"There is not and cannot be anything in our immediate experience that is like immediate experience itself. There is therefore a sense in which we shall never be able to understand consciousness in the same way we understand things we are conscious of."

"We're all zombies."

Consciousness is not an easy thing to define, but most people would agree that there is an aspect of it that goes beyond any mental function, however complex. Regardless of what we are doing with our minds--thinking, feeling, sensing, planning, recalling--there is, or can be, some kind of an experience accompanying the event. This is the first person or subjective aspect of consciousness, what philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) calls "what it is like" to be a human being, or any other creature with some degree of consciousness. As Descartes pointed out, it's the one feature of existence we are all most certain of; yet ironically, it's also the one phenomenon for which we can offer no evidence at all, in a scientific sense. Precisely because consciousness in this sense is a first person experience, there is no way it can be demonstrated to a third person. I can describe my conscious experiences, in some manner, to other people, but I can't present these experiences, just as they are, to others. This introduces us to the hard problem of consciousness.

One enterprising researcher has suggested the hard problem will be solved when we can wire one brain's contents into another person's head (Ramachandran 1998). Even if this kind of manipulation were technically possible, however, it would not solve the hard problem. In the first place, the very process of "wiring" would mean that the functional organization accessible to the two people would be different. And even if it were possible to make the nervous systems of two people identical, we still would have no certainty they were having identical experiences. Ramachandran is assuming a priori that identical brain processes must give rise to identical conscious experiences, whereas this question is part of what we're trying to answer. And finally, even if we had this certainty that the experiences of the two people were identical, we still would not know how consciousness is correlated to brain processes, which is the real heart of the hard problem.

But how? The two seem to be irreconcilably different kinds of things. How can consciousness as we all experience it--that rich world of sights, sounds, smells, emotions and so forth that has defied complete description by the best poets and writers of the ages--possibly arise from physical and biological processes in the brain? How can we possibly go from the lumpy, sticky, gooey material of biological tissue--or if you prefer, from billions of electrical signals making up life's most complex computer--to raw, qualitative experience?

Many scientists and philosophers, staring into this chasm, experience a comforting sense of deja vu. Didn't we feel the same way about life a century ago? Patricia Churchland argues (Churchland 1996b). Weren't processes like growth, reproduction and heritability just as unfathomable before the discoveries of modern cell and molecular biology showed how they could be accomplished by complex molecular structures? And before even that, weren't physical processes such as heat and pressure mysterious until the atomic theory of matter?

There is, however, an important difference between these physical and biological phenomena, on the one hand, and consciousness, on the other. We can study the former objectively, in the scientific sense. We can isolate a material substance, a growing cell, or even another organism from ourselves, and perform certain manipulations on it, observing how these experiments affect it. Consciousness, in contrast, is not separable from the scientific observer. This is the first person aspect of it which is completely inaccessible to the classical detached scientific observer. McGinn (1991) has argued that this makes it impossible to study consciousness in the same way that science has addressed every other phenomenon in the natural world.

In summary, while many aspects of the mind are perhaps in principle explainable in terms of the brain, there seems to remain something left over, so to speak, a phenomenon which is separated from our understanding of physical and mental processes by an enormous gap. A theory that could bridge this gap is called "transparent", and most scientists and philosophers, whatever their disagreements on other issues related to consciousness, agree that we have no such theory. Indeed, some philosophers, such as McGinn, argue that we never can have a theory of consciousness in this sense, a point I will return to later.

The debate over the hard problem is a central issue not simply to those interested in the brain and mind--philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists--but to others outside these fields. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that every area of human knowledge--from anthropology and sociology to economics and political science to art, music and literary criticism--is affected by it. Why? Because the answer to the hard problem determines how we are to approach all these other subjects, how we are to relate the issues they adddess to those of the so-called hard or empirical sciences. In the opening chapter of this book, I pointed out that most scientists and many philosophers practice a subtle form of reductionism (in Ken Wilber's words), in which all the interior or subjective qualities of existence are "collapsed to", or understood in terms of, exterior or surface qualities. This reductionism is stoutly resisted by Wilber and many other philosophers and social scientists as well as those in the arts who follow a hermeneutic or intersubjective approach.

The quarrel between these two groups, it seems to me, boils down to the hard problem. I argued in the previous chapter that many of the interior aspects of consciousness are identical to the social holons of our level of existence, and don't require a separate holarchical axis to accomodate them. To this extent, a certain degree of collapse has occurred. But I also argued that the hard problem is not really about inner vs. outer; it's about a more fundamental kind of experience. If this fundamental aspect of consciousness can be understood in terms of processes in the brain then subtle reductionism is a valid approach. All the interior qualities that make up so much of the data of the social sciences and the arts can ultimately be connected to, and perhaps even formulated in terms of, physical and biological processes. We need nothing more than a single-scale holarchy, and a holarchy, moreover, that ends with our own species and its societies. On the other hand, if the hard problem resists explanation in terms of the brain, then subtle reductionism will always be missing something very significant. However much the intersubjective sciences may profit from the findings of the hard or empirical sciences, there remain aspects of them that can't be reduced to empirical approaches.

In the following chapter I will discuss the evidence for a higher state of consciousness, which strongly suggests, at the very least, that there is more to the holarchy than ourselves and our societies. In this chapter, however, I will consider the hard problem as scientists and philosophers, generally working from the perspective of our ordinary consciousness, have tried to deal with it. All of these theories, it will be clear, fail the ultimate test of transparency, and I believe they do so precisely because they fail to recognize the existence and the features of higher consciousness. But this hardly means that such theories have no value. For one thing, some may shed light on the details of the correlation of consciousness with the brain. A theory might explain, for example, why specific features of consciousness are associated with particular patterns of nervous activity. Such a theory could have great value, for example, in our approach to mental illness.

A second useful feature of current theories of consciousness is that they focus our understanding of just what the hard problem is. A century ago, many scientists felt that we would never understand the cognitive functions of the brain--how we think, learn and remember. These functions were part of the hard problem. Thanks to recent advances in neuroscience and other disciplines related to the brain, we are beginning to have such an understanding. Some philosophers, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, believe we may someday be able to understand and express human psychology in terms of a brain language (Churchland 1986, 1996a, 1998). While a complete understanding in these terms seems very unlikely to most of their peers, the significant point is that the very attempt to explain ourselves in terms of the brain will surely illuminate more clearly just what it is that can't be explained in this manner. The hard problem of consciousness, more than any other phenomenon, is and must be defined scientifically in terms of what it isn't.

