Last newsletter I talked about subjectivity, which I argued was a cultivated frame through which we saw the world. If we go one step back, then prior to subjectivity is consciousness. If subjectivity is the frame, then consciousness, one could argue, is the experience of looking out.
So what is consciousness? Well, that’s not a particularly easy thing to answer. Let’s take philosopher Thomas Nagel’s definition of consciousness: the feeling of what it is like to be something. Most people can agree that there is a difference between consciousness and unconsciousness and that the boundary between those two points centres on awareness. It’s the feeling. Consciousness implies an inner life; the feeling of being alive to the world. But this opens up a debate which is one of the most divisive and complex questions in the philosophy of mind and neuroscience: Why do we feel anything at all?
This is sometimes called “the Hard Problem of Consciousness” (so hard it’s capitalised), a term coined by the philosopher David Chalmers in 1995. According to Chalmers, even if we solve all the mechanical and biological problems of how it is that we come to feel the world around us, this won’t help us to understand why those feelings are there in the first place.
As I type these words I see my hands moving and I hear each keystroke (because I type so loudly I sometimes get scolded in the library) and I feel the cold metal of my laptop on my wrists. There’s also an inner monologue, following these words and casting for the next ones. Why is all of that there? Couldn’t I just be a robot or a computer, functioning perfectly well, but dark inside?
The Hard Problem is hard because there’s no clear answer–if you say that consciousness is there to give meaning to life, then how do you define meaning? Would that imply that life has to proceed consciousness i.e. only by living does consciousness arise? Or does it imply the inverse, that consciousness proceeds life, and that living merely grants access to it? See, it’s hard.
Some philosophers dispute the Hard Problem altogether. For Daniel Dennett, a professor at Tuft’s and one of the world’s most famous atheists, there is no problem whatsoever. Consciousness is just the brain doing its thing. Our experience of the world is just a byproduct of the functioning of the organism. All that feeling you have, it’s nothing more than an exhaust fume belched out by the engine of your being. For him, and philosophers working in his lane, the problem of consciousness will be solved once we better understand the brain. There is so much left to understand, especially when we think about how quantum processes might work at the level of mind, that our inability to solve the Hard Problem of consciousness is simply because we don’t yet have the toolkit to do so.
That might be the case, but I think that is a profoundly sad answer. It would mean that all the suffering we feel is just a waste product of existing and serves no greater function. It would also create the philosophical groundwork to ‘solve’ the problem of suffering altogether–suffering would no longer be a meaningful part of the human condition but a technological problem that could be solved once we understand better the firmware of our minds. Suffering isn’t fun, but I’m not convinced a life without it would be anything to write home about.
Every spiritual tradition has a core component focused upon either the alleviation of suffering or on imbuing suffering with meaning. If we don’t buy Dennett’s argument, then the Hard Problem of consciousness quickly becomes a spiritual one. To ask why we feel is to also ask why we suffer, so here we are in the territory of the book of Job or the Buddhist teachings of Duhkha.
There’s also a question that naturally arises as we go through these different arguments. Are other beings conscious? If consciousness is a product of the brain, then how does it feel to be conscious if you have a radically different brain? This is Thomas Nagel’s argument in his famous essay What is it Like to be a Bat?
Panpsychism is the idea that everything in the natural world is conscious. Consciousness, in this view, is a product of matter. Therefore all things are ‘conscious’ but have varying degrees of ability to perceive themselves as such. In this telling it’s not just us who are conscious (because we have human brains) but our brains act like conduits that channel this wider consciousness.
In the study of psychedelics, which is undergoing a renaissance as psychoactive chemicals like LSD, Ketamine and MDMA are getting FDA approval to be studied as treatments for a huge range of mental health issues, users often report a feeling of ‘oneness’ or experiencing connection with a higher being (which could be, semantically, a universal consciousness). As Michael Pollan notes in his book on psychedelics, after taking mushrooms, “if the experience of transcendence is mediated by molecules that flow through both our brains and the natural world of plants and fungi, then perhaps nature is not as mute as Science has told us, and ‘spirit’ however defined, exists out there––is immanent in nature, in other words, just as countless premodern cultures have believed.”
Perhaps consciousness is too difficult a problem to solve by a human mind itself. Maybe the fact that we are conscious at all prevents us from ‘solving’ the Hard Problem because we exist too firmly within its confines. This position is sometimes referred to as ‘mysterianism’.
So, what are you feeling? Is all of this just a product of your brain? Are you a panpsychic? Are you a mysterian?
More importantly, whichever one of these camps you might fall into, what does this belief do for you? How does your understanding of consciousness then become a subjectivity that shapes your movement through the world and your relation with other beings (human or other)?
This issue of the newsletter was greatly helped through a conversation with Dr. Philip Kurian, a Quantum Biologist at Howard University who reached out to me after my last issue and helped me to really expanding my thinking. Thank you for your time and generosity in speaking with me. Thank you also to Ranjamrittika Bhowmik, a dphil candidate at Oxford, for confirming with me that the Buddhist concept I was searching for was Duhkha. I’m really grateful when these newsletters spark conversations and invitations to new thoughts, so please leave a comment if something speaks to you.