8 posts tagged “conscious sensations”
I have been following this new line of treatment for depression using electrodes to stimulate certain regions of the brain with much interest. The results of the first trial experiments are starting to be published. Popular Science Magazine this month has an up close and personal report on this entitled "Happiness is a Warm Electrode" which describes the result for a severely depressed patient named Diane Hire.
On the operating table this happens:
At his (the doctor's) signal two volts of electricity .. radiate outward from the tip a few millimeters in every direction. ... Hire feels warm at first, a bit flushed.
And then it happens. The room looks brighter to her. The faces, the big circular lights overhead, the cieling, they all seem clearer. Malone asks her how she feels. "I'm really happy" she replies, clearly surprised. "I feel like I could get up and do all sorts of things." But even more telling than her words is the look on her face. For the first time in 20 years, with a halo bolted to her head and two freshly drilled holes in her skull, Hire smiles.
This trail is taking place at Cleveland Clinic in collaboration with Brown University. Others are occurring at Emery University and the University of Toronto. All told perhaps 50 patients are enrolled.
This article also reports:
Scientists are just starting to identify a class of what they call vulnerability genes. In essence they come in two forms: lucky and unlucky. "If you have one version, you are relatively resilient in the face of stress.," says Brown University Psychiatrist Ben Greenburg, who is collaborating with the Cleveland Clinic group. "But if you have another, the more severe the stress you have in your life, the more likely you are to develop depression."
Recent studies show that pills (anti-depressants) work only 50 percent of the time.
Time is dangerous in depression, with suicide --- the eleventh leading cause of death in the U.S. --- claiming more than 32,400 lives every year.
Depression started controlling Hire's life in her early 30's. At 36, after 12 years of service in the Navy, she was medically discharged because of the disease. She went back to school to become a physical therapist. She worked and worked, trying to ignore her growing unease and inability to relate to family and friends, let alone strangers.... In 1999 she stopped working for good. She started semi-regular courses of ECT. The treatment failed to improve her mood and affected her short term memory, a common side effect. ... By 2006 Hire rarely left her sofa, spent most days in sweatpants, and watched television from morning to night. It took her weeks to work up the motivation to clean the house. ... "It was a really black, dismal existence." Hire recalls. "I just couldn't function."
The day after the electrodes are put in testing takes place.
Baker turns the voltage on and off as the machine (fMRI) scans her brain. For 30 seconds, she's happy. Then Baker turns off the electrodes. Hire's smile fades, and the machine maps how her brain reacts. Another 30 seconds pass, and the happiness returns. Cowan later marvels at the effect of the stimulation on Hire and other depression patients, "They're always laughing, and I'm wondering how can you be laughing like this so soon after surgery?"
The results of these limited tests are impressive so far. In 2005 the Toronto group found that four our of six patients showed significant improvements. ... The Cleveland Brown collaboration reports improvements in 70 percent of their patients, half of who are in complete remission.
Medtronic, a company in Minneapolis that manufacturers the hardware for DBS, is working with the Food and Drug Administration to plan the largest study yet of depression and DBS - a 100 patient trial.
Six months after the operation:
She (Hire) is energetic. She shakes my hand firmly and looks me straight in the eye --- something she says she simply wouldn't have been able to do before. She laughs often. She now walks 50 miles a week, talks to her family constantly, chats with strangers in the post office. And her smile is a regular, everyday thing, not a freakish, fleeting appearance in a crowded operating room.
The location of the electrodes is probably important for the success of this operation. A German Study put it in the Nucleus Accumbens. The wikipdia article mentions Brodman area 25 which is close to the Nucleus Accumbens.
Despite being over 10 years old now this book by a leading researcher in the field gives some good information on the fear generating system of the brain.
The first two chapters review the various psychological movements of the 20th century with the third chapter narrowing that down to how they dealt with emotion. By the mid 1980's (page 53) the experimental evidence was in showing that affective (emotional) reactions could take place in the absence of conscious awareness. The key figure was Robert Zajonc who first demonstrated the phenomena known as the exposure effect in which emotionally neutral things one has previously seen are preferred over novel objects. After this discovery, in another experiment, he presented pictures to people so fast that they had no conscious recollection of what they saw yet they still exhibited this exposure effect. Today we call this subliminal suggestion. The main point here is that some unconscious brain mechanism is a work here and this is what the author, Joseph LeDoux investigated from a neuroscience perspective (this exposure effect is also the main reason why we must endure advertising).