Traditionally, most theories of consciousness have fallen into two general classes: monistic and dualistic. Monistic theories propose that consciousness and brain are of the same stuff, so to speak. Thus materialism, a monistic view that is the dominant one among most scientists today, proposes that consciousness in some manner is caused, or determined by the physical and biological processes of the brain. This causal pathway need not be strict nor direct. We have seen that complex phenomena with new properties emerge from simpler ones. Thus growth, reproduction, and other properties of cells emerge from interactions of many different molecules. None of these molecules by themselves can manifest these properties in the way cells can, nor could all of them together do so if they were not organized in a very specific manner. Nevertheless, the properties of cells are understandable in terms of the interactions of these molecules. So we can say that we have a materialistic understanding of cells.

We have already seen the weakness of this kind of theory as applied to consciousness. Consciousness, in its hard problem aspects, seems to be very different from even the most complex other features of cells and organisms. Furthermore, it does not lend itself to a scientific approach in the way these other features do. Though many ingenious and sophisticated theories of how brain activity might give rise to consciousness have been proposed, all of them seem--to me, and to most other theorists--to fall far short of crossing this very difficult gap.

The other major type of theory attempting to understand consciousness is dualism. Dualism, which we have long associated with Descartes, proposes that brain and consciousness are distinctly different things. Consciousness is not determined by activity in the brain, but has an independent existence. The problem with this class of theory, however, is that it has great difficulty explaining why there is any relationship between consciousness and brain at all. As I pointed out earlier, the evidence of this interaction is obvious. If consciousness is completely different in nature from the brain, how (and why) can it be associated with the brain?

Most scientists and philosophers are now well aware of the problems with both monism and dualism, at least in their simplest forms. This has stimulated considerable efforts to develop a theory that avoids the weaknesses of either. What I propose to do next is consider some of these, which I call "hybrid" theories. The first two of them are essentially dualistic, and the other three monistic, yet all of them are somewhat different from these traditional classifications. There are many other interesting and influential theories of consciousness, but since they fall into the more traditional categories, particularly materialism, I will not discuss them here.

David Chalmers is one philosopher who is very much convinced that the gap between brain and consciousness is, in some sense, unbridgeable. While acknowledging that science may eventually elucidate the brain corrrelates of mental processes--what he refers to as the "soft" problems of consciousness--he firmly distinguishes them from the "hard" problem of experience, which I just discussed. And his solution to the problem is to bite the bullet--or perhaps, as one of his critics suggested, to swallow an entire arsenal. Chalmers proposes that consciousness is a fundamental phenomenon, somewhat as space and time or matter and energy are currently thought to be in physics. That is, it can't be explained in terms of anything else--not in terms of the brain, nor even in terms of matter and energy themselves--but must be taken as a starting condition of the universe. Chalmers does, however, make some attempt to relate consciousness with information, which as I suggested earlier, has caught the attention of several other theorists as a possible fundamental phenomenon.

The heart of Chalmers' argument is based on a series of thought experiments, many of which involve a hypothetical creature, currently very fashionable among philosophers of consciousness, called a zombie (Chalmers 1996). A zombie is a human-like organism with all the physical, biological and mental features we have, including thinking, learning, feeling, perception and so on--yet who is not conscious in the sense of having inner experience of himself, his behavior, and the surrounding world. Such an ersatz person, the argument goes, would appear to us to be just like any other human being. He would carry out conversations, solve problems, recall previous events, learn new information, even report feelings. The only difference between him and an ordinary person is that the zombie would have no conscious awareness of herself or of anyone else. He would be much like a very sophisticated robot.

If one accepts Chalmers' argument about the logical possibility of zombies (and other arguments that I will not discuss here), it seems to follow that consciousness is independent of the brain, in the sense in which scientists normally use that term. That is, since all the purely "soft" or mental/behavioral aspects of consciousness can hum along just perfectly without any accompanying consciousness, there doesn't seem to be any reason to suppose that the latter is an emergent feature of the brain. It must be located, so to speak, somewhere else.

But this raises an obvious problem, one associated with all dualistic theories. As I pointed out earlier, we all know that consciousness does have some relationship to the brain. So how can consciousness be completely independent of the brain? To address this problem, Chalmers proposes a type of what philosophers call "property dualism". On the one hand, he argues for a monistic theory based on physical matter. But matter, in his view, has two kinds of properties: in addition to its physical properties such as mass, temperature, color, and so forth, matter has a second class of properties, represented by consciousness. Since consciousness is a property of matter, the two phenomena proceed in parallel, with a certain type of brain process, for example, always being associated with a certain type of conscious experience. This correlative relationship accounts for why consciousness is always found to be associated with a brain, and even more, why different states or degrees of consciousness may be closely associated with certain patterns of activity in the brain.

Despite this perfect correlation between matter and consciousness, however, there is no causal relationship between the two. The physical world, in Chalmers' view, is causally closed with respect to consciousness. Everything that happens in this world can be explained by physical laws. Though consciousness tags along with physical processes, as it were, changing as they do, it is not caused by physical processes, nor can it have any effect on them.

This is not an easy relationship to imagine. In science, correlation is generally taken as evidence of cause. If two events always occur together, or if there is some kind of regular relationship between their occurrence, a scientist presumes there is a causal relationship. However, when we are dealing with fundamental properties, as physicist David Deutsch explains, this is not always the case:

As this quote implies, though, we usually ascribe fundamental, starting-condition properties to physical matter or forces, not to something as seemingly complex as consciousness. At the very least, Chalmer's theory is guilty of a lack of some elegance, because it postulates two different kinds of phenomena--consciousness, on the one hand, and physical/biological/mental processes, on the other. It seems that the latter account for most of Chalmers' worldview, while consciousness is sort of tacked on to explain everything that the former can't explain. Though Chalmers insists that consciousness is a property of matter, since it is not caused by matter, there have to be other kinds of laws, which Chalmers refers to as "psycho-physical" or "bridging" principles, that account for the relationship. This suggests that his theory, if fully worked out, might become rather cumbersome.

Science generally aims for unity in its theories, and when they lack it, this is considered a reason for further revision. No physical theory yet exists unifying the major forces of gravitation, electromagetic radiation, and and strong and weak forces in the atom, but most physicists assume there probably is one. More to the point, these different forces were postulated not to bring together phenomena described by both--as Chalmers theory of the relationship of consciousness to the brain was--but to account for certain phenomena within the range of each. In other words, the multiplicity of physical forces is considered a starting point for further work, whereas the duality of consciousness and matter/life/mind proposed by Chalmers is an end point.

