Cognizant Gravitation Only

||  Introduction | Fluid Motion As Evidence Of Biphasic Perception | What Creates Forms And Maintains Their Coherent Continuity? | What About Time? | Do Gravitational Fields Play An Essential Part In The Structuring of Forms? | Gravitation | The Development Of This Theory In The Paradox of Thinking Our Own Thoughts | Some Ramifications Of This Novel Theory | Summary ||

Prologue

To introduce you to the theory that I call Cognizant Gravitation Only, I have chosen to write this essay in the style of a biography of how the theory came to be, rather than diving into the music and dancing of the theory, those two being a closer to truth depiction than that out-of-date and misapplied phrase “nuts and bolts.” This theory is not just about our being alive and conscious, it is about our being — how we come to be and why we dance to a celestial music that is deeply grounded in our very being as gravitation, which is the music that is produced as you and I, and this world. You might already be feeling that this is going to be very different from the other 350+ theories of ‘consciousness’ so far proposed, to which I agree. In fact, it’s been pointed out to me that this is so different from any of the other theories, and our received conceptual ideas, that it is alien to our current way of seeing the world. Yes, alien — not indigenous to the current world view. So this is a biography of a consciousness theory with an alien view.

I am sure that you have heard the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness” which was coined by David Chalmers in a 1994 talk given at The Science of Consciousness conference held in Tucson, Arizona. The hard problem is explaining why we have phenomenal consciousness, or subjective experience. Not every cognitive scientist, and others concerned to find a theory of consciousness, accept that there is a hard problem, but whether or not they accept it, none of them have overcome the problem. I do not consider ignoring the problem to have overcome it. Chalmers, however, was not the first person to bring the issue to the fore. There was, for example, the Irish physicist, John Tyndall, who described it in detail in the 19^th Century. It was in 1868, in an essay titled “Scientific Materialism,” that he brought the problem of why we have subjective experiences and are conscious of our world, each other, and ourselves, to our attention:

“… the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought, and a definite molecular action in the brain, occur simultaneously; we do not possess the intellectual organ, nor apparently any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass, by a process of reasoning, from the one to the other. They appear together, but we do not know why. Were our minds and senses so expanded, strengthened, and illuminated, as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges, if such there be ; and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem, 'How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness?' The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable. Let the consciousness of love, for example, be associated with a right-handed spiral motion of the molecules of the brain, and the consciousness of hate with a left-handed spiral motion. We should then know, when we love, that the motion is in one direction, and, when we hate, that the motion is in the other; but the 'WHY?' would remain as unanswerable as before."

This essay is not my answer to the problem, it is the path of discovery that I took that finally brought me to the solution, and along that path there were many signs indeed. This is my introduction to the alien view.