The Nature of Consciousness
by Jeremy Wickremer
“Know thyself and you will know the universe and the gods.” Thus said the Oracle at Delphi in Greek mythology. Like the Temple of Apollo built on Mount Parnassus, this essay is built upon the idea that to know all consciousness, know first your own. By starting with the premise that I am conscious, I will explore what it means to be conscious, what are the qualities of this consciousness, and also what consciousness exists beyond human consciousness. I will explore what is perhaps the topic’s primary question; what is consciousness? And perhaps the most intriguing question; which came first, consciousness or the physical universe?
Over the course of this exploration I will address these and other questions. Akin to the expansive nature of consciousness, this voyage will encompass psychology, sociology, anthropology, physics, biology, mythology and philosophy, and span ancient Vedic texts to quantum physics. Much of the scientific research has focused on the mechanics, ie. the how of consciousness, and although this essay will cover the how, I am primarily interested in examining the what and the why. What exactly is consciousness, what is our relationship to it, and what is its purpose? That is, the nature of consciousness. The aim is to deepen our understanding of human consciousness, and thereby deepen our understanding of ourselves, the state of the world, and the wider universe.
Perhaps the most solid foundation upon which I can start to build, is this – I am conscious. What do I mean by that? As I write, I am aware of my thoughts. In 1637, French philosopher René Descartes, famously stated, “dubito, ergo sum, vel, quod idem est, cogito, ergo sum” – “I doubt, therefore I am — or what is the same — I think, therefore I am.” At a glance his conclusion that, I think, therefore I am, appears perfectly valid. However, he could equally have said, I see, or I hear, I taste, I smell, I feel, or I breathe, therefore I am. The essentially point is not that I am thinking, feeling or doing, but that I experience something. It was not the fact that Descartes had a thought that justified his conclusion that he existed, but that he was aware of his thought. Perhaps a more apt, if less poetic conclusion, would have been; I am aware that I am thinking, therefore I am aware of my own existence. Maybe a more valid conclusion would have been; I am aware of experiencing something, therefore I am.
Descartes’ process was based on rational thought. Primarily he placed faith in his own reasoning and logic, even to the extent of reasoning the validity of his own religious faith. He saw the world through a logical lens and it is no surprise that he concluded that thinking was evidence for his existence. It makes sense, given he was a philosopher living in France during the European Enlightenment, an era when reason and intellect were placed atop the mountain peak. We continue to scale that mountain, and today the peak is adorned with the flag of artificial intelligence. My approach is rather to place consciousness at the peak, and any pathway to knowledge, whether it be reason, imagination, intuition, or experience, is equally valid.
Suppose you’d never seen or tasted a pineapple and I tried to describe one to you using logic and written description. You may get some idea of what it was like. If you’d tasted a peach you could try to imagine what a pineapple would be like. However, if I thrust a pineapple into your hands you would have a much better idea. You could see and feel the coarse skin and cut it open and taste its tangy sweetness. Even more than the pineapple, consciousness is best known not through logical thought, but through experience. An advantage we have here though, is that although I do not know if you have ever tasted a pineapple, if you are reading this, I can be fairly sure you are conscious.
Much like Descartes placed his faith in reasoning, and a biologist places their faith in science, my faith is placed in the proposition that consciousness can know consciousness. Beyond being a tool to navigate the external world, it is the gateway to self-knowledge. Much like the glint of recognition when you gaze another in the eyes, I hope that reading this essay will evoke a deep sense of recognition.
Descartes does highlight a distinction to help us define what we mean when we say consciousness. What he described is self-awareness – awareness of what you are doing, feeling, or thinking — which enabled him to conclude that he existed. However, I will use another definition; consciousness as subjective experience, ie. experiencing something, whatever that may be. With this axiom, we can differentiate between that which is conscious and that which is not. We may conclude that a fly has consciousness (even if not self-aware), but a rock doesn’t. We may question whether a tree does if we are unable to conclude whether it has any form of subjective experience.
The problem with the Hard Problem
Once Descartes had concluded that he existed, he proposed that he had two distinct independent parts; mind and body, with mind identified with consciousness. This is often called Dualism or Cartesian consciousness and introduces the mind-body problem: if our bodies and brain structure are physical, while our mind which is aware is non-physical, how can the two interact and affect each other? This has evolved into what philosopher and cognitive scientist, David Chalmers, in 1995 termed the Hard Problem of consciousness, “the challenge of explaining how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective, qualitative experiences.”
Scientists have been battling with this question for many years. Examining the body in ever smaller pieces in an attempt to find the source of consciousness. The proposition is that piece by piece the components of our brains have evolved until they have formed something with exactly the right properties and complexity to be conscious. This is often called the emergent theory of consciousness, ie. consciousness arises from the complex interactions of simpler components.