Zajonc took this further. By subliminally presenting an emotionally charged picture (a smiling or frowning face) just before a normally presented emotionally neutral picture and doing this for a whole set of pictures the test subjects had a tendency to later either like or dislike the neutral images according to what emotionally charged images was associated with them (page 59).
Chapter 4 gives a brief history of the localization of different functions within the brain as related to emotion. In 1929 Philip Bard showed that following the removal of the entire cerebral cortex in cats that they will still exhibit a full range of coordinated emotional rage reactions. This only stops when the hypothalamus is also disconnected from the rest of the brain (page 81). Yet these cats are hyper-reactive such that full rage responses are provoked from the most minor stimuli. This suggested that the neural signals diverged in the thalamus with one set going to the cerebral cortex and the other going to the hypothalamus.
Chapter 5 examines the history of whether human emotions are mostly biologically based or psychologically (culturally) based. The general conclusion is that all emotions must have some biological root even though they are expressed via the filter of culture. Yet no consensus exists on what exactly those root emotions might be. To me the biological roots of emotion are obvious and based upon the two active behavioral strategies of any organism: avoidance and acquisition. The first strategy is to avoid danger. The second strategy is to acquire food, water, sex, and habitat. Emotions enter in different ways depending on the strategy. With avoidance the presence of danger generates the emotion of fear while the presence of water, food, sex, and habitat give the emotion of contentment, peace, and security (emotions signaling inactivity). The lack of water, food, sex generate their specific emotions. The lack of habitat also generates a specific emotional signal relating to temperature, shade, and enclosure, etc (however a normal habitat is defined for that species). Yet the lack of these desired qualities also generates a general discomfort signal commonly called anxiety in humans and if unresolved (or if the involved neural circuits are out of tune) leads to depression which can be seen as an overactive defense mechanism protecting the body from the steroids and other effects of long lasting anxiety (similar to how fever can sometimes become overly extreme). This differentiation into specific and general emotion is what is lacking in present theory.
Chapter 6 gets into learning phenomena of conditioning (Pavlov's dog), especially fear conditioning in which a tone is paired with an electrical shock. This chapter finally gets into some neuroscience by describing the pathway of an auditory triggered fear conditioning. The key brain center involved in producing fear responses in all vertebrate animals turned out to be the central nucleus of the amygdala. It receives neuronal inputs direct from the auditory thalamus thus its inputs do not depend on the cerebral cortex. Electrical stimulation increases the heart rate (blood pressure increase), induced animal freezing responses, stress hormone release, and reflex potentiation (they get faster and stronger). Lesions eliminate these responses in fear conditioning experiments. Joseph LeDoux himself further refined these results by showing that the central amygdala's projection to the periaqueductal grey of the brain stem was responsible for the freezing reflex, that its projection to the lateral hypothalamus was responsible for the blood pressure rise. Others showed that its projection to the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (in the hypothalamic region) was responsible for the stress hormone release.
Significantly, this central nucleus does not receive the neural projections from the auditory thalamus, instead its neighbor, the lateral nucleus, is the region that gets the inputs. Lesion here also disrupt fear conditioning responses. At the time this book was written which of the several possible intra-amygdala pathways is responsible for the fear conditioning responses was not known.
Electrical stimulation of the amygdala in humans most often produces the conscious sensation of fear (page 172). Damage localized to the amygdala in humans is very rare but one such patient was studied by Antonio Damasio. This patient was unable to recognize a fear facial expression even though she could identify all the other major classes of facial expression (page 173).
Chapter 7 compares the unconscious learning involved in fear conditioning with the conscious episodic learning (what we humans consider memory) that involves the hippocampus. Learning in this fear brain circuit is independent of conscious learning in that one can learn to fear something without remembering when or where that fear originated. Also discussed is the novelty detection function of the cortical region (perirhinal and parahippocampal areas) that acts as the way station between the hippocampus and the rest of the cerebral cortex. Not very well explained in this book is the role of the hippocampus. Memory in the brain is the correctly activated pathway between a stimulus and a response. This pathway is selected an extensive network of overlapping context control circuits. The hippocampus provides the commands to form the circuits for spatial and temporal context based upon if the space and time of an event is sufficiently different from previously triggered context forming commands.
