The Fourth Dimension, 1

The Paradoxes of Consciousness

This is a an elaboration of the metaphysics presented in the opening sections of Self and Unself, and summarised in my audio piece ‘The System and The Self’ (which appears at the beginning of Ad Radicem).

Part 1, The Paradoxes of Consciousness presents an outline of the literal, subjective-objective self, and of that which cannot be literally spoken of; transdimensional, ‘panjective’ unself.

Part 2, Standing up in Flatland looks at how the metaphor of the fourth dimension does away with all the fundamental ‘literalist’ conflicts and mysteries of the ‘three dimensional’ self.

Part 3, The Hard Problem of Everything explains the fear, craving, violence, boredom, confusion, insularity, idolatry and madness that follow, of necessity, from taking reality literally.

Part 4, The Soft Solution to Everything shows how to arrive at absolute certainty as to the nature of ‘four-dimensional’ consciousness, and why this entails immense pain.

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The nature of infinity is this: that everything has its
Own Vortex, and when once a traveller through Eternity
Has passed that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind
His path, into a globe itself enfolding like a sun
Or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty,
While he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth…
Thus is the earth one infinite plane, and not as apparent
To the weak traveller confined beneath the moony shade.
Thus is the heaven a vortex passed already, and the earth
A vortex not yet passed by the traveller through Eternity.

William Blake, Milton¹

Representation and Consciousness

Self comprises concepts, percepts, affects and volitions, These modes, or things, that comprise self (the various things I think, sense, feel and do) are not, for self, the thing-in-itself, but either partial representations, or partial manifestations, related to or conditioned by the thing-in-itself, but alienated from its essence. Representations, such as the perceived sensation of an apple or a volitional desire to eat it, or the conceptual idea of a mental snake or an affective feeling of fear occasioned by it, are all partial, filtered, and indirect experiences; mediated projections on the screen of the self which creates what we call ‘things,’ stripped of their inner quality, whatever that might be. The apple-in-itself and the snake-in-itself are thus mysteries which the literal self cannot, by itself, experience.

Literal here means that the phenomenal representation of the thing (or phenomena) can only ever ‘be itself’, or can only ever represent that aspect of the thing-in-itself (or noumena²) which can only ever ‘be itself’. The literal self can, in other words, both grasp and experience Aristotelian logic (a = a / a ≠ b), but it can only grasp non-Aristotelian logic (a = b / a ≠ a). Direct, non-literal or paradoxical experience of ‘a = b / a ≠ a’ is impossible for the literal self. The literal self can know and use paradoxical symbols to describe paradox, but it can never experience what these symbols are of. The mind, for example, can imagine an apple fused with or alternating with a snake, but it cannot imagine an apple that that is simultaneously not an apple, or that is simultaneously a snake. The literal self can imagine an absence of things or events, but it cannot imagine an absence of the space or time which conditions them into literal being. The same applies to sensation, feeling and desire. This means if there is anything to the thing-in-itself which is not literal, not ‘filterable’ into a graspable thing or representation, self, by itself, can not only never know what that is, but it can never really know that it can never know.

The literal self can, in other words, make literal subjects and objects of experience—things which are things and which have a graspable relationship to other things—but what there is to these things that cannot be ‘made sense of’ (made thought of, made will of, made feeling of)—what there is to them that is panjective—can no more appear in or as the self than the colour blue can literally appear on an audio recording, or the taste of cheesecake on a menu. This isn’t to say that literal subjective and objective things are illusions. If representation were not empirically real, spacetime, much less our shared ‘intersubjective’ experience of it, would be incoherent. Our memories and our words, referring to nothing beyond themselves, would have no inherent order and would make no intelligible sense. Nonetheless, that which is ‘beyond’ representation remains inaccessible to the self, and if the apple or snake has properties ‘beyond’ graspable objectivity and subjectivity, that are directly accessible, independent of sense, mind, feeling, or will, such panjective properties transcend the ordinary, literal intelligibility of mere things, and are out of reach of the self.

