The Reality of Consciousness

You hold a baseball in your hand. You see and feel the baseball in your hand. You are quite certain that the ball is real, and yet, you cannot be absolutely certain because the ball might be an hallucination. If so, then the ball cannot be real. Yet, whether the ball should be real or an illusion, you can be certain that you possess the sensations of seeing and feeling the ball. Physical objects can be real or illusory, but in either case, one's sensations of those objects must be real.

You have an operation on your brain. The doctors rig a mirror so that you can stay awake and observe the operation. You observe your own brain, but it is just a physical object like a baseball which may be real or an illusion. Yet, whether it is real or an illusion, you can be certain that you are having the sensations of observing your brain, real or illusory. 

Something must be producing these sensations. The only possible answer is that your consciousness must be producing these sensations. Furthermore, this consciousness must be outside of your brain because the sensations of your mind has to be real even though your brain may be an illusion. Thus, an argument can be made that the only existence of which one can be absolutely certain that it is real is a consciousness separate from the brain. 

If your brain were an illusion, it certainly could not be producing the sensations of it that you see. In other words, should your vision of your brain during your operation be an hallucination, you cannot be certain that your real physical brain is producing the hallucination since it also may be nothing but an illusion. The point is that it is always the physical that can be an illusion; never the subjective because something produces the undeniable sensations whether they are illusory or real, and that something has to be subjective.

One may object that their physical brain produces their sensations, but one can never be certain that one's physical brain is real because it, like any other physical object, could be an illusion. But one conclusion has to be absolutely certain, and that is that while an illusion itself will be unreal, the undeniable sensations of it must register on something because the sensations themselves can only be unavoidable, actual experiences. This something which registers undeniable sensations can only be a consciousness separate from brain activity.

A Comparison of Adam and Jesus

In Luke 3:38, the Bible clearly states that Adam "was the son of God." In Mark 14:61-62 and in John 10:36, Jesus openly declared Himself to be the "Son of God." What were the similarities and differences between these two men as being the sons of God? Both men came into the world being absolutely pure and innocent. Adam had a compassionate and self-sacrificial love for his wife Eve. Jesus had a compassionate and self-sacrificial love for all of mankind whom He came to save from their sins. John 3:16. God took a rib from Adam's side to create his wife. Genesis 2:21-22. A Roman soldier pierced Jesus' side with a spear as He hung on the cross from which blood and water flowed to purchase His Bride, the Church. I John 5:5-6; Acts 20:28.

Despite these similarities, striking differences also exist between these two men. Adam was created by God, and whatever God creates has to be less than God because it must exist outside of God as does the angels who are also called the sons of God. Job 38:7. However, Jesus has always existed as God. John 1:1, 14. Also, Jesus was born of a seed of God miraculously implanted into the womb of a virgin which made Him free from original sin. Luke 1:33-34; Matthew 1:20-23. This means Jesus directly inherited the Being of God Himself, and since God is Infinite, then Jesus had to be both God and man at the same time. Philippians 2:5-8. We finite Christians cannot understand this doctrine, but we accept it by faith. Adam, being less than God, was subject to falling into sin just as Lucifer did although he also was a son of God. Ezekiel 28:15. But Jesus could not sin because God cannot be tempted with evil. James 1:13. God is Holy, and so sin can have no effect on Him whatsoever. Although Luke 4:2 states that Jesus was "tempted of the devil," this simply means that the devil sought to destroy the Holiness of God by destroying Jesus the man. The devil knew that if he could ruin Jesus by causing Him to sin, then the devil could also destroy God's Holiness since the manhood of Jesus and the Being of His Father were wholly one. John 10:30.

The greatest and most awesome miracle that resulted from the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is that we believers can also be sons of God as equally accepted by the Father as He accepts His own Son. John 17:20-26; Galatians 4:4-7; I John 3:1-2.

Granny's Place poetry in prose

Granny wiggled a little as she settled her hefty body into her over padded easy chair. Granny enjoyed her comfort and rest as she read her hand-worn Bible, and her paperback romance novels stacked in jumbled piles around her chair. At times, she delighted in brief visits from her rowdy grandchildren, playing and throwing toys, running through the cluttered house, generally making a nuisance of themselves, and finally getting on Granny's nerves. When Granny had had enough, she called their parents and told them to come and take her grandchildren home. Yet, while they were there, she managed to find some time to gather each one to her ample lap, lay their pretty heads against her faded granny gown, fold her fleshy arms around their tender bodies with a gentle hug, whisper sweet love notes to their tiny ears, and allow love to bloom in that plush easy chair like the red roses in Granny's front yard.