Another criticism of Chalmers' theory raised by several philosophers is that it implies that consciousness can have no influence on our behavior. If the so-called soft problems of mind are explainable in terms of physical laws, but the hard problem of consciousness is not, then whatever conscious experience we have does not alter in the slightest what we think or do. Thus if I have a conscious experience of pain, my outward perceptions and behavior (as well as inner perceptions and behavior, to the extent that these proceed unconsciously) would be no different from what they would be if I had no such experience of pain. To most people, this seems counter-intuitive, though as I will discuss later, it's a well-established fact that most of our behavior is unconscious.

A final troublesome aspect of Chalmer's view, to many of his peers, is that it leads to panpsychism, the belief that consciousness exists in everything. If consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, then everything, it would seem, is conscious to some extent. Indeed, Chalmer takes this implication of his theory seriously, and argues that even some forms of inanimate matter have some consciousness. While most scientists would probably accept that many lower forms of life have some consciousness, they would balk at the notion that non-living things are conscious. But according to Chalmer's theory, almost anything with some kind of function--he uses the example of a thermostat--should be conscious.

A second hybrid type of theory I want to consider, which is also a modified form of dualism, likens the role of the brain in consciousness to that of a television or radio in transducing visual or aural information (Grof 1985). A radio, of course, doesn't produce the sound that emanates from it, but its structure is nevertheless closely correlated with this sound. Turn the dial, and a different sound appears. Remove a part from the radio, and all sound may be lost.

In the same way, some theorists suggest, the brain doesn't produce or determine consciousness, but simply receives, or tunes in to it. In this view, consciousness is not confined to the brain, but exists as a kind of field surrounding the organism. In this sense, the relationship between the two is dualistic. In order to experience or identify with this consciousness, however, the organism must have a certain kind of brain. Thus a close correlation between brain function and consciousness is always observed.

The receiver model has been popular with many people who have experienced higher states of consciousness, for it seems to provide an explanation of a characteristic feature of such states: a feeling of oneness with the world. I will discuss this and other features of higher consciousness in more detail in Chapter 6. Here I just want to point out that if a state of consciousness exists in which one identifies not with an individual human being, but with a much larger form of life, perhaps encompassing the planet, it seems clear that this state of consciousness is not localized to the brain. Therefore, it can't possibly emerge from the activity of a single brain. Nevertheless, it might be possible for a single brain to access it.

The receiver model of consciousness also provides perhaps the best explanation of the well-known ability of certain drugs, such as LSD, to induce experiences of higher consciousness. Ordinarily, of course, human beings don't experience a state of higher consciousness. Therefore, if this state is to be understood as somehow emerging from the organization of the human brain, the brain presumably must undergo large changes in its organization during this experience. Earlier, we have seen that as each new level of existence emerges, it's associated with a new and highly specific kind of organization. LSD and other psychedelic drugs, however, are relatively nonspecific in their actions. They alter the activity of a number of neuronal pathways in the brain (Austin 1999). It's rather difficult to understand how such nonspecific changes could create the complex re-organization required for a new level of existence. However, if the brain does not create higher consciousness, but simply accesses it, the action of psychedelics could be understood as simply lowering the threshold of access. These drugs would make the brain more sensitive to the field of consciousness.

Despite these attractive features, the receiver model has a serious problem. On closer examination it appears to be open to the original objection that constitutes the hard problem of consciousness. If the physical and biological processes of the brain are so different from consciousness that they could not cause or in some manner create the latter, how could they act as a receiver or a transformer of consciousness, either? Though a radio and the radio waves it transforms may appear to be very different things, from a scientific point of view they are both made of the same stuff, so to speak. A radio is made of physical matter; radio waves are a form of energy, which physics regards as equivalent to matter. So when a radio tunes in to certain frequencies in the air, a purely physical transformation is occurring. To a physicist, there is no mystery involved in this transformation. It can be explained in terms of physical theory.

In contrast, if the brain were to tune into a field of consciousness, it would seemingly have to interact with something very different from physical and biological processes. Explaining this tuning in process, therefore, would be at least as difficult as, if not even more difficult than, explaining how consciousness could be determined by, or emerge from, the physical and biological structure of the brain. Indeed, if a theory were developed that could explain this tuning in process, it probably would explain equally well how consciousness might emerge from brain.

Nevertheless, the concept of fields offers a novel and useful way of approaching this problem. In Part 2 of this book, I will discuss Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, which postulates that all forms of existence are associated with non-energetic, informational fields that can shape their development and evolution (Sheldrake 1981, 1989). In this theory, each form of existence and its associated field are of the same stuff, so to speak; physical matter is associated with physical fields, living organisms with biological fields, thinking organisms with mental fields. So whatever weaknesses Sheldrake's theory has (and there are plenty, we shall see), there is no problem of dualism in explaining how the field and its associated visible form interact. The interaction would be quite analogous to that of physical instruments that interact with physical fields.

On the other hand, morphic fields don't offer an immediate solution to the problem of consciousness, either. A morphic field associated with the brain, by definition, would be physical and biological in nature. It would be just as different from the first-person aspect of consciousness as the brain itself is. So while the brain might tune in to something, that something would not provide a ready-made solution to the hard problem.

However, if there existed still higher forms of existence with higher properties, there could be still higher-order fields. While these fields would be different from those directly associated with the human brain, one might still conceive of some kind of non-dualistic interaction. The relationship in this case would be that of one level of existence interacting with a lower level. As an organism interacts with its cells and tissues, for example, or cells interact with their atoms and molecules.

In other words, the apparent incomprehensibility of consciousness to us may reflect its origins on a level of existence above our own. As I pointed out earlier in this book, a fundamental principle of holarachical organization is that we can't see or understand processes or events on levels above our own. Because we can participate in higher stages of our level, we may have some incomplete experience of consciousness, yet not enough to see either where it comes from, or how it interacts with our own physical and biological structure. Yet if we bear somewhat the same relationship to a higher level as cells do to the organism, and atoms and molecules to cells, then we could definitely interact with this unknown form of higher life in a non-dualistic manner.

Every age, it seems, has its technological model of the mind. Prior to the scientific revolution, Western thinkers believed that spirits animated the human organism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, elaborate theories were proposed in which the brain moved the body by fluid flowing through the nerves (Finger 1994). Following the discovery of electricity, and the development of long-distance communications, the brain was visualized as the central switchboard of a telephone system. In the computer age, what could be more natural than to understand the mind as software, the programs that are run on the hardware of the brain? This is the essence of functionalism.

