Consciousness is never something I’ve thought very deeply about in the past. In my younger days I would’ve thought of it as the soul that is a separate substance from the body. Later on I would’ve seen it as an emergent property of physical processes where consciousness is simply the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. However, upon reading David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being Consciousness Bliss, I actually engaged for the first time what all the features of consciousness entail and whether or not emergence or other aspects of mechanical nature are sufficient to explain it.
It has been said by others that consciousness is “being aware that you are aware”. It is not a feature of measurement, that quantiative, but the actual phenomenon of experience, the qualitative. It would require neuroscientists to be able to not just show correlations between brain states and consciousness, but actually explain how it is we experience the reddness of a rose, the pain of a stubbed toe, the love of spouses or parents and children. These are experiences that cannot be measured, but can only be experienced in the first person.
Furthermore, consciousness isn’t just awareness, it is also intentionality. As I am typing this, I have the intention of communicating information that I have been thinking about. I got my wife flowers for our anniversary with the inteion of showoing my love. In order to establish consciousness in a purely mechanical nature you woud have to go from mindless matter states that have no ability to exercise intenion whatsoever, to minds that are able to intend, take action, and achieve goals. Evolution doesn’t actually work like this. We speak as if it does, but evolution itself is random mutations that sometimes bring about the greater chances of survival and passing on the genes, but more often than not don’t actually do so. There are atheist philosophers who have seen this problem and acknowledge that naturalism is not enough to account for consciousness and it seems like they are right.
There are different views of what consciousness is one can hold, aside from Cartesian dualism that in mind mind is unnecessary and doesn’t actually work. Why not? Because Ockham’s razor seems to eliminate its need. We can account for some correlations between mind and brain, and so that would seem to be the nail in the coffin for two separate substances. There is also panpsychism, which holds that mind is embedded in all of nature. Which is fine I suppose by itself, but doesn’t seem to go far enough. There is dual aspect monism, whcih is championed by scientists like the late Physicist and Anglican Priest John Polkinghorne, which holds that cosnciousness is the information bearing pattern of who a person is. Like turning a coin it is two aspects of one substance.
I find that compelling, but what I appreciate even more so is teh idealism of David Bentley Hart which holds that all consciousness of finite beings are instantiations of the one infinite consciousness which is God. In this case matter, and the universe as a whole is the expression of the infinite mind of God which is what makes it so we can have a rational intelligent grasp of the ordering of the cosmos. Our minds are able to grasp its rational structures because they reflect the ordering of the divine mind. As a Christian this makes much more sense than a naturalistic account of reality, especially believe that God isn’t just infinte consciousness, but the infinite being that gives rise to all finite being. The reason anything is at all.
In a future post, I want to go into his chapter on Bliss, and the four causes and how recovering those makes more sense out of our actual experience of reality.