Consciousness, Art and the Fourth Dimension

You aren’t really thinking your thoughts. You are finding them. Length breadth and height are all dimensions. Dimensions in which material objects exist. Most people believe that it is possible to have an idea and then manipulate matter into some configuration of these three dimensions over time. A person might design a piece of art, a sculpture say, and then make it in the physical world. They would then likely feel proud of the work they did. The idea they had. An inventor may conceive of a new product, a spaceship, or a railway and then follow up their thoughts to create in three dimensional reality the thing they thought of.

I no longer believe that this is so. I propose (after one or two others I must admit) that the thought, the conceptualisation, the conscious exploration of the idea is one dimension of the object to be created. Huh? What? Well, let me explain a bit more clearly what I mean. If length, breadth and height are dimensions, then, given everything in existence can also be described in terms of the concept it embodies, perhaps consciousness, or thought are also a dimension of reality just like the other three. So; length, breadth, height and idea. Perhaps my mind navigates in the dimension of ideation to the concept of the thing I ultimately create. So, ‘chair’ is a thing that has length, breadth, height and idea. If it isn’t a chair it isn’t 110 cm high, 60 wide and 60 deep with ‘legs’ just so etc. To be a chair, matter has to be arranged according to a specific set of coordinates, the three we know about and the concept of the object. All things can be described by thought, just as they can be described by the other three dimensions. In order to make anything I have to conceive of it, or at least it must be arranged even by random chance into a form that can be conceptually understood. A grain of dust can be conceptualised, a chair, a painting, a molecule. Whatever. So rather than my brain being an engine for the generation of concepts and the understanding of things, it is a tool for navigating in the dimension of thought.

Room for a conscious universe

If it is true that thought, ideas and consciousness are an inherent property of all things, in the manner described in the previous paragraph, then that means that everything is, in some sense, conscious. Everything already has a thought about itself. A chair is not just wood arranged in a specific three dimensional configuration of wood. It is arranged in the idea of a wooden chair.

So what does this mean? Does it matter? What is the difference between a brain originating concepts and a brain navigating to concepts within an aspect of existence that we call consciousness, or idea or thought. I use these rather different words interchangeably hers because I don’t think we have found a word that correctly describes this dimension or aspect of reality. So I can say that thinking is a type of movement. We actually do sometimes use language to describe ideas in this way already. We often say that we ‘explore’ an idea. We find our way to solutions. A person in goes on a ‘journey’ of self discovery. We ‘reach’ a conclusion. We are at some level, already describing our manipulation of and travel in the three dimensional world as having a fourth dimension to it. The dimension of thought through which we travel in order to effect our mastery of the other three dimensions.

Jeremy Van der want

Jeremy Van der want is a South African artist splitting his time between the rural and bush areas of South Africa and the City of Johannesburg.