In the functionalist view, what is important is not the nature of the components of a system, but rather the relationships between them. In principle, the hardware of a computer can be anything. Silicon chips are used only because they can be made very small, and because communication between them takes place very rapidly. But a computer could be made of some other kind of hardware, and given the same program that was run on a silicon-based computer, would come up with the identical result. In the same manner, the functionalist argues, mind emerges from (or simply is) the relationships--the spatial and temporal patterns of connections--among neurons in the brain. What these neurons actually are--that is, their physical and biological composition--is irrelevant.

Functionalism thus implies that a) the brain is basically a very sophisticated computer (though not necessarily the same kind of computer in common use today); and b) a computer of the appropriate construction, and running the right programs, could be conscious. These implications have made it a very polarizing theory. Not surprisingly, it has many adherents among computer scientists, particularly in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community, and many detractors outside of this field.

Yet anyone with a holarchical view of existence should feel some affinity for the theory. As described in Douglas Hofstadter's incomparable Godel, Escher, Bach (1979)--surely one of the great creative works of this century--functionalism, more than any other theory of consciousness I am aware of, makes heroic attempts to come to grips with the problem of emergence, of what happens when existence moves from one level to the next. Any computer program has a hierarchical organization, for it must mediate between the physical hardware of the computer--which it does with machine language--and the understanding of the human user, which it does with a higher-order language. Computer programs are thus typically composed of several levels--increasingly more intelligent--which seem to capture at least some of the steps that occur going from matter to mind. A program is not just matter, for it depends on a particular organization of matter, just as we have seen a cell is also a particular organization of matter. Yet neither is a program just mind, for it must have some material basis. Even a program that has never been run on a computer, one which exists only in the abstract imagination of some computer scientist, apparently has some manifestation in the material organization of the scientist's brain.

Nevertheless, functionalism is, at its core, a monistic, materialistic theory of consciousness, and like other such theories, does not really address the hard problem of how consciousness can be so different from material substance. Philosopher John Searle, one of functionalism's strongest critics, charges that its proponents, like other materialists, either hide this problem--pretend that they have addressed it when they haven't--or, more honestly if more incredibly, simply deny that there is a problem (Searle, 1999). Philosopher Daniel Dennett, one of functionalism's leading proponents, is one of those who in effect denies there is a problem. Dennett basically argues that all the aspects of consciousness that seem to be different from, or something more than, the operation of programs in the brain will disappear when we understand these programs clearly. There will be nothing left to explain.

Dennett's views, though a minority in the field, have sparked vigorous debates in the philosophical community. All the heat and noise of these arguments, however, may obscure an important truth about human consciousness. As I will discuss later in this chapter, there is now considerable evidence that we are largely unconscious. We are aware of only a tiny fraction of the information that impinges on our brain, with most processing of this information occurring below the threshold of our consciousness (Hunt 1983; Norretranders 1998). So while functionalism does not solve the hard problem, one might argue that from a scientific point of view (if not from any individual's personal point of view), this aspect of consciousness is not as signficant as we usually assume it is. Conscious experience plays far less of a role in our ordinary existence than does unconscious processing in the brain.

A second criticism of funtionalism derives from its presumption that only relationships between components matter, not the nature of the components itself. As I pointed out earlier, this implies that computers could in theory be conscious--some proponents of the theory apparently believe computers already are conscious. Even more than this, though, it suggests that a genuinely conscious being could be constructed out of any material at all, if only the relationships between its components were proper. In a famous attack on this premise, Searle (1981) argued that one could write a computer program that translated Chinese into English, and have the entire program carried out by a single person. The person would simply follow a set of instructions commanding her to display certain English words in response to certain Chinese characters. Yet the person would not necessarily have any understanding of Chinese. Therefore, Searle concluded, manipulation of symbols, which is what computers do, is not sufficient to explain consciousness.

Searle's provocative thought experiment--known at the Chinese room argument--does not really address the hard problem of consciousness head-on, but rather the question of "understanding" something, which is difficult to define. Whether the hypothetical human computer can truly understand Chinese is a somewhat different issue from whether she has any conscious experience. One can certainly have conscious experience of something without understanding Chinese. But the converse may also be true; if one accepts Chalmers' arguments about zombies, discussed earlier, it would be arguably possible to conceive of a person understanding Chinese without being conscious. This point, I think, actually makes Searle's argument a more powerful one against the ability of functionalism to explain the hard problem.

Most functionalists, however, have argued that Searle's scenario is not realistic (Hofstadter and Dennett 1981). A single person could not even in principle perform all the manipulations required by a computer, at least not in a realistic period of time. To answer this objection, Searle put forth an alternative version of the Chinese room, called the Chinese Gym, in which there are a large number of individuals, each of whom performs one particular task in the program. Many philosophers who accept that the single person in the Chinese room would have no understanding of Chinese are not so sure about the Chinese gym. While agreeing that no single individual in the gym would understand Chinese, they argue that that doesn't mean that understanding doesn't exist somewhere in the system.

This may appear to be a very strange idea, yet it is broadly compatible with the holarchical concept of mind. As I discussed in the previous chapter, mentality is not only, not even primarily, found in human beings, but is also a property of their societies. In the next chapter, when I discuss the evidence for a higher state of consciousness, we will see that such consciousness is, and from holarchical principles would be expected to be, associated with large social organizations of people. While individuals may experience this higher state, they do so by becoming one with a much larger form of existence that seems to include everyone on earth.

A final criticism of functionalism worth mentioning comes from physicist Roger Penrose. In The Emperior's New Mind (1989) and Shadows of Mind (1994), Penrose sets out to destroy the argument that the brain can be understood to function just like a computer. The heart of his argument is that the work of Kurt Godel, Alan Turing and most recently Gregory Chaitin has shown that we can be aware of truths that we can't prove algorithmically, that is, by the kinds of programs that run on computers. Thus it seems to follow that our brain can't operate completely on the basis of such programs; we must have some other way of knowing some of the things that we do. Penrose's argument is not entirely new, and several mathematicians and philosophers have criticized it, or the general type of argument that it represents, extensively (Hofstadter 1979; Dennett 1995). Nonetheless, the limitations of computer models of mentality loom large for many philosophers.

The discoveries of physicists in the first half of this century led to a truly revolutionary change in our understanding of physical matter, embodied in quantum theory. Gone was the view of atoms as discrete particles, made up of even smaller particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons. In quantum theory, matter is described better as processes than particles, and these processes have some strange features (Herbert 1985).

One of these strange features is non-locality. We usually think of a substance as having a particular location in space and time, which can be specified accurately. Subatomic particles like electrons, however, have a location that can only be expressed in terms of probability. Physicists can tell us the probability that an electron will be in a particular location at a particular time, but this location can't be fixed with any certainty. In some sense the electron seems to exist everywhere, within a certain region around the atom. It is more likely to be in certain places than in other places, but it has some probability of being in any of a certain set of spaces. This is usually expressed by saying that a subatomic particle can exist in multiple states; the totality of these states is called the particle's wave function.

