Intellect, Soul, and Emergent Consciousness

The stages of emanation in Plotinus' thought go like this:

- The One. This is what Paul Tillich calls the "ground of being," or Substance if you ask Spinoza. The One (or the Good) precedes everything else, and (in a way) contains everything else. From it, all of reality and matter are formed in various stages of emanation, starting with:

- Intellect. Intellect contemplates--that's what it does, what the nature of Intellect is. It contemplates the One, and from this contemplation are produced the Forms. These Forms can be thought of as the ideas behind everything we see. Plato thought of the Forms as being the Ideal Man, Ideal Horse, etc. (because men and horses belong to their own classes--so the Ideal is what each class follows). In Spinoza, the Forms had evolved into modes and attributes, which included not only Ideals, but also what he called the laws of motion and rest.

- Soul. Soul follows Intellect. Just as the nature of Intellect is contemplation, the nature of Soul is desire; and just as Intellect contemplates the One, Soul desires the Intellect (and thereby the Forms). By this desire, experiential reality is created. In a way, the universe is created both from the outside in and from the inside out, at the same time. Intellect and Spirit are two sides of the One; contemplation and desire are two methods of creation; the objective and the subjective are two sides of the same reality.

***

A couple thousand years later, we get Paola Zizzi's "Emergent Consciousness" theory (also called the "Big Wow" theory). In it, she talks about the idea that the early universe may have attained consciousness of a sort similar to what we humans experience.

The math behind the theory is beyond me, but the basic idea is this:

The early universe was composed of (or had in it) a certain amount of "quantum gravity registers." As far as I can tell, these quantum gravity registers are bits of self-replicating information packets (like zeroes and ones). They also function under the holographic principle, where every bit contains all of the information all the bits together contain.

The magic number of quantum gravity registers in this early universe (10^9) is the same number of tubulins in the human brain. Like quantum gravity registers, tubulins (which make up the cell walls of our neurons) also function both holographically and binarily.

Based on some other theories of consciousness, Zizzi implies that this magic number (n = 10^9) is what is needed for collapse from a quantum state into classical consciousness. She also implies that this early consciousness is the source of the laws of nature, and the reason consciousness as we experience it was able to arise.

The conscious universe self-organized, producing the logical structure we know in physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Through the appearance of this early consciousness, consciousness as a necessary occurrence was "programmed" in a way into the nature of reality: because of the "conscious event" in the early universe, it became inevitable that a similar type of consciousness would eventually evolve.

***

This is where I start playing:

It's easy to see how Intellect and emergent consciousness could be thought of as the same thing. If something like the One produced the Big Bang (or perhaps was the Big Bang), then Intellect/emergent consciousness followed, producing the Forms (the laws of nature). The collapse of the quantum universe into classical matter/energy could be thought of as Soul at work, eventually producing the universe that we know.

In her paper, Zizzi mentions Democritus, Spinoza, Liebniz, and Whitehead, all of whom were affected in one way or another by neoplatonic thought (which Plotinus founded). It's fascinating and exciting and, well, just plain wonderful that a two-thousand-year-old idea could make its way into today's scientific frontier.

Stoic vs. Spinozan Pantheism

Stoicism is a religious philosophy that concentrates more on how to live your life than on a metaphysical system. However, it does have a metaphysical system, just not one as deeply developed as, say, Plato's.

In the Stoic view, the Greek concept of Logos (divine Reason) is identical with what we think of as the laws of nature. We can puzzle out these laws through the use of our own reason; therefore Reason must be the creator of (or, in the Stoic view, identical with) natural laws.

Because God was identified with the course of nature, the "good life" was one lived in accordance with nature. You didn't try to accumulate more than you needed for a healthy life, nor did you try to prolong your life beyond its natural limits. In fact, good and evil could never happen to you, as all externals were considered valueless. The only good or evil thing was how the Stoic behaved, and how s/he accepted life.

What that means is that, if someone injures or insults me, that's neither good nor evil, because it's external to me. What would be evil is if I fought back through injury or insult in turn--but not necessarily because it would be wrong to injure or insult another person. I would be doing wrong by letting my emotions override my reason; that's the true evil in the human world.

Reason was the driving force behind the Stoic understanding of right and wrong. The Stoic determined right and wrong based on reality (i.e., nature), but also had to filter ideas about nature through reason, rather than emotion. Thus the Stoic would find that, since death is natural, death is not bad--but being overcome with sorrow or fear is. The passions (strong emotions that could cloud judgment, such as anger or lust) were not to be trusted; there were appropriate emotions, such as joy, doubt, or hope. The difference between the two (passions vs. appropriate feelings) is that the passions are not reasonable, whereas appropriate emotion comes out of reasoned thought.

Spinoza similarly identified the laws of nature with divine necessity. Coming out of a Jewish background, he saw the Biblical accounts of God's relationship with Israel as the natural actions of a divine will in connection with a people who understood God in a specific way.

Spinoza, like the Stoics, was a determinist. He may have been an even harder determinist than the original Stoics, since they believed that you were free in your own actions (but you could not affect the actions of others). Spinoza believed that happiness only came to the person who understood that his/her actions were determined by other factors. The greatest good was in understanding God/nature, understanding that events did not happen in a vacuum or by pure chance, and that even your own feelings/thoughts were affected (limited) by things out of human control.

So Spinoza's concept of the "good life" was very similar to the Stoic one, though with some differences.

First, the Stoics allowed for a limited free will--but only those who were truly wise (in the Stoic sense of the morality of reason) had free will. Freedom only came with the mastery of the passions and the proper use of reason. Even then, the only thing you had control of was your own physical and emotional actions and reactions in the world.

Spinoza, on the other hand, declared that only God had free will. Only God was unlimited by externals; everything a human does is limited by the things and events around him/her, so the human can never have true free will. Because God is the only thing which exists, God cannot be affected by something external; therefore, God's actions are truly free.

Both the Stoics and Spinoza did have very similar concepts of the path to happiness. They both believed that the acceptance of life and the realization of the value-neutrality of externals led to inner peace. For both, this acceptance depended on true knowledge of nature, natural law, and the place we have in it.

All of this is quite similar to the Buddhist doctrine of nonattachment. Unlike Buddhism, though, neither Spinoza nor the Stoics acknowledged much in the way of after-death consequences (such as transmigration of souls) of behavior in this life.