Chapter 8 is a very good discussion mental illness emphasizing the role that unconscious fear conditioning might play. This is rather obvious for various phobias and stress disorders but this also has a role in producing anxiety and thus depression. The author suggests that panic attacks could be a fear conditioning that improperly treats the body's own autonomic fear responses as a fear producing stimulus (page 258). In learning theory this is known as the "assignment of credit" problem. This is the problem of determining which prior event should be associated with a fear event.
Chapter 9 is a discussion of consciousness. What is new for me is the consideration of working memory in conscious sensations. Working memory is a more comprehensive idea about short term memory which allows one to remember temporarily up to 7 things at a time for up to a few minutes. Working memory also involves the active mental processing involving the quick comparison of these 7 things. I have long wondered about the different strengths of conscious sensations between thoughts and immediate experiences (including dreams). The difference seem to be due to working memory indicating that either more neurons in the amygdala are recruited into the event or the neural activation in the amygdala lasts longer than would be normal. Working memory seems to be controlled by the lateral prefrontal cortex at the very front of the brain which exists only in primates (page 274) so presumably it is able to keep amygdala neurons active longer. Below the prefrontal region is the orbital cortex which seems to be responsible for evaluating an emotional stimulus in terms of longer term goals. In college my roommate was givin laughing gas (Nitrous oxide) during a tooth drilling and he reported it "hurt like hell" but that he didn't care. Perhaps the orbital cortex is responsible for that phenomena. The medial prefrontal cortex seems to be involved in the extinction of fear associations.
The involvement of working memory in conscious sensations begs the question of whether the amygdala would produce the conscious sensation of fear in non-primates if the neurons were artificially stimulated.
So overall a good and thought provoking book.
This defines consciousness as the absence of unconsciousness. The result is that the definition does not distill out what may be the core or root of consciousness which is our conscious sensations (also known as Qalia). Qalia is that something that allows us to see "red" when all it is in our brains is a pattern of action potentials on some neurons. All other components of consciousness are probably the effects of the brain's information processing on qalia producing neurons (and their proteins)."Consciousness consists of those states or sentience, or feeling, or awareness, which begin in the morning when we awake from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until we fall into a coma or die or fall asleep again or otherwise become unconscious" (page 11).
Another limitation is this book's hypothysis that consciousness so defined is an emergent property. Somehow complex networks such as the brain cause consciousness to emerge. The analogy the author uses is the old idea of vitalism Many at the beginning of the 1900's could not see how chemistry alone could store all the information needed to define complex biological structures so these people believed some sort of new undiscovered vitalistic force was needed. That turned out not to be the case, therefore another complexity, this time consciousness, must be similar. Yet consciousness is not information which is a measurement of state quantity.
Yet the author goes on to say "Although consciousness is fully compatable with the laws of physics, it is not feasible to predict or understand consciousness from these." (page 11) which is a contradiction of emergence. All emergent properites such as pressure leave a trail back to more fundamental levels of physics, in this case the statistical mechanics of air molecules. All emergent properties are still affected by matter and energy (physics). Physics does not affect conscousness directly, only by affecting the biochemistry of neurons can consciousness be affected by physics.
So why is the author against the other major theory for consciousness suggesting that it is a property of some higher dimensional space? He says this:
To answer his main concern. First matter (mass/energy) is not transmitted out of our universal space. From the equations of General Relativity matter defines space. If matter goes to zero so does space. The same principle holds in quantum mechanics, if matter goes to zero so does the quantum amplitude which is responsible for defining the paths of matter. In short our space is a confinement field for matter. Yet significantly, material properties exist in physics that are not the matter of the equations, terms like electrical charge and so on. Nothing prevents charge from flowing in a closed loop to some hbigher dimensional space as long as the total quantity in our universe stays the same. By changing the flow rate or the vibration of this flow, information can flow across the spatial barrier. Therefore certain folding neural proteins could affect this flow. If everything else is impossble, the remaining alternative, no matter how unlikely it seems, is the answer."While logically consistent, strong dualist positions are dissatisfying from a scientific viewpoint. Particularly troublesome is the mode of interaction between soul and brain. How and where is this supposed to take place? Presumably, this interaction would have to be compatable with the laws of physics. This however, would require an exchange of energy that needs to be accounted for. And what happens to this spooky substance, the soul, once its carrier, the brain, dies? Does it float around in some hyperspace, like a ghost?"