Another strange feature of quantum phenomena is that their nature seems to be determined in part by the process of observing them. As I just noted, subataomic particles have a diffuse sort of existence; they are able to exist simultaneously in a number of different probability states. When a physicist attempts to make a measurement of the particle, however, only one of these states is actually observed. Thus an electron emitted from some apparatus might be measured by determining when and where it strikes a recording instrument. When this recording process occurs, the electron exists in a single state, or place. This is known as the collapse of the wave function.

These odd features of quantum theory have led some scientists to wonder if the theory can in some manner be linked to consciousness. Consciousness, too, seems to be a non-local phenomenon to some extent. While it may be associated with the brain, many experiments suggest that it can't be localized to any particular region of the brain (Gardner 1985). As I noted a little earlier, experiences with higher consciousness suggest it can't even be localized to a particular brain. And of course, the interdependence of quantum properties with the process of scientific measurement suggests some kind of connection between quantum phenomena and consciousness.

A large number of theories of consciousness based on quantum phenomena have been proposed (Lockwood 1989; Goswami 1993; Stapp 1993; Penrose 1994; Miller 1998). While these theories differ in their details, they all propose that the brain, as an immense aggregate of various kinds of molecules, is capable of existing in an even more immensely large number of quantum states. These states can be thought of as representing various possibilities, various ways in which we could perceive or understand the world. When these states collapse, the possibilities are reduced to one, and this is what we are conscious of. Thus consciousness is associated with the collapse of the wave function.

Quantum theories of consciousness are (with a few exceptions) monistic and materialistic, in the sense that they seek to explain consciousness is terms of material phenomena. Where they differ from the more traditional materialistic theories, however, is that they generally see consciousness as in matter, rather than emerging from it. Traditional materialism presumes that consciousness is in some sense far more complex than physical and biological processes, and seeks to show how it could emerge from the interactions of these processes. Quantum models of consciousness, in contrast, argue that matter, when understood through quantum theory, is very complex, sufficiently so to be in some sense identical with consciousness. This idea was actually raised earlier in the century by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (Russell 1927)

Quantum models of consciousness have elicited a great deal of excitement among some scientists, as well as the public at large, for they hold the promise of unifying two of the most mysterious phenomena known to science--phenomena, moreover, which are at opposite ends of the scale of human experience. From a holarchical point of view, however, this is one of the greatest weaknesses of these theories. They not only attempt to collapse levels of existence, just as traditional materialism does, but do so by skipping intervening levels. While traditional materialism understands consciousness emerging from matter through a long series of links--atoms, molecules, cells, and so on--quantum theories operate under the premise that a direct link of matter to consciousness can be made.

If this is indeed true, one might ask why higher levels of physical, biological and mental existence evolved at all. If consciousness is a property of quantum states of matter, why did it not just emerge with the creation of the primordial particles of the universe? The more sophisticated quantum theories of consciousness attempt to address this question, but their answers are not very convincing. Mathematician Roger Penrose, for example, has proposed (with Stuart Hameroff) that microtubules--subcellular structures composed of bundles of protein molecules--are the locus of quantum effects, because they provide an environment where quantum phenomena can be shielded from interaction with (what physicists call entanglement with) macroscopic phenomena in the brain (Penrose 1994). Microtubules, however, are found in the brains of most organisms, and even in some unicellular organisms.

A second criticism that can be made of quantum models of consciousness is that they are based on no direct evidence whatsoever. Their entire support comes from certain features of quantum phenomena--mainly their nonlocality--that seem to have some analogy to features of consciousness, along with the well-established observation that measurement causes collapse of this non-locality. It's one thing to identify analogies between processes on different levels; I have done exactly this, of course, throughout this book. It's quite another to argue on the basis of these analogies that the processes are identical, one and the same thing.

On the other hand, if one is to argue that consciousness is the collapse of the wave function, then one is back to a grossly reductionist view of the phenomenon. Consciousness is somehow made identical to a subatomic process, with no real explanation of how, other than that both are indeterminate. Worse, it now seems that consciousness is a rather capricious phenomenon, because the collapse of the wave function is usually considered to be a random process.

Whichever way one puts the relationship, quantum models of consciousness, like other materialistic theories, really do not explain the gap between consciousness and other phenomena--the hard problem of experience. To say that consciousness is the collapse of the wave function no more explains the mystery of experience then to say that consciousness is the recurrent activity in neural pathways in the brain. So regardless of the other merits of quantum theories of consciousness, they aren't complete.

While the most widely accepted monistic theories of consciousness are some variant of materialism, alternative monistic theories exist which are idealistic. Whereas materialism, in effect, says that everything is ultimately matter, idealism says everything is consciousness. Thus the material world has no reality, but is in some sense a creation of consciousness.

In Western thought, the most famous proponent of idealism was George Berkeley, who held that nothing exists except as it's experienced by some observer (Darcy 1998). To account for the continued existence of the material and biological world when it wasn't being observed by some human or animal, Berkeley proposed that God is an eternal observer. Thus everything comes into existence through the observational consciousness of God. Human beings, in this view, participate in God's consciousness to some extent.

Berkeley's philosophy has often been described as a denial of matter, but one could argue that it depends on how one defines matter. If a higher form of being exists which is always conscious, and if what that being is conscious of has some permanence and continuity, then there is a kind of matter in the world. This matter is not the ultimate stuff of the world, but as we have just seen, neither is it in quantum theory. In quantum theory, the ultimate nature of the world seems to be fields, in networks of processes. Matter only emerges when we focus our attention on certain points or aspects of these networks. In Berkeley's idealism, the ultimate nature of the world is God. Matter is that which is observed by God, upon which we also focus our attention. The practice of science, or any other systematic form of knowledge, doesn't necessitate that matter be the ultimate basis of existence. All that a scientifically viable theory of existence requires is that what we perceive as matter exists and changes through certain rules which can be reproducibly observed. Quantum theory satisfies this requirement, and so, perhaps, does Berkeley's idealism.

Though Berkeley reached his idealistic view through some philosophical arguments that have generally been discredited since (Russell 1945; Nagel 1986; Darcy 1998), the view itself is perhaps not really disprovable. There seems to be no definitive argument or evidence against the possibility that everything we call the world is the product of a single mind. Yet this view does seem at odds with some commonplace observations. For example, if everything we call the world is the consciousness of God, why do we see more and more the further we penetrate this world? Why are organisms composed of cells and tissues (and we know now, atoms and molecules)? If the world is just God's vision, why was it necessary for this world to contain anything beyond gross appearances? If we are figments of God's imagination, why do we need cells and tissues to function? And even odder is why we had to evolve, though of course evolution was not generally accepted in Berkeley's time.

