Spirituality and ruminations on cosmic mind idealism (CMI)

The webmaster for some discussion lists on brain and consciousness wrote:

With yeshua now being a member we are going to have a lot more discussions about religion and spirituality. 

My response:

But do not fear -- we do not intend to dilute the focus of these lists on basic questions of mind and how it works, and what that implies for all that we do. 

[The webmaster's] post reminds me that our culture often encourages a knee-jerk reaction, that spirituality and hard core science must be antagonistic to each other. That is certainly not true for Yeshua or for me; we both think independently. When I was younger, there was an ideological schism between emotional values and reason; at least that has attenuated somewhat. Those old beliefs are in my view important but mild examples of "fake news" or "hallucinogenic groupthink", a very important phenomenon we need to understand better (https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2435634566466946).  At one time we may emphasize one aspect of the greater whole more than another, but Yeshua and I at least agree on trying always to be grounded in the larger context, not disrespecting one aspect of reality when discussing another.

Speaking for myself, however, I would say that it's not really about religion. I basically view religion as an aspect of politics, in which many people try to come to terms with spiritual life while others do other things. Somehow this reminds me of the old saying "I am not a member of any organized religion. I am a Quaker..."

But on to topics more like the core foci of these lists.

Again and again, I have tried to hammer home the fact that consciousness is not a binary variable, that there are levels and levels of consciousness, whether we talk about consciousness qua mind (https://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0311006) or "consciousness of x".

Much of my life has been dedicated to trying to understand THAT LEVEL of consciousness which can be fully understood by using mathematical methods applied to the mundane brain, the electrons and neutrons and protons and electromagnetism of the brain. 

I see no need for religion or even spirituality to explain that level of consciousness, the level which is what we really see in most academic discussions. (Shaw's play Back to Methusaleh captures that reality of life so vividly...). But Yeshua and I also agree that our cosmos and our mathematics do allow for a higher level of consciousness, and that we humans can connect to that level; based on personal experience and further thought, we agree that this is not merely a theoretical possibility but a 99% likelihood, from our point of view. (Since it is a subjective probability estimate, conditional upon information available to us, we can have some level of respect for those who would have other assessments.) Trying to understand and live with that spiritual level of consciousness is another major part of our lives.

My paper in the Activitas special issue (https://rdcu.be/bxnjY ) includes a quick summary of my position on that level of consciousness; the next issue of Cosmos and History will get much, much deeper and more concrete. Crudely, I assign 2/3 subjective probability to the idea that our spiritual or psychic experiences are mostly a product of a kind of symbiosis between us and the "noosphere," in a theory similar to that of Teilhard de Chardin or Verdansky but fixed up to better fit both science and experience. In this concept, the cosmos is still totally governed by partial differential equations over curved Minkowski space or some kind of Fock space; much of the paper argues for observer-free quantum field theory, a kind of hard core realism, too realistic for those physicists who float like corks on the water between "mystical" solipsism and contempt for real mysticism which tries to understand first person experience. 

But what of the other 1/3 possibility, which I called "ultraweirdism"? What of cosmic mind idealism (CMI), the specific type of ultraweirdism which seems most interesting to me, which is also the type which Deepak Chopra has been trying to push? Can we really make sense of it?

(Caveat: there are many other forms of ultraweirdism out there. The second most interesting form for me, right now, is the "subset" theory, the theory that the universe or cosmos we see is just a subset of a larger one, a larger one whose dynamics are much greater than the tiny deviations assumed in superstring theory. For example, there is the theory that our world is a computer simulation.) 

So MANY people believe in CMI! More precisely, so many people believe that 

"Life is just a dream," that everything we see is either an illusion or at least a creation of mind, and that mind is more fundamental than physics in the ultimate laws which govern our cosmos! 

Could that number of people be growing? I remember during the primaries and election of 2016 in the US, I heard many people who said: "I used to laugh at that viewpoint, but as I look at the news today, I begin to wonder whether it is all just a dream after all." 

So if life is just a dream, I can picture Deepak saying: "If you don't like it, try to dream better dreams." I was impressed many years ago by the book Seeing with the Mind's Eye 

https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Minds-Eye-Techniques-Visualization/dp/0394731131/ which talks a lot about dreaming better dreams, positive visualization, among other things. As Stan would say,  dreaming better dreams may be a good idea even if hard core realism is true. More concretely, when we we find ourselves overwhelmed by any number of bad dreams

(e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17564174/james-bridle-new-dark-age-book-computational-thinking-interview ), I would try hard to visualize a plausible better path, like a moral highground. 

Suddenly -- how can I compress such a complex subject? 

Just a couple of thoughts. One variety of CMI is the PARWIN concept, that the people are real but the world is not. This includes the TYPE of "multiverse" theory that Smolin rants about so hard in his new book (Einstein's unfinished revolution), the idea that we each live in our own self-created universe; I was slightly annoyed that he did not pay more respect to the proper Everett/Wheeler/Deutsch version of multiverse. The great little novel What dreams May Come by Matheson (sp?) portrays that Swedenborgian viewpoint. But how do the people interact, really? One way to resolve that is... what I think of as the old Kaballah idea, that we are pieces or streams of a larger mind, similar to noosphere but all-encompassing. But if so, what is the GOAL or PURPOSE of that mind? (The important newish novel Vita Nostra gives a bit of feeling of what it REALLY would be like to be part of such a cosmic mind, if one discounts its overemphasis on semiotics.)

Years ago, I read a core book on kaballah while standing up in a bookstore, and saw that theory. I thought: "OK, they say that the Great Mind was floating all alone somewhere, experiencing sensory deprivation, and so it is natural that it fragmented. But if we follow their grand vision, and bring it together,won't it just fragment again? Why not?" But the noosphere viewpoint has at least some answers to such questions, and connects to experience more quickly ..