Is consciousness a product only of matter, or of life?
No-one knows the answer to this question so it can’t hurt to present one line of thinking here. We will approach the issue not by asking whence arises consciousness, but rather by asking what prevents consciousness from arising. Begin with the assumption that your consciousness depends to some extent on your brain, and that the wall opposite you is not conscious. Since the wall contains a similar number of atoms as your brain, what prevents it from being conscious?
Bob has been talking about links and networks a lot on his great blog Heroes not Zombies, and we can plausibly use the idea of connectedness to explore one way to answer this new question. The elements of your brain are massively interconnected. There are trillions and trillions of connections in your brain; more, it is said, than there are atoms in the universe. Conversely, a molecule in the wall is only locally connected to a few neighbours, with some smeary global influence from all the other atoms in the wall, and indeed the entire universe.
It could be, therefore, that consciousness is a product of the complexity of interconnection of the elements of the ground on which it operates. Life is a process of maintaining complexity, working against entropy by absorbing energy from the environment until death and the second law of thermodynamics win. Consciousness tends to arise in living matter, we may say, because in such systems complexity is produced and maintained. Life is sufficient for consciousness, but not necessary.
If interconnectedness of a large number of elements is a necessity for consciousness, we may ask whether humanity as a whole, or perhaps all life on Earth seen as a great interconnected web, is conscious. This is one aspect of Gaia Theory. It may seem a bit silly to us, an insult to our common sense, since we don’t feel like humanity or all of life is participating in some great consciousness, we are not aware of any greater awareness. But this certainty drops startlingly away when you realise that a single neuron is not conscious either. A single neuron is unaware of the part it plays in giving rise to a conscious you, but it does so nevertheless. Do you in turn give rise to a conscious Earth?
(Public Domain, courtesy of NASA.)
Filed under: big picture, mathematics, science | Tagged: big picture, complexity, consciousness, emergence, gaia, gaia hypothesis, gaia theory, life, link, math, mathematics, maths, network, science
That is an excellent point about neurons! It’s entirely possible that we play some part in a greater consciousness, but are unaware of it. And who knows, perhaps Gaia in turn makes up a neuron of an even bigger network, and so on and so on….
Hi gukseon, and thanks for your input.
You comment made me think again about what I had written and wonder whether it was a little, well, mystical or New-Agey. I suppose it is, but the difference is that we should be able to come up with a flasifiable hypothesis (or series of such) to test this Gaia idea, whereas being content to merely say “imagine if . . .” rests firmly in the “mystery” school
I’m glad you start off with no one knows. I don’t think you should limit this consciousness idea to humanity alone. We humans do tend to get rather puffed up with ourselves at this stage in our evolution.
I have the idea you can pose this question with the brain we have but not answer it.
Phil, it’s not that I’m too lazy to look this up, but I read somewhere about there being a lot of space in the brain and really thoughts are energy patterns that exist for only an instant. I think this is at the subatomic level and I am out of my depth here. The idea being that everything we think and know about life, the universe and everything is in a state of decay and being born at the same time.
I know this is hopelessly muddled. Can you shed some light on what I have only half remembered?
And, I am having a bash at the linked book, too.
Hi Christopher.
I agree that we shouldn’t limit this to humanity alone, and the Gaia theory doesn’t really put humans on a pedestal too much, as far as I understand. It always makes me wonder whether we do actually get a hint of the consciousness we might be giving rise to when we consider Jung’s ideas. Purely speculative, like Jung.
I don’t know enough about brain function to back up or deny what you say. I do think, however, that many things become hard-wired into the brain - indeed, the passage from short-term to long-term memory involves the forming of permanent circuits of neurons corresponding to certain ideas. Or aspects of them. Or some other kind of inter-related but physical method of storing information. How so is still a big, but fascinating, mystery. Will we one day be able to look at physical structure to read minds, or download them into a more stable matrix? Peter F Hamilton’s Nights Dawn trilogy of scifi novels contain vast living space stations part of whose consciousness is fomed by the totality of the dowloaded personalities of deceased inhanitants. (Brilliant trilogy of books, btw.)
But in general nothing is permanent, we are all just patterns moving through space-time. No permanent entity exists in your physical body (not even the atoms or bits of atoms) and apparently no permanent thing exists of your personality either. It also seems like there is no little homunculus controlling your brain; “you” are an illusion.
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Feel that it’s the other way around. Consciousness is the basis of all stuff in this universe. To me, Consciousness means the same as God.
