Consciousness

Consciousness

/ˈkɒnʃəsnəs/

The very word has an irresistible aesthetic appeal, doesn't it? Like a Western version of ॐ (that is Aum, in case your browser is not rendering it properly).

Consciousness is quite simply the most amazing thing that exists, and also the weirdest. Everything in the universe (galaxies, planets, flowers, cows, microwave ovens, life, chemical reations) is physical and can be explained in physical terms, or at least it looks like we will be able to explain it physically at some point in the future. Everything except consciousness, that is, and some of the stuff associated with it, like intentionality. We really don't have a clue what this strange property of brains is all about. We know that apparently you need a working brain to generate conscious experience, and that's about it. As to how the brain generate conscious experience we have no idea whatsoever. To be rigorous (and on this particular point most scientists aren't), we don't even know whether it is the brain that actually generates it. (How does a TV generate the nine o'clock news? How does a wardrobe generate moths? How does the night generate stars?)

But our ignorance goes further than that. Not only do we not know how consciousness is generated or how it comes to be associated with brains; we don't even know what consciousness is, what it's made of, what its properties are. We just know that we have it, and trust that everyone else does as well, for we can only be certain of our own consciousness. We cannot explain it in terms of anything but itself. If you have been born blind, all the information I could give you about the physics of light and the neural processes involved in seeing wouldn't bring you any closer to knowing what seeing feels like. Describing the experience itself wouldn't help either. (There is a famous thought experiment by Frank Jackson called "Mary's room" that makes a similar point, although I've always found it a bit confusing. Interestingly, the author later rejected his own argument.)

Consciousness is irreducible. The kind of physical laws we currently know offer no hope whatsoever of ever being able to account for it. It seems to be out of the physical world, to be an altogether different thing. Perhaps, contrary to what is assumed, it isn't even generated by physical processes. Perhaps we're floating in a sea of pre-existing consciousness that crystallises around certain physical structures imbuing them with subjectivity. Perhaps consciousness is some kind of substance that doesn't abide by the same spatio-temporal laws as matter and energy, and cannot possibly be apprehended through them because it manifests only partially in the known dimensions of the universe. Who knows?

Apart from being an utter mystery, consciousness is our most fundamental reality, the only thing we can be completely sure of (that's what Descartes meant when he said cogito ergo sum) and also what makes us and the universe truly alive. Just imagine a universe without subjective experience, with no one in it to perceive it. Imagine human beings (if we could still call them so) with no consciousness. They'd be as good as dead. It is for a reason that these hypothethical people with no consciousness are called zombies in the philosophy of mind. As for the universe as a whole, consciousness could be construed as the way it has developed to know itself.

The issue of the existence of subjective experience, sometimes referred to as the "hard problem" of consciousness, divides the philosophical community in several camps (not so much the scientific community, where the philosophical subtleties are usually overlooked). There is no such thing as a moderate, tentative, provisional view on the hard problem. People tend to be passionate believers in their respective positions, as is my case. There are reductive physicalists (consciousness is the physical state of the brain, full stop), non-reductive physicalists (consciouness is physical but it isn't reducible to the physical activity of the brain; it supervenes it), epiphenomenalists (consciousness is a by-product of brain activity with no causal role), eliminative materialists (subjective experience doesn't exist, it is some kind of misconception [crikey!]), substance dualists (mind and matter are two different substances; not a very popular view nowadays), ...

A very interesting consideration to make concerns the causal link between consciousness and the physical world. The vast majority of philosophers would ridicule the idea that consciousness has any kind of causal role. It would, at best, be an epiphenomenon mirroring the physical state of the brain. The physical world is causally closed: anything that happens in the physical world is caused by something else happening in the physical world. Consciousness doesn't make any difference: it is pretty much irrelevant, a nice but useless bonus. In other words, if consciousness didn't exist in our universe, everything else would be exactly the same as it is. This leads to the logical possibility of the existence of the aforementioned philosophical zombies: people that would be just like us, except they wouldn't have subjective experience. They would be physiologically happy, structurally sad, functionally angry. They would talk about philosophy, listen to music and fall in love, but they wouldn't actually feel a thing. They would be like machines or computer programs. That's some grim science fiction scenario, but it is logically possible. The weirdest thing is that those zombies, as they are identical to us in every physical respect, would also be baffled (funtionally, that is) by their having consciousness (which they don't have). They would write books and blogs about it, and they would even wonder (again, functionally, like a computer program) about the possibility of there being people like them except with no consciousness (not being able to know they don't actually have it), i.e. zombies (not know that that's exactly what they are), and they would regard that as a grim science fiction scenario.

