In the beginning wasn’t the word.
Instead it was, and is, thought that manifests our reality.
“Thought” is the slippery mental discernment that initiates awareness of self and world; the conscious instantaneous though time-embodied mental process – often independent of sensory input – where reality presents “us,” and to us.
Try to envision the word-cloaked thought, itself, alone.
Or alone as possible in a relationally-defined reality avatared by words. It’s almost impossible, but an essential exercise for grounding and expanding understanding by shedding preconceived symbolic filters.
Acknowledging thought as a first step in rational explication is a must for framing knowledge as well as for realizing the interplay of mind and matter. Transferable information manifests, regardless of subject, through the mediating technology of language, where agreed-upon phonemes are the communicative blocks that corral, shape, and transmit thought.
Contemplating thought as the foundational path has always been part of the well-trod philosophical first step of journeys mapped as “metaphysics” (the study of “being”) and “ontology” (the study of “what is”), as well as the more specialized sojourns of epistemology (how we know). But it’s also essential for finding steady footing in logic, psychology, ethics, law, artificial intelligence, and in providing some understanding of consciousness in the larger context of reality.
Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum 1637 revelation re-centered the primacy of thought (more accurately doubt) in Western philosophy, specifically as the root of reason and identity, even as it presupposes the doubting “I” that elicits that cogito.
But what was an important revelation in 1637 is not enough to encompass what science has discerned 385 years later.
Now is our time of disconnect
It’s not just the long-simmering separation from formal religion, where the old and word-bound explications of foundational spirituality are inadequate to command attention, let alone rational acceptance, in our material-first, “objective” framing of the world. Ironically, the post-Renaissance disconnect is now with scientific objectivity itself.
With the baseline prerequisite of reason applied to our understanding of the world, we’re divorced from grasping the fluid ontological conclusions of reality-defining science since Einstein. The implications of the profound inexplicability of quantum mechanics have us free floating from the accessible, hard-wired, language-structured, material-first ontology that worked so well from Aristotle to Newton, enabling temporary human dominance over this spinning globe with a false scepter of logical thought.
When we try to discern the essence of reality and not just our mediated experience of it, we understandably gloss over this first principle of mind-making-sense.
More than that, accepting materialism as foundational encourages humans to compete for “things,” since at bottom that is all that “is”: only material – the noun-expressible – is “real.” Love, empathy, connectedness; those are abstractions and distractions from a physical-first universe. Any metaphysical bias can distort truth, but now is the time to demote time, as well as measurable space, from first principles of reality to restore the primacy of universal connectedness; of essence undiminished.
The separate but closely related philosophical discipline of examining consciousness – phenomenology – didn’t formally coalesce until the German mathematician Edmund Husserl one-upped Descartes a century ago. Instead of Descartes’s cogito as the first step, Husserl focused on the very sense of experiencing, rather than on the existence of the object perceived. Heidegger went further, looking to modes of being as more fundamental than “objects.”
But the deeper, contemporary problem is the hard one.
Answering the “hard problem of consciousness”, originally expounded by David Chalmers in 1995, is the modern alchemical quest for philosophers. It has reinvigorated and refocused fundamental inquiry on to the existential, not-yet-explainable interplay of non-material thought with the material world. Unlike the “easy problem” of analyzing physical cognitive components (blood, brains, and neurons), we can’t explain fundamental experience and thought – the why and the how of thought. We can’t dissociate – or ignore – sentience and self from the reality it presents, and that itself must be part of.
It’s no surprise that this philosophical focus is commensurate with the awe-inspiring but head scratching consequences of quantum mechanics.
It is enlightening to have leading theoretical physicists, such as Carlo Rovelli, rather than just New Age gurus, acknowledge that the physical world is an illusion; that the touchable, see-able, measurable world mediated by our sensations is entirely relational. Moreover, cognitive scientists such as Donald Hoffman have also pointed out that our perceptual experience is merely a species-evolved interface that doesn’t even approximate reality, yet facilitates our navigation of it.
The metaphysical view gaining reluctant acceptance by scientists and philosophers is that consciousness is itself somehow fundamental, and that time, space, and experiential reality are emergent properties.
