Free Debatable Space by Philip Palmer

with the hard stuff. And **** those other bastards, we’re better off without
     them.
    In my own philosophical theorising, my great inspiration was Immanuel Kant, who wrote about the nature of the nature of knowledge
     and perception. Like Leibnitz, Kant was a philosopher who went out of vogue but whose ideas are now at the heart of the modern
     scientific enterprise. And I was also influenced by one of Kant’s most inspired followers, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
     who wrote about the “primary imagination” which creates the reality known by our senses, and about the “secondary imagination”,
     the source of poetry itself, which owes its power to the fact that it is a shadow of the primary imagination.
    Coleridge’s formulation was a beautiful poetic restatement of Kant’s carefully argued philosophy which showed that time and
     space themselves are constructs of the mind perceiving. Which means:
    Every day we create our world anew.
    Every time we wake, the world springs up around us.
We make it so.
For a few seconds after waking, there is typically a fog of confusion. But then we remember who we are, and what we plan to
     do today, and what we did yesterday and in the years before. And a whole network of associations, assumptions and predictions
     springs into place to unify and control our perceptions. Even time itself only exists because we perceive it as we do; even
     space is a product of how our minds apprehend the atoms and quarks and superstrings of underlying reality.
    This isn’t the same as solipsism. If you and I and the rest of humanity did not exist, there would still be an external universe.
     Lions would still scent their prey; flies would still be able to find and wallow in shit.
But grass would not be so evocatively green, and roses would not smell so delightfully sweet, and nothing in our extraordinary
     world would have the special beauty and the unique range of meaning that the human perceiving consciousness not only perceives,
     but creates by its very act of perception.
    And so, I argued, our primary imagination gives us the power of a god, to create a world and Universe rich in memories and
     anticipations and emotions.
You Are God
, as I pithily phrased it in the subtitle of my book.
    I
am God too; we are, each of us, Gods of our own personal Universe. Nothing about reality is a given; we have to really
work
to make it happen . . .
    And the radical aspect of my new approach was to apply the principles of emergence theory to this whole area of consciousness
     study. If we accept that “reality” is a movie screened in the consciousness, it gives the human observer an active not a passive
     role in his or her private Universe.
    And this connects up with the attempts to replicate the nature of human consciousness in computer systems, as “artificial
     intelligence”. But my equations reached deeper, by embracing the “primary imagination” and its ability to fashion a coherent
     Universe in which time passes and space has extension and all events have emotional resonance and are tinctured with memory
     and anticipation.
    This was my introductory section, in which I argued that consciousness itself is an example of emergence; and that therefore
reality itself
(which is created by consciousness) can also be described according to the equations of emergence theory. The rest of the
     book was devoted to case studies of “mental systems”, taken from memoirs and biographies and autobiographies of famous and
     not so famous individuals whose ways of seeing were expressed through emergent equations.
    Many of these individuals were sociopaths and serial killers – Ted Bundy was my favourite example. Albert Walker, perpetrator
     of the so-called Rolex watch murder, was another of my intriguing case studies. The choice of criminal case studies was primarily
     due to expedience, since there is a such a wealth of psychological information available on dysfunctional killers.
    The main body of