Tag Archives: Philosophy

THE SIX GHOSTS OF FEAR

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve with a planned definite purpose and a positive mental attitude.” This statement is true. I attest to this, and you can take it to the bank. It’s the core of Napoleon Hill’s Science of Personal Achievement set out in seventeen principles nailed within his timeless book Think And Grow Rich. The only specters stopping you from achieving your biggest dreams and your deepest desires are the six ghosts of fear.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” As wise as President Roosevelt was, he failed to qualify his statement. FDR never said six ghosts are manifesting in different ways to create fear in your mind. Napoleon Hill did. Napoleon Hill also said these six ghosts are caused by indecision and doubt, blending in your subconscious to become fear.

Ghosts exist only in your mind. They’re not real entities. They have no physical presence. But, if you give ghosts merit and lodge them in your mind, then they might as well be real. The same goes with the top six things people—like you—mentally fear.

Before I list the six ghosts of fear and drill down as to why they psychologically exist to haunt your personal achievement, let me tell you a story about how I got hooked on Napoleon Hill’s success philosophy, busted the six ghosts, and what led to today’s Dyingwords post.

“Amway.”

“Am…way?”

“Yeah. Amway.”

I hear your gasp and I feel your shudder. I taste your bile and I can see your wide-open eyes. I can even smell gas passing from the shock that anything good comes from Amway.

“Amway is a cult!” you say. “Garry Rodgers can’t possibly be in a cult! A multi-level marketing scam! A pyramid scheme! The terror! The horrifying fear! Say it’s not so!”

Okay. Relax. Breathe easy. Thirty years ago some friends got involved in Amway. With interest, Rita (my wife) and I watched them change from mediocre, basic-get-by folks to this highly-energized and enthusiastic pair of newly-made entrepreneurs. It wasn’t long before they “showed us the plan”.

I was skeptical, like most cops are skeptics of anything perceived to be sneaky. Problem was… my friend showing Rita and I the plan was also a cop—a cop I respected and I knew was no kook. They must be onto something, I thought.

Rita and I initially signed up as customers—not as distributors, or business owners as Amway terms its distribution line people—certainly not before we thoroughly checked this thing out. We went to a few town hall Amway meetings and one large convention in Portland. I had never seen a group of people so pumped about selling soap. It was enlightening.

“How does this happen?” I asked my Amway-distributing police pal. “How do so many people get so supercharged by this soap-selling business?”

“Mindset,” he said. “It’s all about mindset and belief. That and they’ve made a decision to build their Amway business, have no doubt that it works, and they’ve exorcised the six ghosts of fear that prevent people from achieving their dreams.”

“The six ghosts of fear?”

“Yeah. The six ghosts of fear.” That’s when my law enforcement colleague and Amway recruiter handed me a copy of Think And Grow Rich. “Read this,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

I read Think And Grow Rich. I’ve read its sequel, The Master Key To Riches, and I’ve read pretty much everything ever published by Napoleon Hill and the Napoleon Hill Foundation. I’ve watched Napoleon Hill’s grainy old videos, and I’ve listened to original cassette recordings of the old man professing his seventeen principles that form the basis of all success—regardless where you find “success” or how you define it.

Soon, Rita and I signed as distributors, but we never did anything with our Amway business, although I still believe there is enormous potential for the few who do Amway right. Life got in the way to spend the time required to build a distributor chain—life being a very busy detective job and the priority of raising two little kids on a cop’s salary with a stay-at-home mom. Our friends did climb the Amway ladder and, from them, we continued to buy the best soap and consumable products available on this planet.

Slowly, we parted ways with Amway’s outer world. I was never comfortable with Amway as an organization. The products were great, but the Amway delivery system sucked and their recruitment model was less than open. Deep down, I had a fear of this thing—especially the fear of criticism or what “they” would think or say. My fear of criticism was greater than my fear of poverty which is what Amway’s business model promised to fix—building astounding wealth… if you worked their plan properly.