Thus, I can know, feel, sense or intuit the subjective or objective properties of a thing—its position, its state, its dimensions, its status as a non-paradoxical thing among other things, and so on—but if I am confined by representation, its essence remains out of reach. This is the case for subjectivist metaphysics, for objectivist theories, and for many of those which claim to have transcended the subject-object divide, all of which are, despite the subtlety of their arguments, essentially solipsist; either subjectivist solipsism, confined by subjective perceptions and conceptions—what we might call ‘private solipsism’—or objectivist solipsism, related to others through an objective world, but still estranged from the thing-in-itself—what we might call ‘public³ solipsism’.

And so a representation of the apple, shared or otherwise, can relate to a representation of the snake, and both can relate to a representation of me, or of us, and I can call all these representations and relations ‘meaningful’—in that they make sense to the self; or ‘beautiful’—in that they please the self; or ‘useful’—in that they help the self—and, further, I can believe that these representations and relations are what the apple and the snake actually are, that what I see and understand of an apple is, ultimately, all there is to it. But the whole thing remains either in a private (subjective) me or in a public (objective, or intersubjective) us. I am not actually reaching across to anything else as it is, only as it seems to be. All my (and our) relations are ultimately between appearances, not between things as they really are. With one exception. There is one thing-in-itself in the universe—and only one—that I have direct access to; and that is consciousness. Or, to put this another way, unlike everything else in the universe, ‘what it is like’ to be conscious—the consciousness ‘behind’ my awareness of these words and what they mean—is something ‘in itself’ which is not dependent on anything else in the universe.

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Consciousness is not Awareness

The reader may now be ready to object. We appear to have exposed ourselves to accusations of making a series of logical blunders; of committing a category error, by treating consciousness as both the observer and the observed; of committing a kind of reverse epistemic fallacy, by assuming that what cannot be known is coterminous with what really exists; of special pleading, by exempting consciousness from the general principle that all experience is representational; and of committing a logical error of infinite regress: if consciousness can know itself directly what is it that knows the consciousness that knows consciousness, and what is it that knows that (and so on)? All these objections, however, dissolve by making a meaningful distinction between selfless consciousness and selfish awareness.

It has been argued that the most parsimonious explanation for the mysterious presence of my consciousness-in-itself, is that consciousness is fundamental, and that every other thing in the universe is also, in itself, conscious.⁴ This argument, panpsychism, dissolves the mind-brain contradiction at a stroke, by resolving the explanatory gap between consciousness and matter, a gap that no literalist theory can possibly close. Literalist theories (such as reductive physicalism, idealism and subject dualism), which endeavour to account for consciousness in terms of processes which don’t involve consciousness, are as powerless to explain how consciousness can emerge from non-consciousness (the origins of the human mind) as they are to explain how spacetime can emerge from non-spacetime (the origins of the universe).

The panpsychic position is therefore that the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’⁵—how and why organisms have conscious experience—does not exist, in that it is an impossible problem for objectivists/physicalists, and it is not a problem at all for panpsychists. Nevertheless, panpsychism faces what appears to be an insurmountable difficulty of its own, namely the so-called problem of combination (or, in a modified form, the ‘subject-summing problem’), which questions how discrete elements of ‘proto-consciousness’—the consciousness of a subatomic particle or of a fundamental field—can combine to form the ‘unified-consciousness’ of human experience. Panpsychism, says its critics, relocates the foundation of consciousness onto conscious, rather than unconscious, primitives but then fails to explain how their combination grounds human experience. The hard problem of consciousness persists but has not been solved, merely redefined.

A similar problem cripples subjectivist idealism, which has much in common with panpsychism, at least insofar as both claim to explain the mystery of consciousness by appeal to some kind of universal mind, or by rejecting the premise that matter is ontologically primary. Idealism, however, faces a kind of mirror image of panpsychism’s failure to account for the combination of ‘bits’ of consciousness into one, by being unable to explain, given that reality is purely mental, how it gives rise to the seemingly separate, individuated experiences of sentient beings; a kind of ‘problem of decombination’, why one universal Mind appears as all the separate selves we experience around us.