That is mad, but it is the logical conclusion of most philosophers' position. Many of them reject the validity of zombie thought experiments. Some wouldn't even let you carry on after saying "if consciousness didn't exist in our universe", objecting that consciousness as you understand it already doesn't exist. In any event, the most widespread position is that our thinking that we are conscious has nothing to do with our actually being conscious. David Chalmers is the best known advocate of this position, which is a shame, because he's one of the cleverest chaps in the field of consciousness studies, but this idea is completely bonkers. He suggests that our being conscious and our thinking that we're conscious must have their roots in the same processes, that give rise to both consciousness and the idea that we are conscious. The problem with that is how can we be sure we are conscious? That argument might well have been proposed by a zombie! I could be a zombie and I wouldn't know! Why not do away with consciousness altogether then? Consciousness poses an impossible problem to our conception of the universe. It is something that we would think we have regardless of whether or not we actually have it. There are two possibilities then: 1. we really are conscious, and the problem of explaining consciosness remains, or 2. we think we are conscious, but consciousness doesn't exist, so we only have to explain why we're fooling ourselves (which is something we do all the time anyway). Why would a philosopher choose to believe the much more complicated first possibility? For fun?

My view, somehow more traditional, is that we think we're conscious because we actually are, and if we weren't we wouldn't be able to understand what consciousness is. In other words, zombies wouldn't be able to understand the concept of consciousness. That implies that consciousness makes a difference in the physical universe (we think about it, talk about it, write about it) which is absolutely taboo in today's science and philosophy, but to me it is so self-evident that there is no way I would capitulate to the zeitgeist. The only "professional thinker" I've come across that holds this view is Avshalom Elitzur. He's not very well know at all but it is worth listening to what he has to say on the subject. You can check out his article "Consciousness makes a difference: A reluctant dualist’s confession" (you can't get more self-explanatory than that!).

I hope it is clear what's so special about consciousness from a philosophical standpoint. But what does it have to do with spirituality? To begin with, the conscious mind is where all the really important stuff happens: joy, sadness, love, pleasure, beauty. Everything that's relevant to us ultimately relates to a conscious mental state. All our motivation, no matter how shallow or deep, derives from the pursuit of certain kinds of mental states and the avoidance of others. Then the question arises of what's left when you strip consciousness of its usual objects (through the practice of meditation) or whether consciousness can exist with no object. You can become aware of ever subtler kinds of objects. You usually begin with your breathing, thoughts and coarse physical sensations. Then you see behind that and become acquainted with sensations you had never really paid attention to (one doesn't often pay attention to the feeling of wanting to open one's eyes, the feeling of a posture, or the feeling of "what am I doing this for"). You then go beyond that and get to a feeling of just being, of presence, a kind of inner aura of indeterminate consciousness. It is a calm and mysterious place. But you can get even beyond that. Or so they say. You can go deeper and deeper and eventually "penetrate to the ultimate ground state of consciousness, prior to the conceptual demarcations of subject and object, mind and matter, and even existence and nonexistence. This primordial consciousness, is metaphorically described as being empty and luminous, and its has never been sullied by afflictive imbalances of any kind." ("A Science of Consciousness: Buddhism (1), the Modern West (0)", by Alan Wallace) In other words, you blow you mind out in a way that makes everything fall into place and you understand everything that needs to be understood. That's where I have to take their word for it, and at the same time be sceptical about it. In any event, this consciousness thing is cool beyond words, and everything seems to suggest that playing with it is the way forward.