I’ve now reread for the third time the article, “Does Consciousness End?” by Thomas W. Clark and believe it makes a terrific, naturalistic argument for consciousness as the eternal fabric of the cosmos that is in agreement with David Chalmers’ new book, “Reality+”, and my own thinking on the subject in “Meaning in the Multiverse: A Skeptics Guide to a Loving Cosmos.” Let me take a step back and explain a few important terms.
Near the end of Reality+, Chalmers outlines a compelling 3-level construction of the cosmos, with a selfless conscious structuralism at level 0, a digital layer at level 1 whose bits (or more likely qubits) create the simulated spacetime universe we are familiar with at level 2. Level 0 (consciousness) is accessible to some in level 1 (simulators) and level 2 (simulations) via what might be best called APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). It is beyond the scope of this article to explain why a level 0 structuralism is required—and it doesn’t necessitate that it is consciousness—but for this metaphysical conjecture, I think consciousness makes the most sense.
Our level 2 universe is almost completely described by the initial level-1 computations—the Laws of Physics—and the complexity that evolved independently at level-2, only the hard problem of consciousness, that it is like something to be my collection of level-2 matter, remains to be explained.
Panpsychism, that everything at level-2 has some level of consciousness, is only compelling in the naïve conception of a cosmos that only has a spacetime component, a construction that Deutsch in “The Fabric of Reality”, Chalmers, and I all reject. In “Meaning in the Multiverse,” I argue for a parallelpsychicconsciousness that arises from interference from parallel universes in the same way that interference of the quantum material of parallel universes is held responsible (by Deutsch and others) for the counterintuitive collapse of wavefunctions in the dual-slit experiment. Parallelpsychism relies on a heretofore unknown mechanism—the wavefunction of the mind—a level-0 phenomena that opens an API to either level-1 or level-2, but only for the right sort of interlocutor, having the right sort of information processing capability—the right sort of mind.
Level-0 is an immaterial, conceptless, identityless, and selfless consciousness, the stuff of Buddhist metaphysics. However, Clark arrives at it naturally. He shows how, from the point of view of consciousness, there is no break in its subjective availability even if an identity goes to sleep, is made completely unconscious through a general anesthetic, or dies. At least for the first two events, we recognize the truth of the continuity of consciousness, there are hints and memories of a temporal lack of consciousness, but it is one that—by definition—we do not experience. We remember having the experience of laying on the gurney, counting backwards from 5, and our next experience is one of waking up groggy in the waiting room. We never experience a positive nothingness of our time being unconscious, we are only ever experiencing in an eternal present.
We will only ever be tied to level-0 consciousness. There can be no positive nothingness, no void for us to fall into, even upon death. While the identity of Justin Harnish will no longer be conscious after my death, there will be no void to experience, indeed, from the point of view of “my” viewport into consciousness, the identity would change, I’d have no memory of Justin Harnish, but consciousness would be unchanged!
Clark gets us to this naturalistic-reincarnation with a thought-experiment that breaks down identity while maintaining subjective availability throughout. Imagine that like Rip Van Winkle, you went to sleep for a long time, but instead of laying against a tree, tiny nanomachines changed your physiology and your neurology over time. At any time you might wake up and where you used to like broccoli, you detest it now, and many other subtle changes like that in each moment; would the act of waking up have changed consciousness from its side? Is there a point where the nanomachines killed you and where Rip2.0 was born?
In both the case of dreamless sleep, which our identity has experienced, and death, that an identity can experience only once, consciousness is an omnipresent fabric that will be available to the next sentient identity no matter if they arise in this level-2 spacetime universe or in a much different level-1 or level-2 part of the cosmos under a wholly different concept of time. Consciousness as we are aware of it today as the stage of all experience, our being when we are present, is made all the more precious in this metaphysical conception—an omnipresent connection to the most fundamental constituent of existence—one whose nature we wildly make wholly our own unique place of love and peace, but that we ultimately share with all other sentient entities without reference to our conceptions of time, space, architects, sims, or in parallel universes near or far.