The logical flaws of subjectivist and idealist metaphysics rest on the same misunderstanding of consciousness that cripples objectivist and physicalist accounts, a misunderstanding which panpsychism and idealism both contribute to by conflating consciousness with awareness, with the literal intentions of the self. Consciousness is usually understood by physicalists, idealists and panpsychics either as a literal thing, modular and intermittent, reducible to mentation, or as a literal non-thing, which doesn’t really exist (as in hard eliminativism), or that only exists in God’s literal mind (as in extreme idealism). In both cases, we are speaking of an experience which is literally graspable and therefore amenable to literal argument, but which remains solipsistically self-referential, bound by the limits of the selfish self and subject to all the (many) contradictions that attend such circular accounts.

Serious dissent to the literalist bind tends to take one of two closely related forms. Either consciousness is taken to be not just a series of mental states, but the non-literal ground of all literal experience, specifically mental experience, or the literal dichotomy of subjective ‘consciousness’ here and objective ‘world’ there is revealed as an illusion (created by alienated forgetting, perhaps, or even by language itself). In both cases, a radical distinction is made between the self-mechanism which forms, via awareness, the things and relations of representation, and something else which is unfathomable and which cannot be reduced to the subjects and objects of self, and therefore to philosophical enquiry, a conscious experience which ‘remains’ when the problems of awareness—and, as we shall see, these are as serious as they are diverse—are solved.

At the risk of introducing more questions than answers, we can therefore say at this point that consciousness, insofar as it is non-literal, is necessary, is unmediated and ‘precedes’ the representation of mere awareness. It is the I which is conscious ‘of’ the me of awareness. It is identical to the self, but not reducible to it, and so cannot be treated as an object of theoretical knowledge. Consciousness is the observer of the self-aware self, but this ‘observer’ is not a private thing. Consciousness can be said to be awareness in the sense that awareness is its only possible manifestation, but describing awareness (e.g. neural correlates, personal feelings, the activity of will and so on) does not and cannot capture consciousness as the subject of awareness. The knowledge of awareness depends on the experience of consciousness (as waves depend on the ocean), but not vice versa (the ocean does not depend on the waves).

Such statements are, as we shall see, meaningless to the self. Because rationality is a mode of the self, and therefore an object of awareness, the distinction between awareness and consciousness is completely opaque to rational—and therefore to ordinary philosophical—reasoning. It is therefore reasonable to assume that because consciousness cannot be understood by the mind, sensed by the body, desired by the will or felt by the emotions, that it does not exist. The logical possibility of a thinking, sensing, desiring, feeling entity without consciousness—a zombie⁶—demonstrates that consciousness does not depend on logic, and therefore cannot be rationally defended as anything more than an unnecessary hypothesis. You can remove consciousness from the entire universe, and it continues to function precisely as it does. All observable phenomena operate perfectly without invoking consciousness, making its postulation as superfluous to philosophy as ether turned out to be to physics.

It appears that we cannot demonstrate the existence of consciousness-in-itself, which must either be ignored (in order to focus on the empirical fact), or defined out of existence (as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger do). A more pragmatic middle ground is to assume, as Friedrich Trendelenburg argued,⁷ that there is no reason to assume that what the self’s awareness reflects of the thing-in-itself, including the thing-in-itself of my consciousness, is not accurate, that the spacetime it brings to experience does not still reflect the nature of reality beyond its conceptions, perceptions, volitions and affections. This may be pragmatic, but it is, and must always be, an assumption. Trendelenburg still dooms us to essential solipsism, along with all the other problems that beset literalism.