Berkeley's idealism might fare better against such arguments with a somewhat different understanding of God. This is the kind of God described by mystics, a universal consciousness. In the mystic worldview--expressed by Plotinus in the West, for example, and by Aurobindo in the East--consciousness has always existed, and created the physical, biological and mental world with which are familiar (O'Brien 1963; Wilber 1981). The mystic view is not as pure a form of idealism as Berkeley's, for it does not make an either-or distinction between matter and consciousness. It might be better put to say that there are degrees of consciousness; matter, life, and mind each represent increasingly higher degrees or manifestations of it.

Earlier, I touched on the possible role of higher levels of existence in manifesting our own consciousness, and I will have more to say about them in the following chapter, and later in this book. For now, however, I want to point out that while these higher levels are frequently not taken very seriously by scientists and philosophers interested in consciousness, the existence of a higher state of being is broadly compatible with most other theories of consciousness. This is because a higher state can be viewed as either an emergent phenomenon or a fundamental phenomenon. If it's an emergent phenomenon, then higher consciousness appears with a certain level of organization or complexity of humanity on earth. In this view, it could be quite compatible with some forms of materialism, including, as I noted earlier, functionalism.

On the other hand, in the traditional view of mystics, as I said earlier, consciousness is considered to be fundamental, something that existed prior to other forms of life. This idea is obviously very closely related to Chalmer's in some respects, as well as with receiver models of consciousness. Yet it could also be consistent with functionalism or with quantum models of consciousness.

Functionalism, in the eyes of its adherents, makes consciousness emergent from, and therefore ultimately rooted in, material processes. But it's possible to adopt something resembling a functionalist view without assuming emergence. One could, for example, assume that the programs in the brain are what enable it to tune in to a field of consciousness, if one accepts the possibility of such a field. One could also argue that these programs, rather than emerging from the random asssemblies of physical and biological processes, are the result of organization imposed on these systems from above.

Quantum models of consciousness also may seem to explain the phenomenon as emerging from the brain. Presumably that has been the intention of most of those who have proposed them. But at the very least, a quantum theory of consciousness can be made compatible with the idea that consciousness is fundamental. This is what Goswami (1993) has attempted to do, and if consciousness causes the collapse of the wave function, there seems to be no other way to understand it. On the other hand, if consciousness is somehow understood as identical to the collapse--ignoring the obvious problem of transparency--then consciousness is associated with something very primordial. So even the most reductionistic, materialistic quantum models have some affinity for the notion of a universal consciousness.

We have seen that there are a number of theories of consciousness which don't fall clearly into the traditional categories of monism or dualism. Each of these theories has certain attractive features, and while they may seem quite different from one another, there are definitely areas of consistency, which opens up the possibility of some kind of synthesis. Nevertheless, none of these theories, any more than the traditional monistic and dualistic ones, accounts for the hard problem of consciousness. Viewing these failures, some philosophers, such as Colin McGinn and Thomas Nagel, throw up their hands and surrender. We will never have a complete theory of consciousness, they decide, so we should stop worrying about the problem and get on with what we can do--solving the softer problems.

To some scientists and philosophers--perhaps a growing number of them--this is an attractive position, for it neither underestimates the magnitude of the hard problem, as many who propose theories of consciousness seem to do, nor explains it away by proposing something even more mysterious, as traditional religions do. Furthermore, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker contends, not being able to explain the hard problem (which he refers to as "sentience" in the passage below) is no real loss for science:

Philosophers who take this latter view seem to believe that our inability to understand consciousness is just an accidental or contingent result of the way we evolved. Thus McGinn suggests that a species could have evolved lacking some aspects of human intelligence, but with the ability to understand the relationship of consciousness to the brain. This understanding, in McGinn's view, would be neither superior nor inferior to ours. It would be just a different kind of understanding, much, I suppose, as an artist's or musician's insights need not be ranked as greater or lesser than those of a scientist, but just of a different nature.

There is a great deal of evidence for different kinds of intelligences (Gardner 1983), and I agree with McGinn that there is no reason to imagine that another species could not have evolved with intelligences different from our own. The question, though, is whether this would have given it any more insight into consciousness than we have. As I emphasized earlier, in the holarchical view, any form of life's view of existence is limited by its position in the holarchy. It can have little or no appreciation of anything occurring on levels of existence above its own. If the experiential, first person aspects of consciousness are really beyond our understanding, this strongly suggests that consciousness is a higher-level phenomenon. Our inability to understand it has nothing to do with the contingencies of evolution up to our present status. Our ignorance derives from the fact that we haven't evolved far enough. We don't simply need a different kind of understanding; we need a different level of understanding.

McGinn, ironically, appeals to an analogy that supports exactly this understanding of the hard problem. He discusses the story of Flatland, a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants live entirely within the contraints of these dimensions (Abbott 1992; see also Rucker 1984). They can have no real understanding of three-dimensional forms, which exist outside of the plane, literally, of their own existence. Thus when a three-dimensional form does enter their world, they see only a cross-section of it, where it intersects their plane. The movement of this cross-section, related as it is to the three-dimensional shape of the form, appears mysterious to them, following laws that are different from the way two-dimensional forms behave. Thus it can appear or disappear in their world instantaneously, change its shape with no apparent cause, and so on.

Does this sound anything at all like consciousness? I think Flatland is an excellent metaphor--at least the best we have--for the inability of any form of existence to understand life on higher levels. As I have been emphasizing all along, we can understand higher levels of existence as operating on a greater number of dimensions than our own. We might expect that if consciousness is in some way associated with these higher levels, some features of it would appear very strange to us, not at all related to lower level phenomena as we understand them.

