Part 2 - Siva and Cern, Dancing Colliders

What do particle colliders do? And what does this suggest regarding consciousness studies? Subatomic particles such as protons, antiprotons, electrons, and positrons are isolated into pairs and thrust into a circular conductor. With its 27-kilometer loop length, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern is the largest such collider, allowing paired subatomic particles to generate maximum velocity, force, and energy. Their head-on impact generates opportunity for new matter to be “born” from their colliding annihilation. These newly born matter forms, like the recent discovery of the Higgs Boson, are deemed fundamental particles and comprise the fabric of our physical universe. 

Allan B Wallace, the scientist, Buddhist practitioner, and consciousness researcher, argues for the validity of contemplative inquiry. Wallace believes that meditation practices conducted by advanced practitioners are akin to astronomical research on the cosmos turned inward. These first-person consciousness informants are highly trained meditation practitioners with tens of thousands of hours of experience. As with the collider, one’s focus is magnetically streamlined and introverted to investigate fundamental consciousness states, also known as consciousness-as-such states. These unelaborated consciousness states are comprised of minimally phenomenal experiences (MPEs) where one’s qualia, or subjective experience, is stripped to bare awareness. The consciousness explorer is at once the collider, scientist, and the paired isolated particles in search of the fundamental basis of consciousness.

Josipovic, a cognitive neuroscientist from New York University, claims that consciousness is a “type of awareness whose main property is its inherent non-representational reflexivity.” Consciousness free of the obfuscations of mental representation, elaboration, and processing is described as crisp, clear, impartial, and light-filled awareness. In other words, not even the stream of consciousness, the inner narrator, the cognitive shuffling, indexing, collating, and mental mergings that describe our mental phenomena are considered consciousness according to this paradigm. Bringing Siva back into the foreground, this view is corroborated by Hindu scripture. The sage writer, Patanjali of the Yoga Sutras, defines consciousness in the second of 196 sutras as the cessation of all that mind stuff jumble. This clear conception of a non-reflexive mind as consciousness orients the remainder of the sutras and our innermost first-person informants.

Likewise, Wallace argues that consciousness is not reducible to the external world of matter. Consciousness is not mere“steam coming from the locomotive,” as the determinist physiologist T.H Huxley proclaimed in 1874.  Nor is consciousness an emergent factor arising from the fortunate coalitions of neural processes. In their Neural Correlates of Consciousness model, Crick and Koch argue that much of what we experience as perception is generated by the brain’s neural tapestry of schemas and cognitive processing models, which fill in perceptual informational gaps and create the illusion of a seamless conscious experience. To highlight the classic example, let’s consider the color red and the color vision expert Mary.  Mary knows everything about the color red. But knowing and perceiving red wholly differs from the subjective experience of red.  Waves of light impinge upon one’s photoreceptors, and that data is translated into electrical signals and transduced through the brain and cortex to form composite neural representations that, in total, lead to the experience of “red.” However, the frontline data received and computationally encoded by our sense organs, looks nothing like the subjective experience or, as Chalmers claims, the qualia of red. The qualia of red is unique to each and every experience of consciousness.  Despite Mary’s expert computational understanding of red, it can never fill the explanatory gap of her experience of red. 

And finally, going one step further, Josipovic argues that consciousness is not even the qualia or inner phenomenology, as Chalmers would claim. The epiphenomenal version of consciousness promulgated by Huxley, the neural emergent view heralded by Crick and Koch, and the qualia of Chalmers are merely viewing booths to consciousness. We mistakenly explain consciousness with terms, conditions, and concepts that are other than consciousness.  In each of the three cases,  we mistake the effect for the observer—the theater, screen, and projector, for the observer consciousness, which, like Siva, remains victoriously unsullied by the manifestations of Lila. There is a bifurcation, one of immediate experience and the other of assigning terms, descriptors, and concepts—even when they occur in latent non-conscious cognitive structures. Accordingly, consciousness-as-such is distinct from the content that consciousness holds in its purview.  Otherwise, are we not succumbing to the observer effect by allocating a designation of characteristics to that consciousness, which, according to Josipovic, is free of them and merely the aware container of them?

Cern and Siva, particle collider and the deity’s spinning halo of world creation are perhaps world symbols that reflect and guide our consciousness studies. Each, in its own right, points to a foundational baseline reality free of elaboration. Siva’s spinning halo of fire is just a collider of the superpositions of creation and destruction, within which unobfuscated consciousness, like a limpid clear light, reveals itself.