Because of the author's broad definition of consciousness the rest of the book is about the brain function which is always fascinating. He does point out that the conscious sensations of color are most likely localized in the 4th stage (V4) of visual feature definition in a region called the fusiform gyrus (page 138). This localization of conscious sensation production is another piece of evidence against the emergent model. If emergence depends on complexity of the whole brain how does one type of conscious sensation become localized to one part of the brain? Sensory conscious sensations can be more than color. The sensation that an object is moving is also a conscious sensation and this is located in medial temporal area (page 139). If this area is damaged in a stroke, the person's vision consists of a sequence of widely separated images similar to a scenes in a strobe light. This also shows that perception is not a passive process but is instead an active process in which the brain fills in the gaps from internally generated signals. This would explain why all brain regions are reciprocally connected.
So why do we have conscious sensations or more broadly consciousness? At least the author and I agree that conscious sensations have a evolutionary purpose. He says this:
"I am not claiming that such an Uber zombie could not exist or could not be built by artificial means. I don't know about that. What I am claiming is that natural selection favored brains that make use of a dual strategy" (page 237)
Zombies are human-like unconscious robots. The author proposes the evolutionary reason for conscious sensations (qalia) is:
This statement ignores the general strategy of the brain's information processing which is intersecting context control all done in a highly parallel fashion. The thalamus is the main brain region effecting this strategy. Nothing additional is needed. If the authors statement is true then how does non-energetic qalia affect energy demanding neurons in other parts of the brain? (his main arguement against higher dimensional spaces). I would propose that the most likely answer for the evolutionary purpose of qalia is not in aiding the brain's information processing but in aiding in a very general and loosely coupled way group coordination via methods not yet accounted for by physics (such as charge transfere). This group coordination would involve emotional and perceptual biasing broadcast out to the tribal group. In the end though the final way to put this arguement to rest is to to simulate brains with electronic computers to the greatest degree possible."To handle this information efficiently the brain has to symbolize it.This in a nutshell is the purpose of qalia. Qalia symbolize of tacit and unarticulated data that must be present for a sufficient amount of time. Qalia, the elements of conscious experience, enable the brain to effortlessly manipulate this simultaneous information" (page 242)
That conscious sensations do not produce the strongly connected communication needed to aid in the brain's information processing is shown by experiements in split brain patients. By cutting the corpus collosum in siezure prone patients to reduce the severity of those seizure scientists can study this effect.
A very rare patient in which both brain hemispheres have a language ability shows this very clearly in a report form neurologist Victor Mark (90% of people only have language ability in the left hemisphere meaning the right hemisphere can't talk or understand language).
"One half of the brain quite literally does not know what the other half does, which can lead to situations somewhere between tragedy and farce. .. When asked how many seizures she had recently experienced, her right hand held up two fingers. Her left hand then reached over and forced the fingers on her right hand down. After trying several times to talley her seizures, she paused and the simultaneously displayed three fingers with her right hand and one with her left. When Mark pointed out this descrepancy, the patient commented that her left hand frequently did things on its own. A fight ensued between the two hands that looked like some sort of slapstick routine. Only when the patient grew so frustrated that she burst into tears was one reminded of the sad nature of her situations" (page 291)
With both brain hemispheres able to speak "this led to frequent back-and-forth between them, as when Mark echoed one of her statements that she did not have feelings in her left hand. She then insisted that her hand was not numb, followed by a torrent of alternating Yes's and No's, ending with a despairing "I don't know". (page 291)
(Edit: This paragraph added March 31, 2007) The alternative to the proposal that conscious sensations evolved in us is the idea that conscious sensations are simply a side effect of biology, an epiphenomenon, like the noise of a heart beat. This idea seems to have been first proposed in an 1884 speech by Thomas Huxley, the famous defender of Darwin (page 238 of Koch's book). Yet all epiphenomena are by products of entropy, the emergent property of statistical mechanics that all physical processes involving a transformation of energy are not perfectly efficient. Epiphenomena represent these energy leakages but since conscious sensations have nothing to do with energy this idea has no merit. If one argues that conscious sensations represent some other sort of leakage then one must explain what the neurons that produce conscious sensations are doing differently from neurons that do not produce conscious sensations.