I was lucky to have been mentored in college by the late Thomastic scholar W. Norris Clarke. This soft spoken, brilliant Jesuit bodhisattva integrated Eastern contemplative thought as well as the metaphysical framework of Aquinas into a contemporary, inspiring vision of reality and our place in it. He also had a deep understanding of theoretical physicist David Bohm‘s work, even assigning to us undergraduates Bohm’s mind-bending “Wholeness and the Implicate Order.”
Fundamental to Thomastic metaphysics, elaborating on Aristotle, is distinguishing essence from existence. Essence is the “whatness” that distinguishes something, whereas existence is the “thatness” infinite-in-itself, reality. It is the essence that limits a thing’s existence as well as defining it, making it real to us. Before Aquinas, existence was part of essence; now existence is metaphysically different from essence and is itself the timeless fundamental.
What did it mean to the physicists faced with the absurd fact that the quantum world could only be expressible by probabilities?
For Werner Heisenberg, this meant reality must encompass the potential or indeterminate even thought this unimaginably wider world doesn’t become “real” until it interacts with the rest of the manifest world.
Willing to extend this expansive and all-inclusive metaphysics further, Boehm posited that there is an “implicate order” not fully comprehensible to humans that is the fundamental structuring of reality. What we can measure is the unfolded “explicate order.” Unfolding into the explicate order that is both comprehensible and incomprehensible to humans, the implicate order is the primary causative structure to reality.
It’s not hard to see that continuity of thought not just from Aquinas to Bohm, but also continuity with Daoist and Buddhist thinkers (not to mention mystics of all denominations) in placing primacy of reality not in the measurable but in the infinite; an infinite that we participate in, and that is absolutely relational.
The renaissance of metaphysical idealism is exemplified today by Bernardo Kastrup, a Dutch-residing former computer scientist turned philosopher. Unlike Rovelli’s refusal to go to the next step after acknowledging “all is relational,” Kastrup confidently accepts consciousness itself as the first principal.
Communication and Intelligence
Earth-bound species as evolutionarily and geographically distinct as birds and mammals developed high level vocal communication. It would make sense that elsewhere in our shared universe, atmosphere-blessed planets would also evolve organic systems with communicative technology, perhaps also utilizing sound to symbolically capture and transmit information. But the origin and evolution of intelligence is a byproduct of continued entropy of the universe, with different vectors of unfolding beyond earth-similar boundaries.
Communication with non-human intelligences requires a deeper understanding of fundamental reality to access mutually accessible points of references of our common universe, not just the material and terrestrially framed. Unfolding the strange, more complex but more fundamental world into consciousness allows humans to access and better reconnect with reality; with the underlying existence rather than constrained essence.
What’s more, developments in artificial intelligence are simultaneously pushing us to better understand and expand human expression of information, primarily via language.
Word2Vec and GloVe are the computer language programs developed a decade ago that represent words as mathematical embeddings in vectors, arranged by semantic sensibilities. Deep learning programs layer artificial neural networks to approximate human brains, though utilizing the non-biological process of backpropagation.
Mastery of words through artificial inelligence systems have illuminated language and questioned the meaning of “thought” as never before. These large language models, such as OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (“GPT-3”) are astonishingly good at presenting human communication. They can replicate phonemes of connected thoughts based on relationships of word usage. But the real breakthrough will be when AI transmits information of as yet uncomprehended reality; of existence itself rather than mirroring back the secondary interface of used language, opening up for human intelligence to up to the presence of less mediated truth. There are steps in that direction right now using, for instance, visual information (via video) rather than words to better represent reality.
But first there must be the acknowledgement of that there is an “it” before “bit”; that there is a fundamental connectedness underlying and presenting reality, an unfolding into intelligence that may be beyond our rational hardwiring, but is accessible to our deepest self. Thought itself is a product of the continued entropic dissolution from the “big bang”. Like art and music, it is a way of reconnecting with the larger universe. Understanding but transcending thought is the first step of enlightenment, and the next step in the evolution of human consciousness.