Vision Requires a Personal God

In attempting to explain consciousness we need first to agree on exactly what it is we’re trying to explain. For me, the bottom line is the presence of an image, seemingly “out there” yet also “in here” as the introspective aspect of our bubble of self, with this duality suggesting a fundamental two-sidedness to reality – nicely accommodating the duality of self-other, order-disorder, life-death, and so on. In any event, if there is any hope of explaining consciousness, we will have to come to grips with an introspectable, universal graphic: an image (perceived as other) within a more encompassing field of awareness (perceived as self). Something smaller inside something larger. Simple in principle!

In a related manner, we must explain the meaning of the relationship between the small and the big, the finite and the infinite, with a contrasting relationship to nonexistence nicely explaining the small, finite nature of an image – with the understanding that infinity is not a spatial expanse but, rather, nonexistence itself. This works well but only if God is, as biblically proclaimed, both personal and transcendent — thereby allowing an image to be the means by which a universal tendency toward increasing disorder (the Second Law) is contained. Atheists will object, but perhaps only because they have not yet been introduced to the energy-regulating rationale of the brain, a rationale dependent upon the expectable (and matchable) finitude of an image as the means by which the dissipative effects of the Second Law are slowed.

Given the immersive nature of an image, the modulation of the motor system by the limbic brain (where weight and temperature are regulated) has one ultimate objective: that of sustaining some optimal disparity between the anticipated (relatively more weightless) and actual body mass. Indeed, the orderliness of the body mass is inseparable from its anatomical precision and one’s capacity, via an image, for containing regression. Part of this precision is to be found in the way sensations from the totality of the body mass merge in cortical multimodal nuclei before a final vector converges upon the weight and temperature nuclei of the limbic brain – thence to influence the motor system, and so on. This cycle of feedback, sustained by an image, is known as the “perception-action” cycle. This feedback cycle precisely parallels the figure-ground of awareness — experienced in the eternal “now” of time, biblically referred to as the habitat of God.