While I disagree with the author's interpretation of conscious sensations this is the best book about consciousness that I have come across because of the sheer volume of hard neurological data. Even with that the author does not investigate the emotional, feeling level of conscious sensations.
Here is a news article describing a recent finding about a human pre-frontal cortex region which intergrates some deep emotional centers with goal directed social behavior. The deep emotional center called the Amygdala mentioned in the article, when electrically stimulated, produces the conscious sensation of fear. This is another among many in recent years indicating that the wiring of our biological brain is responsible for our personality leaving conscious sensations (collectively the soul) with some other evolutionary purpose.
This book by Scott Cunningham is the one I saw recommended most often for the novice Wiccan and I can see why. It is full of wisdom and practical advice to quickly get a future Wiccan up and running. Of all the nontraditional spiritual movements Wicca seems to be the most grounded ;) yet I do have some reservations.
The things I like:
Scott's emphasis that magical ritual is all about creating a personal state of consciousness focused on a certain topic takes Wicca from the realm of superstition and places it right within the realm of intellectual plausibility. Items, actions, and places have spiritual power only to the degree that one has an emotional connection to them. These items can be used both as a tool for personal self-exploration but also as a connection to the greater divinity or collective consciousness (my term).
This connection with others via emotion and visualization is exactly what one would expect from the existance of our own conscious sensations. Based on the regions of the brain where they can be elicited via electrical stimulation in awake brain surgery patients conscious sensations are not needed to make us intelligent. The regions where they are elicited are the primary sensory cortex regions and the deep emotional centers. Yet they must have some evolutionary advantage to our species (and most likely other species) otherwise we would not have evolved a connection to them. The only possibility seems to be some sort of extra-sensory communication in the form of emotional and perceptual biasing. This communication probably depends on both the emotional state of the sender and receiver and even then it probably has other variables making scientific testing impossible (how can one really measure and isolate the emotional states of people except in the simplest, most trivial way?).
One can think of these rituals then as a sort of prayer but not aimed at any sort of intelligent, emotional god who then must judge and filter them. To me the existance of gods or spirits as independent willfull, emotional beings is just not credible. How can a structure as complex as a brain exist outside of our material universe? Higher dimensional spaces have too many degrees of freedom to be good at assembling structures. I read somewhere that knots are impossible in higher dimensional spaces (I do need to find out more about this however). If this higher dimensional space out of which the universe originated can do everything on its own then no reason exists for the creation of our (and other) universes in the first place.
I suspect that the refinement or strengthening of our own set of conscious sensations (soul) is why the universe was created in the first place. Our souls probably consist of some simple structure involving communicaiton links and some simple memory. To be consistent with eternity the All, or the Divine Realm can only have a fixed number of souls with no net creation or destruction. Yet over time souls might degrade requiring them to be rejuvinated by attaching themselves to a physical brain. This means that the souls in reincarnation do not bring any information about past lives beyond some personality biases.
So Wicca in practice involves the direct manipulation of spiritual forces or energies instead of petitioning of some diety in the hope that he, she, or it will manipulate the spiritual forces for you.
Nature itself is one of the most powerful emotional triggers. Who has not revelled in a sunset or was lulled by the sounds of waves at a beach. Any spirituality must accomodate this and reverence the earth.
Things I don't like:
Wicca, at least as presented by Scott Cuningham, is not internally consistent. It still contains vestiges of diety in the form of the God and Goddess, the masculine and feminine aspicts of divinity. Their interactions give the rationale for the Wiccan holidays. The God and Goddess have become Wiccan dogma with all that implies for enforced and rigid thinking. This also views the Divinity (the collective consciousness of souls in 3-d space and elsewhere) as divided instead as a unified whole consisting of many intermixed aspects.