The Boy Fisherman

 The small boy swung his line and hook, and dropped it into the placid pond, spreading tiny ripples over its velvet surface. His gaunt face looked up from under his torn straw hat at the wide water before him crowded all around with a thick growth of verdant trees and underbrush. Dragonflies flitted over the green water and only the soft croaking of unseen frogs broke the silence. The solitude of this peaceful scene made the boy feel as if he had entered a piece of paradise, that nothing could ever go wrong in the world again.

The ragged boy pulled the end of his line up just enough to make the line taut. He used no cork on his line. He caught fish by feeling with his skinny fingers. He could detect the slightest jerk on his line, and when he did; he snapped the end of his cane pole up just enough to set the hook in the fishes' mouth. Then, he just pulled the flopping fish out of the water and swung it to his thin hands. He collected his fish by transferring them to another line in the water tied to a wooden stake he had pushed into the moist, black earth.

Toward noon, the smiling boy pulled his long, shiny string of fish from the water, threw them over his bony shoulder, and ambled along a narrow trail toward home. He had caught mostly half pound sun perch and an occasional catfish.

The dark trail followed the curve of the pond for a stretch, and as the boy trod along; he happened to pass a splendid fisherman equipped with an expensive rod and reel and a fancy, red tackle box. The boy could not help but notice that this opulent fisherman had caught no fish.

"That's quite a string of fish you got there boy," exclaimed the well-dressed, portly fisherman. He grinned but the boy could see the envy in his eyes.

"You just have to know where to fish and what bait to use," the boy retorted.

A flash of anger crossed the fancy fisherman's face, but he did not respond. He simply turned his empty gaze back toward his line in the water.

With his back a little straighter and his head held a little higher, the boy quickened his step along the leaf-strewn path as it turned from the plentiful pond toward his cozy home. Only he and his Godly mother were left of their family in their small house by a winding country road. Some nights, he and his weary, but prayerful, mother had gone to bed without supper; but tonight, this scruffy boy would provide a lavish feast of fried fish, and Ma would also cook some French fries and hush puppies.

On Dread and Freedom

Isaiah 8:13  Genesis 28:17  Daniel 9:4

Dread is not exactly the same as fear. Fear means to be afraid of something exact such as death or a dangerous person or of God as a person. Dread is a kind of nameless fear, a sickening feeling about the future. Existential philosophers call this feeling "angst" or "nausea."

Dread consists not so much in a fear of the future as it does of being forced to take responsibility for the decisions that one cannot avoid. In this way, dread directly connects to freedom. This inner or spiritual freedom is not the same as political freedom although political freedom extends from it. This freedom constitutes the very intellectual and spiritual being of the individual. Thomas Jefferson referred to this freedom when he wrote "that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness..." "Unalienable" means a freedom that cannot be separated from our inner being. In a sense, we are freedom itself. The existential philosophers contend that we are condemned to be free. By this, they mean we cannot avoid being free; and that freedom can be either a blessing or a curse depending on the choices we make. For this reason, the existentialists despise those who attempt to avoid making decisions. They consider them to be cowards in life and contend that they live in a state of "bad faith." The existentialists admire those who resolutely make decisions and manfully take responsibility for them.

Yet, as Shakespeare wrote, "Conscience makes cowards of us all." We all anguish over choices we have to make, especially the very important ones. Questions arise in our minds. What if I make the wrong choice? Will I regret my choice? Can I bear the responsibility for the choice I make, especially if it was a bad one? This is dread.

The existentialists maintain that our very being becomes determined or fixed by the choices we make. Thus, the person who chooses to do evil becomes an evil person; and the person who chooses to do good becomes a good person.

However, the Bible teaches that to choose to be good is not enough to save us from evil. The Bible teaches us that when God confronts us, He constrains us to make a choice. God forces us to see ourselves as a condemned sinner; that is, as a person who cannot avoid making wrong choices at times; bad choices for which we must take the responsibility and bear the punishment. Jacob, in Genesis 28:17, and Daniel, in Daniel 9:4, faced this dread when confronted by the presence of God; and they made the right choices to repent of their sins and serve the Lord.

Whenever a sinner reads or hears the gospel, he or she becomes confronted with God in human form; and the Holy Spirit constrains that person to make a choice either to submit humbly to Christ as Savior or to deny Him. When a convicted sinner makes the right choice to repent of their sins and put their faith in Jesus as their Savior, then Jesus takes away their dread because He has already taken the responsibility and the punishment for their sins by His suffering and death on the cross in their place. In place of their dread, Christ gives them peace. Matthew 11:28-30; John 14:27; John 16:33; Isaiah 8:13.

When the new believer receives the free gift of peace, forgiveness, and the everlasting life of Christ in his heart, then his dread departs because he knows he is forever safe no matter what future decisions he may make, good or bad. But when Christ recreates the heart of the new believer, he becomes so grateful and loves Christ so much for his salvation that he desires only to please his Lord; and as a result, he endeavors to make only good choices for the rest of his time on earth.   