The problem with all emergent models is that scientists still haven’t been able to identify what exactly these pieces are, and exactly what level of complexity is needed. Is a worm conscious, and if not, why not, what is it missing?What are the hard lines that separate conscious things from non-conscious things?
There are many real-life examples of how the unobservable, non-physical, or invisible interacts with and affects the physical. A few examples are: the double-split experiment, the observer effect, and precognition. Buffalo, elephants and dogs escaped drowning in Thailand, Sri Lanka and Sumatra by fleeing coastal areas for higher ground before the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. You thought of your friend and then they called. There is synchronicity. There is the 100th monkey effect, which comes from observations of a young female macaque monkey on Koshima Island that started washing sand-covered sweet potatoes in the sea. This behaviour gradually spread through the troop until the number of monkeys washing potatoes reached 100 when, without any apparent contact, the behaviour spontaneously spread to other monkeys on different islands. Many people use conscious intention to affect real world outcomes. In everyday life, we think and then speak, we imagine and then create. It follows, that if we conclude that consciousness is non-physical, then the above examples show the physical being influenced by the non-physical. The obvious conclusion to the phenomena observed is that the non-physical does affect the physical, but we don’t know exactly how it does so.
Panpsychism is a view that has an answer to the Hard Problem, asserting, that consciousness is present not only in humans and animals, but everything, however small, throughout the universe. This is the belief expressed by the Indian Brahmin philosophers in the Vedic texts from as early as 700BC when they refer to Atman and Brahman. The Vedas described Atman as the part of you behind your thoughts and senses, and Brahman as the ultimate reality underlying all physical forms, “beyond name and form. Before and after, and in everything”, the irreducible essence of the universe. At the heart of this view is that, not only is consciousness in everything, but that it is intrinsic and fundamental to the universe and everything in it. This is the “dharmakaya” in Buddhism, or “Dao” in Daoism. I will refer to this concept as universal consciousness as opposed to individual consciousness. Although, as we will see, the separation between the two is not so delineated.
The Vedas, Buddhist texts, and “Dao De Jing” are all full of wisdom, with deep insights and sweeping visions of the origin and purpose of existence. However, when they were written their focus tended to be on how to live rather than providing evidence or testable theories of consciousness. Modern day panpsychic models of consciousness face the flip-side of the Hard Problem; the Combination Problem. David Chalmers described this as, “how do the experiences of fundamental physical entities such as quarks and photons combine to field the familiar sort of human conscious experience that we know and love?”Simply put; how do smaller units of awareness combine to form larger units of awareness?
In modern day neuroscience some of the most intriguing models that attempt to solve the combination problem involve the brain’s electromagnetic field (EMF). One of these theories (McFadden 2003) proposes that the brain’s self-generated electromagnetic field binds information to create consciousness, accounting for mind-body differentiation with an energy-matter differentiation. EMF-centred theories are intriguing as the electromagnetic field, like consciousness, is continuous, unified, and time-lag free. However, even if we conclusively demonstrate a correlation between the brain’s EMF and consciousness, we face the dilemma of whether the brain is the producer or the receiver of consciousness. Like turning on the radio and thinking that the radio is creating rather than receiving the broadcast. Or perhaps the brain is both a broadcaster and receiver of consciousness? Additionally, in proposing that consciousness is contained within the electromagnetic field these theories once again butt up against the Hard Problem – how exactly does the electromagnetic field produce even simple forms of consciousness?
Unified field theories such as String Theory (Gabriele Veneziano, 1969) also provide a possible theoretical framework for where consciousness could arise. String Theory proposes that the fundamental physics of the universe is one dimensional “strings” vibrating at different frequencies. To incorporate gravity and make the theory work for our world, additional dimensions are required. Perhaps consciousness is to be found in the six or seven dimensions beyond length, width, height and time proposed in string theory?
Quantum physicists are increasingly describing a world which correlates with the world described by panpsychists. Their models also share characteristics with the subjective experience of consciousness; universal and unified. They are finding phenomena that is influenced by the observer, they are finding a world that is interrelated, interconnected and interdependent – they describe a world that is joined up. Unified field theories talk about a “field of potentiality”, describing a world which starts to mirror the qualities of consciousness; continuous and with infinite potentiality.
These findings are reshaping how we view the world. However, the research still focuses on the physical, essentially trying to insert something that has non-physical characteristics into a physical model. The fundamental question remains: are the physical phenomena the scientists observe creating consciousness, or is consciousness creating that which is being observed? There is still a knowledge gap for how the physical and non-physical interact.There is still the experiential gap; the gap between the characteristics of the vibrating particle strings and electromagnetic fields and the subjective human experience. Our experience is coherent, continuous and vastly beyond pure information processing. We experience love, beauty, desire and more. Consciousness revealed under the microscope remains out of grasp.At this point in time, the Hard Problem still exists.