Please see Peter Russell’s excellent exposition at:
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/%7Esai/prussell.htm.
One of my Gurus once said: The inferior devotee says, “God exists, but He is very far off, up there in heaven.” The mediocre devotee says, “God exists in all beings as life and consciousness.” The superior devotee says, “It is God Himself who has become everything; whatever i see is only a form of God. It is He alone who has become Maya, the universe, and all living beings. Nothing exists but God.”
Douglas Adams made many ideas in physics understandable by playing with them. I remember the piece in Hitchhikes Guide to the Galaxy where he describes the inter-galactic battle fleet attacking planet Earth but due to an mismatch in size the whole fleet was swallowed by a small dog.
Srinivas Shastri,
Is the wall conscious in your view or a manifestation of consciousness? I don’t mean this to be overly cryptic. But when we say conscious I am thinking we are talking about self consciousness and would that mean the ability to act in some way. Or is there anything that would not be conscious in your view?
Hi Paul,
I agree, your post does have mystical overtones—although to me, that’s not necessarily a bad thing! I am curious though as to how you would test the “Gaia” hypothesis? I can’t think of a test that would be accepted by most mainstream scientists.
Srinivas,
You have essentially hit on the key point here (which Paul makes explicit in the title): is consciousness an “emergent property” of the universe? Or, as some schools of Hinduism and many mystics in other traditions suggest, is it that which underlies all that is?
It’s a fascinating question….anyone interested in this question should read Bernard Haisch’s book God Theory, which comes to a similiar conclusion as , but from a scientific standpoint. Like Srinivas, for Haisch God is essentially consciousness become the universe.
Great discussion, and very thought provoking. That bit at the end of your original post Phil brought back to my memory how my best school friend and I used to go out star gazing at night and as we looked up at the Milky Way and all the constellations sometimes we had this thought - what if the stars we saw were each atoms of a huge creature and we were so small we existed in the spaces between its atoms? Used to boggle our minds!
Hi everyone, and thanks for some great comments.
Srinivas, your notion that consicousness is more fundamental than the physical universe sends the mind reeling, doesn’t it? I’m not sure which I would find more amazing, that matter gives rise to consciousness or the other way around (or that we could tell either way!). But I think we’re getting tied up in poorly-defined concepts. If consicousness is fundamental then it is a “something”, it has some physical existence, persisting on some substrate. This is still a material description, just using different materials than what we are used to.
There’s the other issue of whether you could actually tell the difference between a universe in which (what we now call) matter is fundamental and one in which consicousness is. I think Donald Hoffman has done some work on this.
Christopher, we have indeed lost a great advocate for fun science, that comic giant Douglas Adams. There’s a wonderful talk of his here, and I’ll quote one little snippet relevant to this discussion:
Gukseon, what is it with people lately thinking my name is Paul? This has only ever happened in the last two weeks, and several times at that
Anyway, I think you’re right that it would be very hard to come up with a falsifiable test of whether Gaia is conscious, but it’s a fascinating challenge which I hope people are paying attention to. Whether or not the Earth’s biota couples with the physical landscape and environment to form a self-regulating (but not necessarily consicous) system is one of the main questions of the Gaia hypothesis, and I believe aspects of it are falsifiable.
You come back to the question of which is more fundamental, mind or matter. I maintain that until we can distinguish between those universes, the question remains meaningless (but important, if that makes sense).
Bob, I know exactly what you mean, I used to do the same! Of course, you can go inwards and ask whether each atom of your body contains a universe and so on. Weird stuff.
Christopher,
Can’t really say whether the wall is conscious or a manifestation of consciousness, because there’s no way i can get feedback from the wall
However, Swami Ashokananda said that trees have the consciousness of 16-year old girls! More at:
http://shastrix.blogspot.com/2007/03/ode-to-tree.html
Gukseon,
i’d also recommend the interview with Amit Goswami at:
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/%7Esai/goswam1.htm
Phil,
The concept makes the mind boggle, but i’d go with Sherlock Holmes who said that, after you’ve eliminated all the possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, is the Truth.
Sri Ramakrishna says that Consicousness is like water, with a dimension between 1 and 2. Probably, it’s a fractal
Sometime back, scribbled a sort of haiku:
The Infinite One
Cannot be understood
Only experienced.