In the next chapter, I will discuss the evidence for higher levels of consciousness, and I will argue that consciousness is not an emergent property. That is, consciousness is not a phenomenon that comes into existence when, and only when, life reaches a certain degree of complexity or holarchical development. Rather, consciousness is associated with the highest level of all of existence. What we, and other forms of life to varying degrees, experience is some portion of this consciousness, the amount of this portion being what is correlated with our degree of holarchical development. For the central claim of mystics is that our ordinary consciousness is not the highest level possible to us--that indeed, we are much like zombies, creatures with some very sophisticated mental abilities, yet largely unconscious. George Gurdjieff, an Armenian mystic who formulated a sophisticated and coherent view of holarchy in the beginning of the twentieth century, referred to our state as one of sleep:

Many, perhaps most, scientists are highly suspicious of mystic insights. Yet if science has difficulty in accepting the reality of a higher state of consciousness, it is becoming well aware of the limitations of our ordinary state. About the same time that Gurdjieff was forming his "fourth way" schools in Russia, Freud was uncovering a vast vault of unconscious memories, desires and impulses. Freud has often been criticized for trying to interpret all human behavior in terms of early childhood events. In the past several decades, however, cognitive psychologists have found that the unconscious includes much more than repressed or forgotten memories. Much of our everyday, moment-to-moment processing in the brain, including our very highest forms of intellectual activity, are also unconscious (Hunt 1983). Indeed, almost all of our mental processing is unconscious. Writer Tors Norretranders argues that of literally millions of bits of information that impinge on our senses every second, no more than twenty or so reach our conscious awareness (Norretranders 1998). Some of this information is filtered out fairly early in the pathways from sense organs to brain, while most of the rest of it is processed and determines our behavior, but below our threshold of awareness.

Consciousness, then, clearly is not continuous. We experience the external world only at intervals; most of what is going on around us escapes us. Daniel Dennett, whom we saw earlier suggested that we are indeed unconscious zombies, refers to our consciousness as "gappy". Computer scientist Marvin Minsky explains why we nevertheless experience our consciousness as continuous, and why, he thinks, this illusion is necessary:

I have quoted Minsky at length here, because while supporting the widely held view of mystics that we are largely unconscious or "asleep", he argues that we have to be this way in order to function effectively. This seems to pose a serious challenge to the mystical view. Higher consciousness is sometimes described as being continually aware of one's surroundings, and in my own experience, this is quite correct. As we move along the path to higher consciousness, we become increasingly more aware of the outer as well as the inner world.

Why, then, don't we lose all capacity to see significance in the world, as Minsky predicts we should? On the contrary, why do mystics invariably say that higher consciousness is accompanied by a greater appreciation of significance? What Minksy means by significance is distinction, the ability to divide the world into different things which have different value or meaning to us. If an organism couldn't tell the difference between prey and predator, it couldn't survive; each has a different significance to it. In contrast, when the mystic talks of significance, she means something more, a state in which both unity and difference are perceived at the same time. The mystic is, paradoxically, aware of both the separateness and the connectedness of everything. I will discuss the nature of higher consciousness further in the next chapter.

Minksy's point, however, would probably apply to a sufficiently high level of awareness, perhaps two levels rather than one level above ordinary consciousness. At this point, consciousness presumably would lose the capacity to make distinctions in the ordinary world. However, at such a very high level, life is no longer living in our familiar world, so these distinctions no longer matter. This relationship can be understood very clearly if we consider a lower level of existence. If a single cell in the body were to realize a higher state of consciousness, it would be consciousness of being an organism. In this state of consciousness, the cell would lose the ability to make distinctions in its own world, that is, between different cells or tissues or other biological processes of the body. But the cell, at its new level, no longer needs these distinctions; on the contrary, they would only interfere with its consciousness of a new level of existence.

Closely related to the lack of continuity of consciousness is its lack of unity. If we are not aware of most of what goes on inside our heads, it seems that we are fragmented into a number of different processes. Again, this seems at odds with the common-sense view of ourselves. After all, we are organisms, autonomous forms of existence. How could we function if our consciousness were not unified?

V.S. Ramachandran, a neurologist who has actually studied such patients, comes to a similar conclusion. Born in a Hindu-dominated culture, he was well aware of the Eastern view that the self is an illusion, but it took his work as a doctor for him to appreciate it:

These unconscious zombies, which Minsky refers to as simply "agents", are clearly very similar in concept to Gurdjieff's notion of "selves" or "I's" (Ouspensky 1961).

To summarize, there are two salient facts about consciousness that any approach to it must begin with. First, most of the time, human beings are not conscious; that is, we are aware of only a very small fraction of all the events that go on around us. And second, we have the illusion that we are fully conscious. We are not aware that we are not aware. To be unconscious is by definition not to know it.

There is a fine line--perhaps no line at all, really--between being unaware of things and being deceived about them. That the mind can deceive us is demonstrated by numerous types of sensory illusions--usually visual, but not necessarily so--that are the stock-in-trade of many books about the mind and its relationship to brain. I see no need to discuss such illusions here, but there is another kind of illusion which is much more fundamental and which may help us understand why we experience illusions of any kind at all. It was revealed by some fascinating, provocative and still fiercely debated experiments begun more than two decades ago by neurophysiologist Benjamin Libet (1979, 1991).

Libet asked human subjects to make voluntary movements of their fingers, while he recorded the electroencephalogram (EEG) from their scalps. Whenever a movement was made, it was preceded in time by an EEG event known as the readiness potential, indicating that certain processes were occurring in the brain that were necessary for the movement to be initiated. To his great surprise, Libet observed that the readiness potential occurred nearly half a second before the subjects reported they made the conscious decision to make a movement. Thus the initial decision to make the movement seemed to be unconscious.

Other work carried out by Libet, however, suggested some even stranger things about the mnd. He also studied neurosurgical patients, whose skulls were open, making their brains accessible to direct stimulation by electrodes. Many years earlier, the renowned neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield had demonstrated that when certain regions of the cerebral cortex are stimulated, the patient has the feeling that a certain part of his body is being touched (Penfield and Rasmussen 1950). These are the regions of the brain that the sensory receptors on our skin finally report to, where the sensation of touch becomes conscious. Libet repeated Penfield's findings, confining his stimulation to regions of the cerebral cortex corresponding to the hand; that is, when this part of the brain was stimulated, the subjects reported they felt that their hand was being stimulated. However, Libet also observed that the cortex had to be stimulated for about half a second before the patient became conscious of stimulation in the hand.

This half second value closely agreed with the gap between the EEG readiness potential and the time when subjects had experienced making a voluntary movement. Thus it appeared that the half second delay was a characteristic time that activity in the brain, once initiated, requires before the individual becomes conscious of it. I should emphasize that this time is somewhat variable, ranging over several hundred milliseconds. The important point, however, is that there is a definite delay between the time at which a message enters the brain and when we become conscious of it.

Or is there? A problem with this conclusion is that we are ordinarily conscious of many events in much less than half a second. If someone touches your hand, it doesn't take you half a second to feel it--does it? To demonstrate this rigorously, Libet stimulated subjects directly on their hand; the subjects reported being conscious of the stimulus about 20 milliseconds (two one-hundredths of a second) after the stimulation. This time was roughly in agreement with the time it would take for the stimulus simply to reach the brain, travelling up sensory nerves in the arm to the spinal cord, and from there up to the brain. But what happened to the additional half a second (500 milliseconds) that a stimulus was supposed to require, upon arrival in the brain, before we are conscious of it?

