Nodes, Minds And Aspects

Poul Anderson, Genesis (New York, 2001), Part Two, I, pp. 102-103.

In Gaia And The Universe II, we compared emulations within Gaia to organisms within the universe. Now we can add:

minds within nodes (p. 102);
aspects within minds (p. 103).

First, let me summarize how I see consciousness within the universe:

reality is a single being, not homogeneous but internally differentiated;

being becomes conscious of itself;

thus, it becomes both a subject and an object of consciousness;

a subject of consciousness is a self;

however, self and other are interdependent like in-out, up-down, left-right etc;

thus, the one being becomes conscious of itself only by appearing to itself as other;

the processes that generate consciousness occur within organisms interacting with their environments;

therefore, a conscious organism becomes a "self" and its environment is "other" although the reality is that they are differentiations of a single being;

human beings can realize this unity, transcending alienation from the other;

thus, consciousness involves many selves within a single being;

however, since the single being is the subject and object of all consciousness, it is the one universal self transcending the many individual selves which are particular organisms;

the separate self is an illusion;

among human beings, each individual self can realize its identity with the universal self and can thus dispel the illusory separate self;

Buddhist "no soul" teaching is a denial of the separate self and Vedanta Brahman-Atman teaching is an identification of the individual self with the universal self.

And how that connects with Anderson's nodes, minds and aspects will have to be the subject-matter of a further post.