Genesis by Experience, Part 5

Genesis by Experience, Part 4 was my most recent post in this series in which I am trying to fashion a metaphysics I call genesis by experience, or GBE. In it, there is a God, and our own conscious minds are an echo or mirror image of God's consciousness. Just as our conscious acts of observation are capable of conferring factual coherence on quantum indeterminacy in our world, God's watching of the world confers grand coherence on the cosmos as a whole. An upshot of that is the reliability of worldly causality. In fact, the core principle of GBE is that causality is consciousness conferring coherence ... upon the cosmos, or upon any part thereof.

But GBE purports to be a metaphysics, not just an account of consciousness, causality, and coherence. A metaphysics is an account of existence per se. In order to extend what I have already said into a full-fledged account of existence, all I need to do is state an auxiliary principle that goes along with the core principle of GBE. The auxiliary principle is this: to exist is to be caused.

By that I mean that existence comes from being caused. If you exist, it is because you are caused.

If you exist, then it is because some consciousness has conferred coherence upon the stuff that you are made of, and has done so in such a way that you wind up having the particular qualities, properties, and characteristics by which you are accordingly are going to be able to be recognized as you by ... uh, well, recognized by any conscious mind!


You might think, if you disagree with me about the role of God in all this, that the causality that directly or indirectly puts your "stuff" together in a way that makes you and only you is something that happens in a sort of consciousness vacuum, such that your ineffable recognizability to other conscious minds, and to your own, arises only after the fact of your initial assembly at the hands of forces and laws of nature.

I reject that point of view — in part, because it makes it hard, if not impossible, to give an account of your existence-qua-existence. On the other hand, if existence is predicated on consciousness — God's consciousness, ultimately — then the problem solves itself. You exist, basically, because God sees you. As long as God sees you, you will always exist. And God has never not seen you. That is what the immortal soul is all about.


GBE is dualistic, as I said in the previous post, in that it finds mind and matter to be distinct. So it is fair to ask, does mind exist? If matter exists by virtue of being "seen" by mind, can the same be said of mind itself?

On this point I must admit to being a bit agnostic. On the one hand, we know that our conscious minds seem to be blind to any direct, observational awareness of those of other people. There is no way, except by analogy with my own introspection, for me to be certain that you are conscious. In fact, when each of us puts our own conscious mind under a powerful enough logical microscope, it seems to reveal to us that even our own consciousness may be but an illusion.

If I can't observe consciousness, can consciousness be said to exist? That seems to be the question.

On the other hand, perhaps all that is going on here is a limitation that applies to human consciousnesses, but not to divine consciousness. Perhaps God can "see" our conscious minds perfectly well ... and, accordingly, confer existence on them by way of imposing coherence on whatever "stuff" our conscious minds are made of. That's another way of looking at the situation. I don't know which one is right.


At any rate, now that I have failed to resolve the riddle of whether the thing which has the power to confer existence — this "thing" called consciousness — itself exists, I'd like to move on to another topic that interests me. It is the topic of intentionality.

For it seems to me that intentionality ranks with consciousness as a salient characteristic of mind. Minds not only have subjective experience, assuming they are conscious; they also have goals, intentions, desires, and the like. They try to arrange for certain outcomes to occur, and accordingly to suppress other possible outcomes.

In fact, it could be argued that God intentionally imposes coherence upon the world, thereby making for its reliably observable causal relationships, because he sees coherence as being his originative goal for the world. If there is to be a cosmos and not a chaos, it will be because God intentionally chooses that outcome instead of the other, and arranges for it to happen.

Out of that originative coherence, one could argue, emerges all the other facts about the world which God intends to see emerge — including the eventual evolution of beings called humans that themselves have conscious minds and can be said to be made in God's "image." Again, intent is meshed with consciousness: God's sees the world he intends to make. Intentionality and consciousness are two sides of the same mental coin.