But what Amway did was change my inner world. I got hooked on Napoleon Hill’s science of personal achievement philosophy. Without any shred of a doubt, my mindset changed when exposed to Think And Grow Rich. It’s responsible for what I’ve become and for what I’m up to today.

That’s creating the new netstream video, audio, print, and ebook series of hardboiled detective fiction titled City Of Danger. I’m treating this project as a new business venture outside of my regular writing and publishing work. Right now, I’m finishing a business plan for the City Of Danger series based on Napoleon Hill’s seventeen principles that have proven so successful—time and time and time again.

Part of my business plan formulation was reading a recently released book titled Think and Grow Through Art and Music. It’s released by the Napoleon Hill Foundation and aimed at motivating artists like writers and musicians. I’ve read it with my red pen and yellow highlighter. When I came to the final chapter titled The Six Ghosts Of Fear, I realized that, long ago, I’d destroyed those demons. Being ghost-free gives me the courage and confidence to tackle a massive project like City Of Danger.

So what are the six ghosts of fear? Let’s let Napoleon Hill introduce you.

“Before you can put any portion of my seventeen principles into successful use, your mind must be prepared to receive it. The preparation is not difficult. It begins with study, analysis, and understanding of three enemies you have to clear out. These are indecision, doubt, and fear. Members of this unholy trio are closely related; where one is found, the other two are close at hand.

Indecision is the seedling of fear. Indecision crystallizes into doubt, the two blend and become fear. The blending process often is slow and makes the three enemies so dangerous because they germinate and grow without their presence being observed.

There are six main categories of fear. All six reside in the mind, and none have any more reality than a ghost. These six ghosts of fear, on their own or in some combination with each other, are non-realities every person suffers with at some time. Most people are fortunate if they do not suffer from the entire six.”

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Fears are nothing more than states of mind. One’s mind state is subject to control and direction combined with one’s mental attitude and definite purpose. Here are the six ghosts of fear in order of their most common appearance.

The Fear of Poverty

Poverty bites. I relate to a quote from Vancouver billionaire Jimmy Pattison who said, “I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. Rich is better.”

I think there are two people types. There are those with success consciousness and those with poverty consciousness. This consciousness resides in the mind and is influenced by three things:

  1. Who you associate with
  2. Your mind input
  3. The decisions you make

Poverty is the most destructive ghost and the most difficult fear to master. It’s amplified by indifference, indecision, doubt, worry, over-caution, procrastination, and plain laziness. Poverty is overcome by living within means, applying a definite purpose, having confidence, doing the hard work, associating with the right people, adopting a positive mental attitude, and making sensible decisions.

Poverty is the opposite of riches. It’s more than having money or having no money. Poverty and riches extend beyond financial means. They include your physical health, your mental state, and your spiritual well-being.

The Fear of Criticism

What “they” say or think. I was fearful of what they would think and say about my, and Rita’s, brush with Amway. This was all in my head. I never had one person say to me or anyone else (that I know of) that I was getting sucked into a cult.

Who are “they”? They are entirely imaginary beings—just like ghosts—but they’re surprisingly powerful. They stupefy enthusiasm. They cut down personal initiative. They destroy your imagination. And they make it practically impossible to achieve anything beyond mediocrity.

While poverty is the most entrapping ghost, the fear of criticism is the most common ghost that holds you back—the fear of how other people might judge your work, your creativity, and your ideas of how to wildly succeed as an entrepreneurial business person.

The criticism ghost browbeats you. It inseminates a lack of poise, undermines self-consciousness, quashes personalities, instills inferiority complexes, and dives home a void of ambition and initiative.

The Fear of Ill-Health

Disease. “Dis-Ease”. It’s the pill Big Pharma wants us to swallow, and those companies know people are motivated to buy their snake oil products because of health-fear motivation. Sickness is a multi-trillion dollar industry.

Many illnesses are not real. They’re figments of people’s imaginations—just like ghosts. But the fear of disease and the many imagined maladies that infect human minds can manifest as realistic, symptomatic presentations in their bodies. People think themselves into illness and when the symptoms illusionary appear, they’re convinced. And the circle continues.