This dogma keeps alive the fixed masculine and feminine gender roles which is antagonistic to one's own self discovery. All human emotions and motivations occur in both genders, some more often in one than the other, but still all can be found within an individual. Even sexual orientation is not limited by gender.
There is nothing wrong with using a personification of any ancient or new goddess or god (or object that represents them) as an aid to connect with some sort of emotion or vision but these magical totems should not be any different from any other totem.
Another thing is that Wicca does not seem to have thought through the implications of the loose interconnection of everyone's consciousness. Their main ethic is "do no harm" which is rather passive. It should be "build up the collective consciousness" or "build up mutual karma" to which we all are connected. One cannot experience good karma unless all others around are experiencing it also.
I look forward to any insights practicing Wiccans would care to contribute.
References
Wicca, A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham; Llewellyn Publications - 2004
I have been having a hard time completing my thoughts in regards to the creation of the universe from a conscious sensation containing higher dimensional space. Writing forces me to address these issue head on and when writing about a subject becomes difficult I know I have some sort of mental block. Over coming these blocks takes time yet often they seem to resolve themselves while I zen out in a long shower. I usually take long showers because of this. Showering seems to be my form of meditation where time just flies.
Anyway, my mental block is that I have been thinking of space in the conventional, intuitive way instead of the deeper and more general mathematical way. Space is not absolutely scaled according to Einstein's General Relativity Theory. The scale of space and time will shrink as a system approaches the speed of light relative to the observing system. The deeper spatial dimensions are based upon communication rules. What we normally think of space is just a special case of that rule.
The best way to think of a space is to define it graphically. Each dimension represents an independent degree of freedom of action, some variable parameter. Our 3-D space has 3 dimensions since an object can move in 3 directions. Yet these dimensions are connected to each other via connection rules (mathematically this is called the metric of the space). So a 3-D space is represented graphically by a triangle with each vertex representing a dimension and each line represening the connection rule. In the case of our 3-D space the connection rules are vector addition but if space is curved as in general relativity then these connections rules are more complex.
Notice that a spatial dimension is defined as a very general "degree of freedom". This extension makes a space out of any set of independent variables (dimensions). Yet spaces should be classified into intrinsic spaces and extrinsic spaces. Extrinsic spaces are what we normally call a space and those are defined by connection rules involving the half (uni-directional) dimension of time. Intrinsic spaces do not have time based connection rules.
Full spatial dimensions allow for change in both the positive and negative directions. Half dimensions allow change in only one direction and can never be expressed in the absence of a full dimension. There is no such thing as an independent time dimension. Time is always determined by the movement across space of some object. So in out spatial graph time is represented by an open circle over the dimensional connection lines.
Mathematically these half dimensions are represented by a term containing the imaginary number "i", the square root of -1. In the general relativity equations the time dimension term is multiplied by "i". One has to square the term to express the time, to make it "real".
Another example of the use of imaginary numbers is Euler's Formula in its various forms. In this case unidirctional declining exponentials can be used to form bi-directional sine and cosine funcions.
A significant intrinsic 3-D space is our color perception with its own unique set of connection rules that allow for the three primary colors to form all the colors of the rainbow. Of course color is a conscious sensation. Significantly, a material property in quantum mechanics is called color charge because its spatial connection rules are the same as those for the conscious colors!
This obvious connection between an intrinsic space of a consciousness sensation and an intrinsic space of physics seems to me to be very, very important and really indicates that treating conscious sensations as arising from a higher dimensional space is the right approach.
Also notice that in physics the spaces are clustered together by fundamental particles in the same way a soul possibly clusters together the various conscious sensation spaces.
So a spatial graph of the universe would include all the extrinsic and intrinsic dimensions along with their connection rules. The space out of which the universe was created should be larger since it includes the conscious sensations in addition to the matter properties. Yet the nature of how one space can be formed out of another needs to be worked on.
References
Easy Overview of Material Properties in Quantum Mechanics
A major problem with existing religions and philosophies is explaining why the universe was created in the first place. Why should the complexity of an evolving universe exist when nonexistence is much simpler?
In ancient polytheistic cultures the predominant idea was that humanity existed to serve the gods. Thus the gods created the world in order to make "life" easier for them. They would get their sacrifices and all would be well.
