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.

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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.

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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.