I read a quote from entertainer Naomi Judd. She said, “Your body hears everything your mind says.” She’s right. Autosuggestion works both ways, and you can talk yourself out of ill health fear or what’s called hypochondria.

I respect people who meditate and do yoga. I also respect people who eat right, exercise, and get proper sleep. And I respect people who put their mind into a positive state where they don’t fear poverty or care about what “they” say.

The Fear of Loss of Love

This is the painful ghost. This specter is so excruciatingly cruel. It can cause it’s possessed one to take their own life. This ghost prevails misery and devastation and soulful destruction.

Jealousy doesn’t require a reason. It’s the most unreasonable emotion and sets up irrational fears where it’s a devastating ghost—devastating where there is, or is not, any basis. Real or unreal, the fear of loss of love is awful.

I experienced the loss of love a long time ago. I now call her “She Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned”. Losing her was the best thing that ever happened in my life because I wouldn’t have met Rita if I hadn’t lost her. Finding Rita was even better than discovering Napoleon Hill and smashing the six ghosts of fear.

They say if you have to convince someone to stay with you, then they’ve already left. In this case, I have to agree with they. Security in a relationship is a treasure without an appraised value, and I treasure my relationship with Rita above my own life. I don’t fear it. I love it.

The Fear of Old Age

Your fear of being alone in old age, or being debilitated through wear-out, is understandable. It’s especially understandable if you’ve lived a life filled with the fear of poverty, the fear of criticism, the fear of ill health, and the fear of the loss of love. The combination of these four ghosts—these non-real ghosts—are life-threatening.

Napoleon Hill said, “I don’t know why men and women should be so afraid that they’re gonna dry up and blow away when they get to that ripe old age of forty to fifty. The real achievements of the world were the results of men and women who had gone beyond sixty. The greatest achievement age is between sixty-five and seventy, so I don’t know why anyone should be afraid of old age. Yet they are.”

Fearing old age is a ghost. There is no reasonable reason to buy into this BS. Sure, as we age we slow down physically but we’re completely capable of being mentally active as long as we don’t allow the fear ghosts of poverty, criticism, ill-health, and love loss to cripple our mindset.

I turned sixty-five this year. I drank the Napoleon Hill Kool-Aid in my thirties, and it was the best thirst quencher ever. I’m just getting started in life, although it took me this long to get my act together.

The Fear of Death

“It’s the rarest thing in the world to find a person who hasn’t, at one time or another, been afraid of death.”  ~Napoleon Hill

“Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. They can only be changed from one form of reality to another.”  ~Albert Einstein

In my experience in the death business, I’ve been asked a lot of questions, done a lot of research, and soul searched. I believe there is a soul beyond physical matter and energetic action, and I believe it’s a non-physical combination of Infinite Intelligence, or The Creator, employing two functions called consciousness and entropy. But, that’s for another post.

I don’t fear becoming a ghost after death. I look at it like this. I was somewhere before I was born into consciousness as a lump of matter, and I’m living an energetic life constantly being broken down by entropy. When this consciousness I now have finally extinguishes—because entropy’s universal change ultimately conquers a rigid combination of matter and energy—I’ll go back to where I was before I was born, and I’m not afraid.

There are no specters. No illusions. There is only you.

Only in your mind live The Six Ghosts Of Fear.

Conquer them.

65 THOUGHTS FROM 65 YEARS

I turned 65 this week. Officially, I’m a Senior. I’m now eligible for geezer graft – my public pension and a free morning coffee at McDonalds plus 10 percent price cuts at prestigious places I patronize like Walmart, Home Depot, Habitat For Humanity’s ReStore, Salvation Army’s thrift shop, and many, many hole-in-the-wall used book stores. On delegated days, of course, and with certain conditions applying like having my Covid vaccine papers ready and my leak-free Depends securely on. Also, my If Found – Return To wristband in place and my GPS tracker beaconing away.