These problems include a failure to resolve the ‘problem of independent access’ (how we are to verify the world the self presents to us without being able to step outside of its limits); a failure to account for observations of a universe which defy our conceptions of time and space (the non-literal ‘a = b / a ≠ a’ findings of quantum physics); and a failure to resolve the contradiction of time and space apparently causing themselves (i.e. the origin of the universe). These are not trivial, academic problems that weaken the force of arcane scholastic theories—they undermine every theory about reality. The literal (not to mention dismal) fact remains that the literal awareness of the self and all its empirical sensations and abstract arguments—and therefore philosophy itself—can never reach into the thing-in-itself, and therefore into consciousness-in-itself. We appear to be walled off from reality itself, alone and in enemy territory. Forever.

But appearances, as we all know, can be deceptive.

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Metaphors of Transcendence and immanence

Where does this leave us? How can we overcome the contradictions of subjective and objective metaphysics? How can we determine whether consciousness-in-itself really does bridge Trendelenburg’s gap? How can we be sure that non-literal consciousness even exists, when there is no possible (i.e. literal) reason in the universe for it, and when its existence appears to lead us to conclusions that are not just counter-intuitive, but border on insanity? For, if we assume that consciousness is non-literal, that, unlike everything that happens to (or as) me—my thoughts, feelings, actions and sensations—consciousness does not happen at all, that it does not occur in time and space, that it is that which time and space occur to; under this assumption it follows that consciousness-in-itself is not only not alienated from its own inner experience, but, incredibly (incredible to the literal self), it is not separated from the experience of any other thing-in-itself in the universe.

Thus, to assume that consciousness is non-literal is to be left with contradictory and, to the self, completely baffling descriptive statements. We call these ‘a = b’ statements metaphors. We shall look at these below and explore why they are systematically misunderstood, and even feared, but for now let us look at an extreme example of a counterintuitive-bordering-on-insane metaphor that directly and succinctly expresses non-literal consciousness-in-itself, as an experience which cannot be reduced to an isolated thing, or subject to the principle of sufficient reason. This is the statement, first attributed to the Sufi mystic Rumi, in the second book of the Masvani, that ‘I am you’.⁸ In Hinduism we find the same fundamental paradox expressed, in the sixth book of the Chandogya Upanishad, as ‘Tat Tvam Asi’ (or ‘thou art that’).⁹ In Taoism we read in the Chaung Tzu that the ‘hinge of the Tao’ (i.e. the non-literal ground of experience) is ‘a state in which “this” and “that” no longer find their opposites’.¹⁰ The Buddhist Heart Sutra declares, ‘form is boundlessness; boundlessness is form.’¹¹ And in the Christian tradition we find non-literalism expressed in Christ’s injunction, in the Gospel of Thomas, to ‘make the two one.’¹²

Now, clearly, ‘I am you’ (and its equivalents) is not literally the truth. Literally—and therefore, to the Aristotelian awareness of the self, obviously—I cannot be you, just as this cannot be that, form cannot be formlessness, the two cannot be one, and the snake cannot be the apple. Those for whom I am literally you, we correctly call ‘foolish’ or, in extreme cases, ‘insane’. If, however, we assume that the thing-in-itself of my consciousness, here, is not confined to literality, it must in some way be identical with the thing-in-itself of your consciousness, there. If we assume that the thing-in-itself is not confined by phenomenal literality, then I am therefore, in a manner that the representing self can never quite grasp, one with the inner reality of whatever is ‘before’ my consciousness. I don’t just conceptually understand its reality, or perceptively feel its quality; I am, ‘beyond’ my thoughts and feelings, that. Again, this does not mean that space and time (or facticity and causality) are abolished, but that they are brought to existence by the self which the I—consciousness—‘precedes’ and which thereby ‘transcends’ the spacetime which my self presents to me, the fact of the snake and apple, and the fact of the egg and the seed which caused them.