With the development of western monotheism this human servant idea seemed rather silly. Why would an all powerful God need anything? He should be completely self-contrained emotionally. For God to need anything is to exhibit a human weakness. Still the monotheistic religions have not given a good answer to this which seems to suggest a deficiency in their conception of God.
The eastern religions did not evolve into a monotheism with a human like God. Instead they moved towards a more impersonal concept of divinity. Hinduism's Brahman is the eternal divinity inherent in all things, the divinity out of which all things come yet why things come out does not seem to have been explained well.
Yet the eastern religions did develop the concept of eternalism earlier than the west, that is, they attempted to define the properties of eternity. They generally concluded that whatever is eternal must either be static or cyclic. Nothing eternal can have a beginning or and end. The eternal concept of changelessness was initially maintained with their idea of re-incarnation in that the total number of souls remained the same.
Buddhism ran into a problem when it adopted the idea that one could escape re-incarnation by reaching Nirvana. This violated the idea of eternal changelessness since now Nirvana was a growing region slowly filling up with souls. The result was an uneasy compromise in that after a long amount of time even those souls in Nirvana would have to be re-incarnated.
Of course Christianity, Islam, and Judeism seem to ignore the whole problem of eternal changelessness with the number of souls in heaven ever increasing.
So how could the universe be created out of something eternal? In general one can imagine some eternal random motion of something in a higher dimensional space where the density either exceeds some threshold or falls below some threshold and a universe is born. The universe expands and then contracts with matter once again being absorbed into the higher dimensions. Yet this "something" would seem to be the components of conscious sensation since that is what exists in higher dimensional space. Yet conscious sensation components come in many varieties. Just think of all the conscious sensations we humans experience and then add to those the likelihood of even more that we do not experience. The density variation could be from one type or one mix of component.
The hope is that a new universe does not form within range of our existing one leading to the destruction of our own universe. If low density is the key to universal creation then the conscious sensations within our universe must compensate for the large decrease in density so universes are not created on on top of the other. Alternatively, a universe might only be created from a high density conscious sensation components.
Well, more things to think about :).
References
Rationality and spirituality are not contradictory eventhough most people think they are. One meets people who tend to be predominantly one or the other but most of us are somewhere in between where the two sides of our nature have in the past existed in an uneasy tension.
Yet one does not have to ignore rationality in order to be spiritual. The key to this new understanding is simply to consider the source of our own conscious sensation, that quality within us that allows feelings and sensory perceptions to be more than active neural signals. Some day humanity might be able to make smart robots that mimic human behavior but they will not have conscious perceptions. They will respond to "red" objects but they will not "see" red. To them the concept of "red" is simply an activated byte of RAM memory or an activated synthetic neuron.
The next step is to wonder why we developed conscious sensations in the first place. According to evolution it must be beneficial to our survival as a species yet it is not needed for accomplishing our intelligence or artificial intelligence (A.I.) for that matter. This does seem to leave some sort of communication of a perceptual and emotional bias between people as the only alternative. This type of communication is the source of all spiritual and religious experience! This spiritual communication probably depends on one's emotional state and even on the receiver's emotional state and science would have a very hard time isolating and characterizing these states. With this difficulty the exact nature of this communication may never be completely known. This really exposes the limits of human knowledge.
As Olmsted points out in his paper conscious sensations most likely are inherent properites of a higher dimensional space. At least conscious sensations do not belong to our physical universe. He suggests that physics can be extended to accomodate conscious sensations by assuming that the sub-atomic properites such as charge are not static but are instead a dynamic flow passing through the interface between our physical 3-D space and some higher dimensional space.
Since I also know something of quantum mechanics this idea makes a lot more sense then Roger Penrose's idea that quantum mechanics somehow produces conscious sensations. This idea seems to keep hanging around even though quantum mechanics is only good for our physical universe. Our physical universe is finite and expanding or contracting within some higher dimensional space and to assume that our little universal bubble is all there is to reality is just ludicrous.
References:
Conscious Sensations Possibly Derive from Qualities of Space External to the Universe by David Olmsted
What Can Science Tell Us About Collective Consciousness by Robert Kenny
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