I never thought I’d live this long, given some of the high-risk behavior I’ve displayed during my 65 trips around the sun. 64 of those trips were pretty much fun. 1 was not.  However, that bad trip gave me an entirely new respect for the value of this extremely precious and terribly fragile thing called life.

My 65 trips gave me insight into what’s important and what’s not. They also gave me plenty of time to think. Specific thinking. Random thinking. And nonsense thinking. In no particular order, and with no particular agenda, here are 65 thoughts from 65 years—many borrowed from folks much wiser than me. By the way, I also shared this post with friends over at the Kill Zone blog on Thursday although it’s tweaked a bit for today.

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1. Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve by taking planned action with a positive mental attitude. This is the core of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich personal growth and success philosophy which, in my experience, is pure truth. It’s the primal advice I pass on.

2. You become what you think about most of the time.

3. Be careful with your thoughts, because your thoughts become your words. Be careful with your words, because your words become your actions. Be careful with your actions, because your actions become your habits. Be careful with your habits, because your habits become your character and your character becomes your destiny.

4. Dream big. Dream often. The first step in achieving big dreams is by having them.

5. Don’t matter what came first—the chicken or the egg—as long as you stay alive and remain healthy enough to eat them.

6. I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. Rich is better.

7. Always read the instructions. Twice. Then save them.

8. Don’t buy extended warranties, timeshares, or cheap tools.

9. Persistence is to character as carbon is to steel.

10. If you must read the news, read for fact and data, not for opinions.

11. Cocaine users say they indulge because it amplifies their personality. I say coke is a dangerous drug for assholes.

12. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.

13. If you chase a badger across a field and it goes down a hole, don’t follow and poke its backside with a pick handle. Seriously, don’t. I tried this. You’d be amazed at how fast badgers can turn around in a tight spot.

14. People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.

15. Do not steal the parking spot reserved for the guy who’s about to interview you for your dream job.

16. And don’t bother searching for your eyeglasses while wearing them.

17. Speaking of eyeglasses, when you do go searching for your lost glasses and finally find them, don’t put them back where you found them. Put them where you first looked for them.

18. Once you get it all down to one shopping cart, you’ve got it made.

19. The Golden Rule will never fail. It’s the foundation of all other virtues.

20. I don’t judge your age, race, gender, sexual orientation, language, religion, political beliefs, education, occupation, body shape, or any other quirk that makes you a human being. You are you. I am me. I’ll be nice to you even if you’re not nice to me and I’m fine with that.

21. Never get involved in an Asian land war.

22. To make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting to, and taking personal responsibility for, the mistakes you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. It’s astounding how powerful this ownership is.

23. Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed ever regretted giving away too much.

24. I’ve never seen a hearse pulling a trailer loaded with a ski-boat, an ATV, or a full-dresser Harley.

25. A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

26. Ancient Jewish wisdom says not to argue to win the argument. Argue to discover the truth.

27. The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.

28. The best way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas and then discard the bad ideas.

29. Seek to be the wisest in the room, not the loudest, and never miss a good chance to shut up.

30. Never take down a fence until you know why it was put up.

31. If you have to convince someone to stay with you, they’ve already left.

32. You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book is too difficult for adults, then write it for children.

33. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer. No surprise in the reader.

34. Always apply the duck test.

35. The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.

36. The two founding points of human existence are consciousness and entropy.

37. Everything in moderation, including moderation.

38. Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, bad and good, and see how they do it. Just like a stonemason who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window and write something else.

39. Carl Sagan said, “A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called leaves) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you’ll hear the voice of another person, perhaps a person who’s been dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time—proof that humans can work magic.”

40. And Lady Gaga said, “When you make music or write or create, it’s really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you’re screwing with at the time.”

41. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots.

42. You don’t stop flying when you get old. You get old when you stop flying.

43. A ride in a US Navy F-18 Hornet flight simulator is a mind-blowing and condomless, sexual experience. Been there. Done that. MUST do again.

