[MD] Emergent Consciousness

[Ham Priday]

Hello S.A. --


> Arlo said:  "Like I've said, I consider the "I"
> and the "collective consciousness" to be co-constructs
> at the social level, siding with Einstein's view that
> the "I" is an "optical delusion of consciousness"

Albert Einstein did not define the 'I' of consciousness as "an optical
delusion," and he certainly did not suggest that it is a construct of
society.  His use of the phrases "kind of delusion" and "kind of prison"
were euphematic in this statement on the universe.

What he actually said -- and I may have gone to a more complete source than
Arlo used -- was:

"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in
time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as
something separate from the rest.  A kind of optical delusion of
consciousness.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to
our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.  Our
task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of
compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its
beauty...  We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if
mankind is to survive."

A more comprehensive statement by this mathematician about man and his sense
of purpose in life is contained in this quotation.  (Note that Einstein does
not allude to man's derivation from the social structure (level), but
instead cites the individual's relations to other "social beings" only in
the valuistic terms "sympathy", "pride", "hate", "need for power", and
"pity".  Nor does he speak of consciousness as an "emergent" attribute.)

"We all know, from what we experience with and within ourselves, that our
conscious acts spring from our desires and our fears.  Intuition tells us
that that is true also of our fellows and of the higher animals.  We all try
to escape pain and death, while we seek what is pleasant.  We are all ruled
in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our
actions in general serve for our self-preservation and that of the race.
Hunger, love, pain, fear are some of those inner forces which rule the
individual's instinct for self preservation.  At the same time, as social
beings, we are moved in the relations with our fellow beings by such
feelings as sympathy, pride, hate, need for power, pity, and so on.  All
these primary impulses, not easily described in words, are the springs of
man's actions.  All such action would cease if those powerful elemental
forces were to cease stirring within us.  Though our conduct seems so very
different from that of the higher animals, the primary instincts are much
alike in them and in us. The most evident difference springs from the
important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of
imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and
other symbolical devices.  Thought is the organizing factor in man,
intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.
In that way imagination and intelligence enter into our existence in the
part of servants of the primary instincts.  But their intervention makes our
acts to serve ever less merely the immediate claims of our instincts."

Concerning man's creativity, Einstein also said:

"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a
simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some
extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and
thus to overcome it.  This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative
philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.  Each
makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in
order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the
narrow whirlpool of personal experience."

If we're going to infer support for the MoQ from what others believe, the
least we can do is quote them accurately and in the context of their overall
statement.

Regards,
Ham