This is why we must place spatio-temporal terms, such as ‘before’, ‘beyond’, ‘precede’ and ‘transcend,’ in scare quotes. If some ‘thing’ is in any way different to space and time, ultimately it cannot be said to ‘precede’ or ‘transcend’ anything, or even be different to it. If the thing-in-itself—what things really are and what I really am—transcends all categories that follow from the facticity and causality of self-generated things, such as cause and effect, subject and object, and time and space, then it follows that it can make no sense to talk about consciousness as a spatio-temporal ‘thing’ in comprehensible spatio-temporal relationship to (‘before’, ‘beyond’, etc.) other things.

Thus, if we are to use language at all, we must use it metaphorically to describe consciousness-in-itself ‘in here’, and to ‘reach across’ (metaphor comes from the Greek μεταφέρω, ‘to carry across’) to things-in-themselves ‘out there’ that consciousness reveals to us. Such metaphor—again, under the assumption of non-literality—is neither fantastic imagination, although it would necessarily be taken as such by objectivist selves, nor literally, factually true, although it would necessarily be taken as such by subjectivist selves.

Just as we use metaphors of transcendence, such as ‘I am you’, to express the non-dualist nature of consciousness-in-itself, so we use metaphors of immanence, such as ‘Juliet is the sun,’ to express the non-dualist nature of the thing-in-itself which lies ‘before’ consciousness. Where metaphors of transcendence collapse the framework of separation (observer versus observed) that ordinary language assumes, metaphors of immanence preserve subject-object categories, but fuse them to express that ‘within’ the thing-in-itself which cannot appear literally to the self, but only non-literally to consciousness, an experience which is then registered in the self as [a certain] quality, or as what ‘it is like’ to be that thing. (We can therefore refer to both types of metaphor as metaphors of essence)

To perceive—or, to modify and adapt a little-used term from psychology to our theme, apperceive—the transcendent reality or immanent quality of the thing-in-itself therefore culminates, expressively, in metaphor, or, more broadly, in non-literal expression. Thus, if we hope to solve Thomas Nagel’s famous puzzle, ‘what it is like to be a bat’,¹³ we cannot turn to literalist, objective science, nor to equally literalist subjective art, but to non-literalist, panjective forms of expression (either scientific or artistic)—metaphors of essence that collapse the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity. Under the assumption of non-literality, the thing-in-itself of consciousness experiences the interiority of a bat, and then seeks to express that interiority in a metaphor which self can only ever partially or literally grasp.

We must pause here to make a more careful distinction between the paradoxes of conscious, non-literal experience and the mere contradictions of the subjective imagination. Non-literal metaphor which comes from experience is an entirely different order of experience to that which comes from imagination, however deeply believed or strongly felt. When Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge, he wasn’t referring to the mind’s ability to idly make things up, but to an apperceptive mode of apprehension that precedes what we call knowledge and which has to express itself non-literally, or ‘imaginatively’. The groundless inventiveness that often goes by the name ‘imagination’, which at best is mere fancy¹⁴ and at worst outright insanity, is essentially a self-referential experience of the self, while grounded imagination reaches beyond itself to an actually existing mystery. This is why (under the assumption of non-literality) the paradoxes of great art, even at their strangest, have the power to move us in a manner that merely bizarre or contradictory ravings do not. It is also why great scientists, those rare few capable of grasping the implications of non-literal reality, always possess a profound imagination that expresses itself in their non-scientific conversation, character and style.

For although the non-locality of consciousness is opaque to literalist science, it is consonant with non-literal science, manifest in the extraordinary discoveries of quantum mechanics. It is not necessary to be a quantum physicist to grasp the basic philosophical implications of the entirely non-Aristotelian logic of non-locality revealed in the double-slit experiment, which demonstrates that, at the limits of observation, literalist identity-logic collapses; wave and particle are indistinguishable (a = b) yet not self-identical (a ≠ a). Indeed it is a scandal that literalist science and philosophy, after making this discovery in the first half of the twentieth century, proceeded to relegate its ontological implications to the technicalities of particle physics, as if of no real significance, and that non-specialist enquiry into the implications of what had been discovered to be an essentially paradoxical reality can be automatically conflated with lunacy (Quantum mechanics ∴ God / Non-locality ∴ consciousness causes reality, etc., etc.); but that is what happened.