44. A business rule: Pay every invoice within 48 hours. You’ll be amazed at how many people give your work top priority.

45. Ungulates like deer, moose, elk, and caribou have antlers for a reason.

46. Bears have claws and teeth for a reason, too. Don’t poke the bear like I poked the badger.

47. The cost of perfection is inaction, but boring progress produces exceptional results.

48. The less you need the approval of others, the easier it is to get what is right rather than what is easy.

49. “I don’t pay no attention to no kind of critics about nothing. If they knew as much as they claim about what they’re criticizing, then they ought to be doing that instead of standing on the sidelines using their mouth.” ~Muhammad Ali.

50. Multitasking is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.

51. Ninety percent of success can be boiled down to consistently doing the obvious thing for an uncommonly long time without convincing yourself that you’re smarter than you are.

52. That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult—provided you don’t lose it.

53. If someone tries to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a pyramid scheme.

54. If you have any doubts about your ability to carry a load in one trip, do yourself a favor and make two trips.

55. Anything real begins with the fiction of what it could be. Imagination is the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It’s the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

56. For every dollar you spend on something substantial, expect to pay another dollar in energizing,  repairing, maintaining, disposing, and replacing by the end of its serviceable life.

57. Eliminating clutter makes room for your true treasures.

58. If you plant for days, plant flowers. If you plant for years, plant trees. If you plant for eternity, plant ideas.

59. Never start a fight. Especially one you can’t win. Like, don’t get in a pissing match with a skunk, because you’re going to end up taking an excruciating, eye and nose blast plus a humiliating, clothes-stripped, tomato juice remediation bath while the skunk reloads and carries on to hose the next idiot who’s stupid enough to cross it.

59. Subsection 1. Same applies to badgers.

60. A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

61. People shouldn’t look for perfect leaders. They should look for authentic leaders with human-flawed competence and integrity, not consumed with presenting their title’s self-importance.

62. Near the end of his life, Steve Jobs said, “I learned that life is like a river. At first, you think that if you’re successful, you get to take many things from that river… products people have made or ideas people have come up with. But, eventually, in life you realize that it’s not what you take from the river, it’s what you get to put into that river.”

63. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not their facts.

64. Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.

65. When you die, you take nothing with you except your reputation.

Bonus Bit: When playing Monopoly, spend all you have to buy, barter, or trade for the strategic orange properties at the end of the second stretch just before Free Parking. Don’t bother with Utilities or Railroads. If you play the game right, and for long enough, you’ll find Park Place and Boardwalk are terrible returns on investment.

Another Bonus From 31Oct2021: I don’t care if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

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Dyingwords followers – What words of wisdom will you share? Don’t be shy about commenting!

HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN CONSCIOUSNESS?

What is consciousness? What’s in you—a conscious and thinking entity—perceiving and processing information from a myriad of sources to form intelligent images in your mind? You’re consciously reading this piece, which I consciously put together to explore an area of existence that current science really doesn’t know much about, and I think you’re wondering—has anyone explained what being conscious really is?

Scientists seem to understand macro laws explaining the origin of the universe and greater physical parameters governing the cosmos. Recent science advancements into quantum mechanics shed better light on micro laws ruling sub-atomic behavior. But nowhere has anyone seemed to clearly explain what consciousness truly is and why we—as conscious beings—observe all this.

The question of consciousness intrigues me. So much so, that I’ve read, thought and watched a lot on the subject. From what I’ve picked up, one of today’s leading thinkers about consciousness is Dr. David Chalmers. He’s a likable guy with a curious mind and he’s a Professor of Philosophy at New York University. Dr. Chalmers did a fascinating TED Talk called How Do You Explain Consciousness? Here’s the transcript and link to his thought-evoking talk.

Note to readers: It’s worthwhile to listen to Dr. Chalmers TED Talk while reading this transcript.

https://www.ted.com/talks/david_chalmers_how_do_you_explain_consciousness?language=en

Right now, you have a movie playing inside your head. It’s an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3D vision and surround-sound for what you’re seeing and hearing right now, but that’s just the start of it. Your movie has smell and taste and touch. It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger and orgasms. It has emotions, anger and happiness. It has memories like scenes from your childhood playing before you.