Putting these two observations together (along with the results of other studies), Libet found himself forced to the conclusion that while the subjects first became conscious of being touched on the hand after about half a second, they projected (or referred) this experience back into time, so that it was experienced as occurring close to the time in which it in fact did occur (Libet 1991). He compared this projection in time to the well-known projection of experience into space. Though all our experience of the external world goes on inside our brains, we experience this world as outside of ourselves, in space. Thus when our hand is touched, we experience that touch not on the cortex of our brain, but in a characteristic position on our body. In somewhat the same way, Libet suggested, the brain is also able to project events backward into time.

Stated in this way, this result seems paradoxical, indeed supernatural. How can we experience something as occurring before we are actually aware that it has occurred? In interpreting Libet's work, it's important to understand his experimental setup. When subjects were stimulated on the hand, they watched the dial of a clock that discriminated milliseconds as it spun rapidly around. They then reported as precisely as they could where the position of the dial was when they became conscious of the stimulation. But they made their report--that is, told the experimenter where they saw the dial of the clock--several seconds after they became conscious of the stimulation.

This delay between when something is experienced and when we report it is inevitable in any experiment of this kind, and gives the brain ample time to practice some kind of deception. In a long and perceptive discussion of this subject, Dennett (1991) points out that the brain could edit the original message either prospectively or retrospectively (what he calls Orwellian and Stalinesque editing, respectively). In prospective editing, the subject experiences the original event incorrectly. He is not conscious of the stimulation when he says he was, but he believes he is, and reports this belief to the experimenter. In retrospective editing, the subject experiences the original event correctly--in this case, experiences being touched half a second or so after the stimulus--but the brain changes that information, so that what is presented to consciousness is the experience of being touched earlier.

The larger point that Dennett is trying to make--which constitutes the esssence of what he calls the multiple drafts model of consciousness--is that there is a period of time of several hundred milliseconds during which the status of information coming into the brain is very fluid. During this period, the brain can subject it to a considerable degree of editing, so that the temporal sequence of events becomes very fuzzy. Information coming in at any one point during this period is thrown into a pool, so to speak, with information entering at any other point.

In we accept this idea, we can't really speak meaningful of a temporal sequence, of some events coming before others. Everything entering the brain during a certain period is all at the same moment; any event that occurs during this time is potentially temporally equivalent to any other. Time sequences become sorted out only after the brain, having constructed numerous multiple drafts or versions of events, presents one of these to our consciousness.

This idea has many important implications, but I want to focus on one that is especially relevant to the holarchical model being developed in this book. In Chapter 4 I argued that we actually perceive the world in two dimensions of time, not one. In addition to the first dimension of time, in which events seem to flow in succession, we have the ability to experience the same event in our mind, over and over. This repetition, I argued, is what gives our world permanence. It's why external objects continue to exist for us when we aren't directly experiencing them, and also how we create identities for ourself and others--that is, a relatively stable view of people.

If we understand time in the brain in the conventional sense, this repetition would not seem to constitute a different dimension. The repetition of the event simply extends it in the same dimension of time in which the original event occurred. If there is a fluid period of several hundred milliseconds in our brain, however, then this period is, for all practical purposes, like a single moment or instant of time--it is, for our species, a point of time, the smallest indivisible unit that we can experience. It follows that any events that are repeated within this period are occurring in a different dimension of time. If more than one event can occur at the same moment of a linear flow of time, then this series of events must exist outside of the dimension of that linear flow.

The existence of a second dimension of time may help us understand why we experience a flow of time in the first place, why we divide our existence into a past, present and future. Most physicists now believe that time does not actually flow. What we call past, present and future is all there, together, in space-time (Davies 1983; Deutsch 1997). The reason time seems to flow, according to this view, is because of our memories of past events:

But this statement is almost circular. Why are some events perceived as past? If all of time is there, what meaning or sense can there be in calling something the past? How does our mind come to make such a distinction? Deutsch, I think, provides the key to the answer, without seeming to understand its significance:

Exactly. And the second dimension of time provides this exterior time. The second dimension of time is what gives us memory, the ability to ascribe permanence to objects and other people in the world. And it's also why time seems to flow. What we call the flow of time is the first dimension of time, moving with respect to the second.

However, there still seems to be a problem with this notion, according to Deutsch:

There is no need to postulate an infinite regress of time. As I suggested earlier, there are a maximum of three dimensions of time associated with any one level of existence. If we were to realize the third of these dimensions, there would be no further exterior dimensions, and time would no longer cease to flow. But we aren't aware of this third dimension.

I will return to this point in a moment. but first, let's summarize the experience of different holons on different stages of the mental level. Three-dimensional experience, as found in invertebrates and lower vertebrates, has no sense of time. Such organisms are neither aware of change nor of lack of change. Four-dimensional experience, exemplified by birds and lower mammals, is aware of time; the world changes, and some aspects of the external world, chiefly other organisms of the same species, are understood as existing in that time as well as in space. Five-dimensional experience is aware of permanence in the world. An object or another organism continues to exist even when it's not in the direct experience of the organism.

Two qualifying points about this understanding. First, to reiterate what I said in Chapter 2, these distinctions are not hard and fast. Lower organisms may have some degree of four- or five-dimensional perception. If they did not, they would not be capable of learning, for example, which requires some experience and understanding of time. It should also be clear that if there is no experience of a second dimension of time, there is no flow of time. Time in the first dimension flows with respect to time in the second. However, this perception is much less developed in these organisms than in higher organisms, whereas, I contend, their three-dimensional perception is as good as ours.

The second important point is that since each of these types of dimensional experience represents a new stage, it includes the lower, yet does not fully transcend it. A bird or mammal, which experiences the world in four-dimensions, can't experience it in only three dimensions. While it is aware of three spatial dimensions, it can't experience anything in space that is not also moving in time. The same is true for five-dimensional experiencers, like ourselves, and moreover, we can't experience anything in only four dimensions. We (mature adults) can't experience our world, in other words, without attaching some permanence to what we see.

What about six-dimensional perception? What would that be like? It should not only include the lower stages, but transcend them. Six-dimensional experience should be capable of seeing the world both as permanent and as changing, and even more, should be able to see the world in a way in which neither the concept of change nor the concept of not-change is present. More still, it should be able to do all of this in two very different ways: one way by looking down at our mental level and everything there; and the other by looking up at the next level, on which it's being born. This is higher consciousness, the subject of the next chapter.

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