Or does it? When we embrace a dualistic world, we assume a definite separation of the physical and the non-physical based on lack of evidence to dispute it, rather than conclusive evidence for it. Our world is full of conceptual and perceived duality: negative and positive; night and day; life and death, physical and non-physical. However, just like we experience day in the Northern Hemisphere, while the Southern Hemisphere experiences night, is there an aspect of ourselves that is experienced in the physical world while we simultaneously experience an aspect in the non-physical world? That which spans and unifies the physical and the non-physical being consciousness. Perhaps the human being is not the two separate things of dualism, perhaps we are the thing that unites the two.
What if the way to find the answers to consciousness are not found by trying to break it down, but through unifying? What if the awareness we experience is already a piece of the whole? The answers are found by looking at how consciousness manifests, by looking at the whole, and looking at relationship. What is consciousness in relation to being human, what is the human being in relation to consciousness? Like Copernicus coming to understand the earth’s true relationship to the sun, through understanding our true relationship to consciousness, we can better understand ourselves and the universe.
Our physical being and conscious mind are interconnected, but distinct, like two sides of the same coin. Or in the language of quantum physics; perhaps we simultaneously exist in more than one dimension. We exist in the dimension of time, space and matter, and we exist in a dimension beyond time, space and matter; a dimension of unity and infinity. Or perhaps dimensions themselves are an illusion, and there is only one.
The fundamental reality of the universe is more mysterious than that of classical Newtonian physics; separate objects moving around and bumping into each other – an observable cause and effect. Instead it is like a vast fabric, and we are a thread in the fabric. The physical part of us threads through to be seen on one side, while there is a non-physical part on the unseen side. The infinite number of threads making up one continuous fabric. One side of our thread is multi-coloured, but finite, the other, invisible, but infinite. This perspective doesn’t solve the mind-body problem as traditionally viewed as it doesn’t give answers for the mystery of how consciousness attaches to and affects physical life forms or vice versa. What it does suggest however, is that consciousness is the more fundamental or enduring aspect of our being and may provide the more enduring answers.
Nature, Nurture, and consciousness
It could be that our bodies and brains are just so complex that we need many more years and more advanced scientific apparatus to fully understand ourselves. However, this complexity or sophistication is exactly what leads to my interest in looking at the centre — at the human experience.
If we agree that continuity and unity are defining qualities of consciousness, in the spirit of Occam’s razor the most obvious thing to do would be to explore the whole and our relationship to it. Instead of trying to break down the world and look for evidence of consciousness in the minute, I am interested in observing the whole, the human being. The evidence that is right before us. It is the most direct and most useful approach to understanding ourselves as conscious beings – it is where consciousness is found and its nature is revealed. My assertion is that our physical and non-physical sides are part of the same thread, and that aspects of the observable side of our nature reveal the nature of our non-physical side. This is supported by my proposition that consciousness can know consciousness. In fact, to go a step further, that the purpose of consciousnessis to know consciousness.
How could we be conscious beings and not manifest the qualities of consciousness? We expect our biological bodies of flesh and bone to follow the nature of biology. We expect our physical bodies of mass to follow the law of gravity. In the same way, we should expect ourselves as conscious beings to follow the nature of consciousness. Consciousness is present in all healthy human beings and thus by looking at aspects of human nature that are universal, aspects of consciousness will be revealed. The challenge is to discern which aspects of our behaviour are the result of consciousness and which are the result of biology or upbringing – nature or nurture. The proposition here is that there are three forces that influence human behaviour; nature, nurture, and consciousness.
Consciousness is like the canvas upon which nature sketches our outline and nurture paints us in colour. The brightly coloured painting more easily apparent than the canvas beneath. However, let’s try to reveal it.
The games we play
Let us start from birth. There are two games that every healthy newborn baby and every child plays in every family in every known culture across the world. You have played these same two games. The first game every baby usually plays is peek-a-boo. One of the parents, or both, hides their face behind their hands for a few moments and then reveals themselves, provoking a smile or fits of giggles from their newborn baby. This most likely serves a development purpose, it reassures the baby that their parents can disappear, or leave the room, and they will reappear. It allows the baby to rest in peace, while the parents can get on with other important tasks. As the baby gains confidence in the game, the parents up the stakes, hiding behind their hands longer and longer before revealing themselves to squeals of joy.
As we grow, we start to crawl, walk and run, and the other game we all play as children is hide and seek. It is a more involved version of peek-a-boo where we hide and seek out other children. Hiding away in dark corners, waiting quietly in suspense, and then laughing or screaming as we are found by the seeker.This hiding and seeking, so ingrained in our essence, points to the nature of our existence, to the nature of consciousness. We are conscious beings, playing the game of hiding and seeking. We are playing the game of life that we all play. Finding ourselves through play, in art, in work, in sport, in nature, and in other people. We are consciousness hiding from itself and seeking itself. Consciousness starts us off in life with this big clue as to our nature and purpose, while revealing that there is something much vaster to discover.
