure reading can help anyone who wishes to avoid falling into the sort of slavish literalism that makes bible-bashers so obnoxious. Just as many people don't bother studying fine art but sturdily know what they like when they see a picture, so readers can relish the quality of a writer's prose independently of what the latest pundit said about that writer. But even then, as you say, people have to learn to read first.

This does bring up an issue that needs to be addressed, panpsychically, of course. I "believe" or "have faith" that God will right the wrongs, but I do not claim to "know" this. Knowledge, in the proper sense, is that which can be empirically or logically verified.

Good, this is theologically correct.

How are you defining truth? I ask because religions claim that their doctrines and principles represent truth. Also, I see the anti-evolution stickers on cars that show a Truth fish devouring a Darwin fish. Is there a definition of the truth concept that lies outside of the exact sciences?

There is, but you won't like it. If God says so, it's true. And if you want to know what God said, read the Bible. God is truth because it says so in John 1:1. The shtick goes like this. How can you explain the existence and orderliness of the universe wi