The Truth about Reality

What is that one main characteristic that distinguishes life from nonlife? What is the main difference between life and nonlife? The answer has to be consciousness. All of life has some form and level of consciousness, and all of nonlife has no consciousness whatsoever.

Only at such a time as when consciousness separates itself from nonconsciousness can reality be established. Consciousness establishes reality by reflecting upon itself as separated from nonconsciousness, and upon nonconsciousness as composed of separated things. Consciousness effects this separation by its use of the idea of nothing. First, consciousness recognizes that it is something in itself and not anything else. Second, consciousness recognizes each individual thing as not being anything else.

If everything were nonconscious, then all of the recognized separation caused by consciousness would be impossible. Such a nonconscious everything would be like Parmenides homogeneous soup. Parmenides thought that this homogeneous soup was the ultimate reality, and that consciousness of everything was but an illusion. Actually, the opposite is true. Consciousness establishes reality, and the homogeneous soup is not real. It cannot be real because it equals an absolute nothingness. The nothingness is absolute because it cannot be separated from the somethingness. Both something and nothing must be recognized by consciousness before reality can be established.

If ever our universe were a nonconscious one, then absolute nothingness would prevail and reality could not exist. But reality has always existed because there has to be an Infinite Consciousness who has established an Infinite Reality.

Thoughts on Quantum Mechanics

I am not a physicist but I do have certain common sense ideas ( at least to me) that seem to me to be good answers about questions about reality. I present them here for what they are worth.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle reveals the fact that if a sub-atomic particle's position is measured, then one cannot measure its speed; and if one measures its speed, one cannot measure its position. The essence of this Principle means that an unobserved sub-atomic particle has no position. It is a wavefunction. On the other hand, if a sub-atomic particle has an observed position, then its wavefunction collapses into a material particle. Many physicists believe that this Principle only applies to the sub-atomic world. They do not believe that it applies to the macro-world where we can feel the solidity of objects and can observe their positions.

But to a certain extent, this Principle also applies to the macro-world. For example, when a baseball pitcher throws a baseball to his catcher, then while it is in flight, its position cannot be known because it is constantly moving. Only when it is caught by the catcher and comes to rest does it gain position. One may object that since we can see the baseball in flight, we can know its position, but this is not correct. The reason is that the moment we say that the ball has a certain position, it has already moved to its next position, and so forth until it reaches the catcher's mitt. Only when it stops in the catcher's mitt can we say, with certainty, that it has position. While the ball is in flight, we cannot see its position. We can only see a moving baseball. One may object that the Principle does not apply because the baseball does not become a wavefunction. But that only happens because the baseball moves to slowly to become a wavefunction. If the pitcher could throw the ball at the speed of light, then one would no longer see a baseball. One would only see a burst of light; that is, a wavefunction.

This means that wavefunctions happen when positions are not known, and positions are only known when observations collapse wavefunctions. The Uncertainty Principle causes the mind to be critical to the reality of the world.

When our minds observe the world, we observe both wavefunctions and material objects made of particles. When we see sunlight, we observe a wavefunction. But Einstein discovered that when one does a certain experiment, one finds that sunlight, at the sub-atomic level, comes in discrete energy packets called photons. This means that wavefunctions and material or energetic objects become real only by observation; that is, by the workings of consciousness.

Reality must be a duality of mind and matter, including wavefunctions. But what happens when mind is removed from duality? In other words, what exists when there is a nonconsciousness of the world? The only possible answer is that nothing exists. No positions or wavefunctions of reality can be experienced. This can only mean that space and time also cannot exist. In fact, nothingness itself cannot exist because it too can only be real as an idea in the mind. In a nonconscious world, only absolute nonexistence would (non)exist.

One cannot possibly imagine such a condition. But one can try. In the first place, since time and space cannot exist, then all of non-reality must collapse into a superposition state of existence and nonexistence. Since there could be no points in space, this superposition state would be nowhere and at no time. A superposition state is one in which sub-atomic particles both exist and nonexist at the same time, but the unreal superposition state could be nowhere and at no time. Such an unreal condition could be called a singularity.

But when one adds Consciousness to this singularity, then the wavefunction is created and one gets a burst of light. Genesis 1:3. With the burst of light, Mind overcomes the nonexistent superposition, and something becomes distinguished from nothing. Genesis 1:4-5. Then, Mind slows light until it can be collapsed into material particles that can coalesce into material objects. Genesis 1:6-10. After this, Mind can combine matter and energy in very complex ways in order to create life. Genesis 1:11-27.

Hebrews 11:3. The first half of this verse seems to indicate that God put order into His universe by His application of information when He created it. The second half of this verse seems to indicate that God created the universe by applying His Consciousness to the task of overcoming the superposition of the singularity.