And, it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you. You’re experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness—the subject of experience of the mind and the world.

Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence. Each of us is conscious. We all have our own inner movie. That’s you and you and you. There’s nothing we know about more directly. At least, I know about my consciousness directly. I can’t be certain that you guys are conscious.

Consciousness also is what makes life worth living. If we weren’t conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning or value. But at the same time, it’s the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. 

Why are we conscious? Why do we have these inner movies? Why aren’t we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. I’m going to suggest that to integrate consciousness into science then some radical ideas may be needed.

Some people say a science of consciousness is impossible. Science, by its nature, is objective. Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective. So there can never be a science of consciousness.

For much of the 20th century, that view held sway. Psychologists studied behavior objectively. Neuroscientists studied the brain objectively. And nobody even mentioned consciousness. Even 30 years ago, when TED got started, there was very little scientific work on consciousness.

Now, about 20 years ago, all that began to change. Neuroscientists like Francis Crick and physicists like Roger Penrose said, “Now is the time for science to attack consciousness.” And since then, there’s been a real explosion, a flowering of scientific work on consciousness.

All this work has been wonderful. It’s been great. But it also has some fundamental limitations so far. The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations—correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states of consciousness.

We saw some of this kind of work from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work she presented just a few minutes ago. Now we understand much better, for example, the kinds of brain areas that go along with the conscious experience of seeing faces or of feeling pain or of feeling happy.

But this is still a science of correlations. It’s not a science of explanations. We know that these brain areas go along with certain kinds of conscious experience, but we don’t know why they do. I like to put this by saying that this kind of work from neuroscience is answering some of the questions we want answered about consciousness, the questions about what certain brain areas do and what they correlate with.

But, in a certain sense, those are the easy problems. No knock on the neuroscientists. There are no truly easy problems with consciousness. But it doesn’t address the real mystery at the core of this subject. Why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all? Why is there this inner subjective movie? Right now, we don’t really have a bead on that.

And you might say, let’s just give neuroscience a few years. It’ll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon like traffic jams, like hurricanes, like life, and we’ll figure it out. The classical cases of emergence are all cases of emergent behavior, how a traffic jam behaves, how a hurricane functions, how a living organism reproduces and adapts and metabolizes, all questions about objective functioning.

You could apply that to the human brain in explaining some of the behaviors and the functions of the human brain as emergent phenomena. How we walk. How we talk. How we play chess—all these questions about behavior.

But when it comes to consciousness, questions about behavior are among the easy problems. When it comes to the hard problem, that’s the question of why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience? And here, the standard paradigm of emergence—even the standard paradigms of neuroscience—don’t really, so far, have that much to say.

Now, I’m a scientific materialist at heart. I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn’t work for systematic reasons.

It’s a long story, but the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems—how we behave, how we function but when it comes to subjective experience—why does all this feel like something from the inside?

That’s something fundamentally new, and it’s always a further question. So I think we’re at a kind of impasse here. We’ve got this wonderful great chain of explanation that we’re used to it—where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn’t seem to fit into this picture.

On the one hand, it’s a datum that we’re conscious. On the other hand, we don’t know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don’t yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically.

Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be. My friend Dan Dennett has one. His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem of consciousness. The whole idea of the inner subjective movie involves a kind of illusion or confusion.

Actually, all we’ve got to do is explain the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain, and then we’ve explained everything that needs to be explained. Well, I say, more power to him. That’s the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of consciousness.

At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfactory. So I go in a different direction. In the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that I think may have some promise.

The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass. They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics. These fundamental properties and laws aren’t explained in terms of anything more basic. Rather, they’re taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there.

Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands. In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out that you can’t explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals—space, time, mass, Newton’s laws—so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element that those laws govern. I think that’s the situation we’re in with consciousness.

If you can’t explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals— space, time, mass, charge—then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list. The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature. This doesn’t mean you suddenly can’t do science with it. This opens up the way for you to do science with it.