From our perspective, it seems like we are hiding from and seeking human consciousness. We are living a human experience, seeking to find ourselves through play, through creativity, through relationships. We are self-expressing and self-seeking. If this behaviour is present in all humans, ie. that it is our nature to explore or play at experiencing and finding our own consciousness, or reflections of it, and we come from the same source. then we might well conclude that this is also the nature of universal consciousness or Brahman. So, universal consciousness is also playing the game of experiencing itself and playing hide and seek with itself. And how else could an omnipresent infinite consciousness do this, other than to reproduce itself in an infinite number of individual fragments causing itself to hide from itself?
In order to know and fully experience itself as one infinite consciousness, it would seek to experience the opposite – finite and separate. Universal consciousness rippling out to separate and experience itself as an infinite number of occurrences. This is the perspective of one infinite consciousness – we are as its flickering flames from an eternal fire, it is our source; source of life and consciousness.
This view of life, that we are fragment of a whole may seem implausible as we live our day to day lives. It flips the perspective from ourselves as human beings experiencing consciousness, to consciousness experiencing being human. However, the clues to our true nature and the nature of consciousness go far beyond a game of hide and seek. They are interwoven through every aspect of our lives. We will look at these in a moment, but first let’s first consider why we feel so resolutely our experience of life as separate physical entities.
Usually we’re not reading or writing essays on consciousness, but out experiencing life through our senses. What exactly is a sense? Let’s take hearing. I can hear the neighbour’s dog barking, it’s very useful as it warns me that there may be danger nearby. Very useful in protecting and preserving my physical body. However, there are another 700 dogs barking in my town, and perhaps yet another two million barking across the world at any one time. These dogs exist and they also have something to say, however I can’t hear them. If I had ears that were open to all, I could hear everything in the world simultaneously. However, this wouldn’t be very helpful to keeping me alive. If we heard every dog that barked within a twenty mile radius, we would likely miss the close-by one that really mattered. Hearing would lose its value to survival. So my ears, in combination with my brain, filters. My ears are essentially filtering and focusing devices, limiting what I can hear.
We tend to think of our senses as enabling us to receive information from the external world. True to an extent, but what they are actually doing is limiting, or filtering, to a tiny fraction, what we can experience at any one time. Our human eyes, ears, brain and nervous system has a limited spectrum of light and wavelength of sound that we can experience.Some animals have entirely different perception to humans. Sharks can sense electromagnetic pulses, bats hunt primarily using echolocation, bees see a wider range of colours than humans, including ultraviolet light. Our sensory experience of the world is a tiny subjective fragment of what exists. Our senses and brain focus on preserving the separate physical fragment which is our body. We focus on a tiny physical portion of reality because if we don’t our bodies may suffer pain or even death.
In 1859 naturalist, geologist, and biologist, Charles Darwin published his treaty, On the Origin of Species.In 1864 Herbert Spencer coined the phrase that many of us associate with Darwin; survival of the fittest. This phrase seems to tie perfectly with what our senses and physical body focus on. When examined closely, what lies at the heart of Darwin’s culturally influential theory is adaption. It is the most well adapted that are most likely to survive. Darwin acknowledged the difficulty of explaining the emergence of consciousness, indeed, a theory of natural selection based on random mutations had no need for it. However, his observations about adaption are something that help us profoundly understand humanity’s place in the world as part of a living interconnected ecosystem. Although widely misquoted and misinterpreted, his observations begin to paint a picture of a being whose existence is tied to everything around. Darwin appreciated the crucial role that our senses perform in helping us adapt, survive and thrive in our environment. This combination of information about the outside world from our senses, and focus on survival reinforces our experience and view that we are primarily separate physical entities. We feel physical pain and pleasure, we have immediate physical needs to be fulfilled, and we seek to navigate the world to avoid threats while establishing safety and comfort.
However, we also have a mind with the capacity to go beyond our senses. We have a conscious mind that focuses on the immediate and important to help us survive, and we have a sub-conscious mind that contains vast depths, and performs things beyond our awareness. We have imagination and intuition. On this dichotomy, in his book The Metaphoric Mind, Bob Samples wrote, “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.”
Darwin and Samples highlight one of the main dynamics of human existence – that we have both an animalistic and transcendent existence. We are nature and nurture, unified by consciousness. Consciousness is what ties us together, giving us coherent awareness of life.
There are many ways we seek and experience life beyond our day-to-day individual physical self. Considering this, lets look at the next example of human nature which gives us an insight into the nature of consciousness. Something that is present across all cultures, and in which all humanity partakes, something that ties us all together.