Think that sort of sums up my feeling to the whole shebang. You got to XP that for yourself. Personally know one guy who’s seen the Formless. Since i’ve not had that XP, i would go with people i trust and have XPed that. For instance, Swami Vivekananda’s XP of Cosmic Consciousness at:
http://bp1.blogger.com/_t9sretC2Cxk/Ryq9kSno4eI/AAAAAAAAAmo/Yw5sS_1FCm0/s1600-h/XPOfCosmicConsciousness.jpg
Hi Srinivas. I’d go with Holmes on a lot of things (apart possibly from the heroin). In the present discussion, we haven’t yet ruled either of the alternatives, so we can’t yet apply his maxim. But it’s worth bearing in mind, since reality can be stranger than fiction.
Hmm, the dimension of consciousness? I have no idea how you might define that.
Thanks for continuing this interesting discussion!
Thanks, Phil, but there’s no way one can _understand_ consciousness, you can only get to experience It, that Inexplicable Thingumajig.
Sri Ramakrishna says that while bhakti (devotion/faith) is given access to the inner courtyard (of Consciousness), jnana (knowledge/reason) can access only the outer courtyard.
Further, as it is said in the Katha Upanishad (I.2.23): “This Self* cannot be attained by instruction, nor by intellectual power, nor even through much hearing. It is to be attained only by the one whom the Self chooses. To such a one the Self reveals itself”.
* Self = Consciousness
Thanks, Srinivas. I sympathise with what you are saying, but I’m not convinced we won’t be able to understand consicousness with more work - maybe a lot more work, maybe more than there is time left to the human race, but I don’t see the benefit in throwing up our hands and declaring it to be beyond understanding.
On the other hand, the experience of consicousness itself may well be beyond words, or is better conveyed in the language you have used above. It’s a bit like saying that in principle all mathematics can be written in extremely formal, computer-checkable language, but that’s not what maths is, and it would become meaningless to humans were we to do so.
Fair enough, Phil. Hope you don’t mind what follows, as i have always put my money where your mouth was. So here goes:
Am willing to pay USD 25,000 (that’s about a million bucks in my currency, INR) to anyone who can distill Consciousness out of matter and show it to me.
The payout is guaranteed since there’ll be no doubts whatsoever when one sees the real McCoy.
Hi everyone,
As pointed here already, the Hindu philosophy (especially the Advaita Vedanta school of thought) holds that unalloyed universal consciousness (UUC) is the only primary entity that has-ever-existed, is-existing, will-ever-exist. The whole universe is only a condensation / manifestation of that UUC. Now, what we call “life” (which is ofcourse part of the universe) is a successive manifestation of UUC in varying degrees.
Dead matter or wall - Unconscious (but still ultimately a condensation of UUC)
Plants - rudimentary self consciousness
Animals - improved self consciousness
Humans - self awareness (development of thought).
Next-Human - UUC
Anyway, it is a clearly stated proposition in Hindu philosophy, that man is evolving and next stage of evolution is a further manifiestation of UUC and full realization of UUC. Whether one believes this or not, is ofcourse a matter of cultural belief, intuition, etc etc.
However, i wonder if there is a principle in the above scheme — that a lower form of consciousness can *never* comprehend a higher form. Like a Dog trying to understand what human consciousness is like. Similarly, i wonder if our human consciousness (dominated by thought) is adequate to comprehend higher state which is UUC. My personal intuition (which i can back with some degree of reasoning) is that thought can never comprehend what higher consciousness is.
And, that is perhaps the root-principle of meditation, which basically constitutes a gradual receding of thoughts, until one’s consciousness rests in the space between thoughts. And that, *apparently*, is a blissful state, which is UUC itself.
Wow, Srinivas, that’s a very generous and brave offer! You had better clarify the conditions otherwise you might get swamped with applications! Who will the judges be? On what criteria will they assess on potential claims? When does the offer expire?
Hi, Chaitanya, and many thanks for your comment. It is wonderful to have some input from a philosophical tradition outside of the Greek one usual in such conversations. I reread the Bhagavad Gita recently, and thank you for providing the above explanation of advaita vedanta philosophy.
As you point out, however, it all rests on what one is prepared to believe or have faith in. The scientific process aims at a universal culture- and observer-independent grasp of reality. There are many epistemological problems with that, I know, but I worry to what extent a philosophical tradition which remains untestabel can speak authoritatively about the universe. Huge questions, these, aren’t they, and none of us has the answers.
Phil, i’ve always been a betting man
No need to clarify the conditions; when we see Consciousness, we will know.
The offer will expire, of course, with my death.