What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect consciousness to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes. Physicists sometimes say that we want fundamental laws so simple that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. Well, I think something like that is the situation we’re in with consciousness. We want to find fundamental laws so simple we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. We don’t know what those laws are yet, but that’s what we’re after.

The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. Every system might have some degree of consciousness. This view is sometimes called panpsychism—pan for all, psych for mind. The view holds that every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight’s microbes, elementary particles. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness.

The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking. It’s not that a photon is wracked with angst because it’s thinking, “Aww, I’m always buzzing around near the speed of light. I never get to slow down and smell the roses.” No, it’s not like that. But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.

This may sound a bit kooky to you. I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing? Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental. If it’s fundamental, like space and time and mass, it’s natural to suppose that it might be universal too, the way they are. It’s also worth noting that although the idea seems counterintuitive to us, it’s much less counterintuitive to people from different cultures, where the human mind is seen as much more continuous with nature.

A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness to physical processing is to link consciousness to information. Wherever there’s information processing, there’s consciousness. Complex information processing, like in a human, takes complex consciousness. Simple information processing takes simple consciousness.

A really exciting thing is in recent years a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has taken this kind of theory and developed it rigorously with a mathematical theory. He has a mathematical measure of information integration which he calls phi, measuring the amount of information integrated in a system. And he supposes that phi goes along with consciousness.

So in a human brain with an incredibly large amount of information integration it requires a high degree of phi—a whole lot of consciousness. In a mouse with a medium degree of information integration, it still requires a pretty significant, pretty serious amount of consciousness. But as you go down to worms, microbes, particles, the amount of phi falls off. The amount of information integration falls off, but it’s still non-zero.

On Tononi’s theory, there’s still going to be a non-zero degree of consciousness. In effect, he’s proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness. Now, I don’t know if this theory is right, but it’s actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it’s been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data. It does have a nice property that it is, in fact, simple enough that you can write it on the front of a tee-shirt.

Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate consciousness into the physical world. Physicists and philosophers have often observed that physics is curiously abstract. It describes the structure of reality using a bunch of equations, but it doesn’t tell us about the reality that underlies it. As Stephen Hawking put it, what puts the fire into the equations?

Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are, but you can take them to be describing the flux of consciousness. That’s what physics really is ultimately doing—describing the flux of consciousness. On this view, it’s consciousness that puts the fire into the equations. On that view, consciousness doesn’t dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra. It’s there right at its heart.

I think the panpsychist view has the potential to transfigure our relationship to nature, and it may have some pretty serious social and ethical consequences. Some of these may be counterintuitive. I used to think I shouldn’t eat anything which is conscious, so therefore I should be vegetarian. Now, if you’re a panpsychist and you take that view, you’re going to go very hungry. So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations—not so much the fact of consciousness—but the degree and the complexity of consciousness.

It’s also natural to ask about consciousness in other systems, like computers. What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie Her, Samantha? Is she conscious? Well, if you take the informational, panpsychist view, she certainly has complicated information processing and integration, so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious. If that’s right, it raises pretty serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems and the ethics of turning them off.

Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of whole groups, the planet. Does Canada have its own consciousness? Or at a more local level, does an integrated group like the audience at a TED conference—are we right now having a collective TED consciousness, an inner movie for this collective TED group which is distinct from the inner movies of each of our parts? I don’t know the answer to that question, but I think it’s at least one worth taking seriously.

Okay, so this panpsychist vision, it is a radical one, and I don’t know that it’s correct. I’m actually more confident about the first crazy idea—that consciousness is fundamental—than about the second one—that it’s universal. I mean, the view raises any number of questions and has any number of challenges, like how do those little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of complex consciousness we know and love.

If we can answer those questions, then I think we’re going to be well on our way to a serious theory of consciousness. If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy. We can’t expect to solve it overnight. But I do think we’re going to figure it out eventually. Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves.

It may just take the right crazy idea.