It should be noted however that there is more to the resistance of practical, classical (and especially popular) science to the implications of quantum physics than just an inability of literal thought to comprehend paradox (and to then conflate such comprehension with stupidity and insanity); for classical, non-paradoxical science is also grounded in metaphorical constructs and symbolic relationships. Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton both self-consciously presented their theories as non-literal analogies. Over time, the metaphorical element was forgotten or dropped and we came to unthinkingly, unconsciously, believe that the universe is literally a machine, that causality literally exists in the world as a discoverable fact, and that the objects of the world are literally separate from the subject which experiences them; beliefs which collapse at the limits of literalism.¹⁵

Thus science itself is grounded in metaphor, as all human language is. In the same way, we no longer think about the qualities of ‘honey’ or the ‘moon’ when we go on ‘honeymoon’—the word now simply and literally means a holiday after marriage—so our concepts have lost their qualitative referents and ossified into literality. The word ‘spirit,’ for example, means either ‘soul’ or (less commonly) ‘breath’ in modern thought, but originally expressed no such distinction; breath had soul and soul had breath, a paradox that was not represented in speech, but embodied in it.¹⁶ The word ‘spirit’, like the words ‘fire’, ‘heart’ and ‘understand’, like all language, expressed an actually existing fusion of phenomenal representation and noumenal quality in the same way as the thing-in-itself that the word referred to did.

We depend on metaphor to understand the paradox of reality and, consequently, we celebrate those who can make sense of reality through [ap]perceptive metaphor. One reason our culture is at such a loss to understand itself is not just that it possesses so few metaphors to do so, but also, as we shall see, it has stripped us of our ability to experience paradox and therefore experience reality metaphorically. When truthful metaphors appear they are misunderstood, ignored, feared or merely enjoyed, as ‘art’ or as ‘entertainment’, and those who give new metaphors to the world are ignored until they are safely dead. The idea that those who can make metaphors—great writers and artists—have more to say to us than scientists is a quaint, peripheral fancy, not to be taken seriously.

Part Two of this series will appear next week.

In the meantime, feel free to write to me with criticisms of this article or any other in the series. Before technical expertise (specialists in the fields of biology, physics and philosophy), I write under factual correction.

1. William Blake. (2004). Milton. In A. Ostriker (Ed.), The complete poems (Penguin Classics). Penguin Books. (Original work published c. 1804–1811).

2. Kant, I. (1998). Critique of Pure Reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1781/1787).

3. Or ‘intersubjective’.

4. Eddington, A. S. (1928). The Nature of the Physical World. J. M. Dent & Sons.

5. Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In search of a fundamental theory. Oxford University Press.

6. Kirk, R. (1974). Sentience and Behaviour. Mind, 83(329), 43–60.

7. Beiser, F. C. (2014). The Genesis of Neo-Kantianism, 1796–1880. Oxford University Press.

8. Rūmī, J. al-D M. (2007). The Masnavi: Book two (J. Mojaddedi, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work composed 13th century).

9. Olivelle, P. (Trans.). (1996). Upaniṣads. Penguin Books. (Original work composed c. 800–600 BCE).

10. Chuang Tzu. (1968). The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (B. Watson, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work ca. 4th century BCE).

11. Tanahashi, K. (2014). The Heart Sutra: A comprehensive guide to the classic of Mahayana Buddhism. Shambhala Publications.

12. Meyer, M. (Ed.). (2007). The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The international edition. HarperOne.

13. Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a Bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.

14. Coleridge, S. T. (1817/1983). Biographia Literaria: Or, biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions (J. Engell & W. J. Bate, Eds.). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1817).

15. Turbayne, C. M. (1962). The Myth of Metaphor. Yale University Press.

16. Barfield, O. (1973). Poetic Diction: A study in Meaning (3rd ed.). Wesleyan University Press.