Time and Separation Consciousness

Discussion

William Irwin Thompson:

"When we come up the evolutionary ladder of life from feelings to perceptions, we encounter the dynamical world of time. A perception is a judgment of time, for an animal doesn't want to confuse the dangers of past and present; it wants to perceive what is going on now. The very nature of the extensive field of the delay-space that emerges when channels process information at different rates is about nothing if it is not about time. Neuroscientists who have measured our human sense of "now" report that it is an extensive field that ranges between one-fifth and one-quarter of a second. A longer duration belongs to the next moment, the next sense of "now^," and a shorter duration is too fast to be available to consciousness. It becomes what Gregory Bateson used to call "a process rather than a product of consciousness." These rapid processes support the functions that enable us to have a field of awareness, but they are not accessible to consciousness itself.

With the emergence of this sharp phenomenology of time, we have crossed the Great Divide, or what Christians might like to call the Fall. On one side of the Great Divide, we have an undivided world in which beings are saturated with Being. Eternal Atman rests in eternal Brahman. But once we slice up the world into distinct perceptions, into distinct rates of time, we take an ontological step that separates the unique being from the universal Being. Of course, from another perspective, this process of temporal differentiation is ambiguous, for the emergence of the extensive field of the delay-space that orchestrates the afterimages and echoes of impulses is taking one giant step toward individuation and the emergence not of life — which we have had for billions of years —but of living beings: of nematodes and not simply spirochetes and cyanobacteria.

In the work of processing time, of cross-referencing channels of information that come in at different rates, of stabilizing the delay-space so that the afterimages don't dissolve before they can be accessed for perception, a pathway of activity comes about that we can call a nervous system. The more all these channels of information from forms, feelings, and perceptions are cross-referenced, the more the extensive field of the delay space becomes stabilized. The delay-space endures not simply as a perceptual afterimage or echo, but as a virtual engine of perception that begins to evolve into an organization of perceptions, a system with a natural history of its past processing and judgments. In other -words, it moves from after-image or echo to identity. With this meta-level of cross-referencing of perceptions, of perceiving perceptions, we take the step from perceptions to patterns of association, habits of connections, histories of patterned connecting determined by the neuronal synchrony that orchestrates the network that is brought forth in response to this excitation. This neuronal synchrony that has been reported on by Wolf Singer, Rodolfo Llinas, and others is within a range of oscillation of twenty to forty hertz (Hz), and so its behavior is within a range of time that is a "now." But this neuronal synchrony that orchestrates neurons into a network in an experience of "now" is a learned and selected pathway with a history. It is what Gerald Exdelman calls "neural Darwinism" — a group selection patterning of response that becomes reinforced and develops structures through repeated performances. Kittens raised in the dark from birth do not, and can never, develop certain neural structures that normal kittens do. "Wolf children" raised by animals in the wild without human language cannot develop linguistic ability after they are discovered by humans and brought back into human society. These patternings of associated responses through a net- work of what the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume liked to call "customary conjunctions" take us from the third skandha, of Perceptions, to the fourth skandha, of dispositional attitudes. 38 Coming into Being.

As the habits of associated perceptions persist through time, as they become a customary response to activity, they are themselves perceived, and this metalevel of perceiving perceptions and associating perceptions gives us the new emergent state of the fifth skandha, of consciousness. Francisco Varela Ukes to distinguish between primary consciousness — the conscious ness of the animal —and the reflexive consciousness that generates an awareness of selfhood, a state that we most probably share with chimpanzees. When this consciousness becomes thus reflective on itself, we have the emergent condition of the ego or the self. But, notice that this condition of alienation of time fi-om eternity, of beings from Being, is even more basic than the human ego. Before there was Adam there was "war in heaven."

And so we can see now^ that the five skandhas of Buddhism present a developmental model of the evolution of consciousness: from the form of the spirochete to the feeling of the cyanobacterium to the perception of the nematode to the dispositional attitude of the slug to the primary consciousness of the animal and the reflective self-consciousness of the human.

If we look back at this evolutionary process of emergent states in the movement from forms, feelings, perceptions, and dispositional attitudes to consciousness, we should be able to construct a dynamical model or phase portrait for the geometry of behavior. We could construct a five-dimensional model for consciousness with each channel of information coming in defined as a dimension or axis. We then could define consciousness as "the state-space of the perceptual system."

(https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Coming_Into_Being)