I’ve been blessed by two very smart sons, one of whom has been engaging me on philosophy of mind over the last month or so. Through these discussions, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking through what I really believe about consciousness. I come at it with a trio of prejudices. First, my faith is a resurrection faith. That prevents me from agreeing with dualist (mind and body are separate) or emergent theories of mind (consciousness is a perhaps accidental result of our various parts). Second, I believe that my experience in contemplative prayer indicates that I am not my brain. I’m going to temporarily set aside as out of scope to this article the fact that many physicalist neuroscientists would argue this is an illusion of control and that my brain has a kind of default network that creates my sense of self, giving me a false narrative that there is an eternal “I,” that is controlling my brain and thoughts. I will simply say here that my direct experience is that I am much more than a brain in a meat carriage. Finally, I and several of my friends and family have had post-mortem and near-death experiences that tell me that our consciousness is more than an emergent phenomenon from evolution, or an illusion created by a convenient brain narrative.
Yet, my sense is that many people do not have these experiences. You can pray and meditate and never get the sense that your existence is more than matter. Maybe you’ve never seen a ghost or are happy explaining NDEs away as the comforting chemical by-product of a dying brain. Many people are pure materialists who assume that the world can be explained entirely mechanically or mechanistically. So why wouldn’t consciousness also have a mechanical explanation?
Editorial aside: Before moving on with my thoughts below, I want to credit David Bentley Hart’s writings and lectures on mind and consciousness. I don’t have footnotes for you, because though I know his words have guided my own here, I cannot point you to exact literary locations for references. I’ve read many of his writings, tried to absorb them into my own thinking as possible, and undoubtedly mistaken many of the arguments along the way. You would do well to read him yourself and if you do, take along two dictionaries because the man’s vocabulary may be larger than a single volume.
If you approach mind and consciousness through purely mechanical means, you typically end up in one of two places. You may be a Cartesian dualist, in which you believe the physical being or your body is somehow operated by a separate soul. Or you believe that consciousness — and with it intention, abstract thought, and appreciation of truth, beauty and morality — emerges from matter in a mechanical monism that thinks such things as intention can emerge from unguided physicality. In other words, you believe that parts without meaning – say atoms – can somehow generate meaning and intention if we simply have enough of them interacting.
This creates a kind of false alternative where physicalists think that if they can disprove dualism, they can assert once and for all that consciousness is emergent from matter. But take a step back from this argument and it becomes apparent why these choices are limited. In these false alternatives you can only choose that either a spirit is operating a machine, or conversely, a machine is generating the illusion of a spirit.
I can of course appreciate that a neuroscientist is committed to not being influenced by any preconceived metaphysical assumptions. Good science cannot assume God or even assume an ultimate cause, let alone a resurrection faith. Science can only objectively measure the material, so it is entirely focused on the material. It seems like a natural jump to many scientists from only being able to observe the material world to assuming all that exists is material. Or perhaps more generously, many have given up on metaphysics and ultimate causes that can never be observed physically or mechanically. So instead of a God in which we find our very being, science gave us the Deist’s God, the great watchmaker. Or modern Christian intelligent design, which can be argued against even by such poor philosophers as Richard Dawkins. Of course there is no great watchmaker of the intelligent design variety. So, it is easy for Dawkins to dismiss the watchmaker as a cause while he misunderstands what cause really means. When Christians talk about an ultimate cause, we do not mean a physical cause that we just keep pushing backward through infinite regress — turtles all the way down — because that is not God that is just one more mechanical explanation.
I don’t have space to take up a dismissal of dualism here. If I’m being honest, I’m tempted by dualism because of the post-mortem and near-death experiences I and my friends have had and the many thousands of NDEs attested to in various accounts. It is the prejudice of my own faith that insists on resurrection that keeps me believing that somehow our consciousness and matter are meant to be intertwined forever. I will say here that the main problem I have with dualism is that it still fails to explain why we are both spirit and matter and how they come to interact. The flip side of that coin for me is the physicalist argument that somehow mind — especially the unique and intentional inner experience of our lives and our world — is a result of evolving physical structures.
So, if a modern philosophy of mind dismisses dualism, it’s left trying to explain how mind and consciousness emerges from matter. One answer is that it is just an illusion. Another answer is what is known as panpsychism which posits that consciousness is a property of all matter. The problem with the former is that we all intuitively live our lives as if consciousness is not an illusion. We operate as if our abstract thought, self-awareness and opinions of truth, beauty and justice are as real as our physical bodies from which such “illusions,” emerge. If consciousness is an illusion, then what, pray tell, is experiencing that illusion if not consciousness itself? Panpsychism is no better of an explanation because it simply punts the football down to a lower level of matter. Instead of explaining the existence of consciousness, it pushes it down into ever smaller yet still material parts. It says that if you can get small enough – subatomic – you can still find the presence of consciousness. But why? That lacks any explanatory usefulness. But an even bigger problem with panpsychism is that consciousness in no way seems like a property, such as mass or force. It is intentional and requires a conscious being with the intent to act. No other property I’m aware of has intentionality. Gravity doesn’t choose to be gravitational.
“One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing’s material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively. We tend to presume that if one can discover the temporally prior physical causes of some object—the world, an organism, a behavior, a religion, a mental event, an experience, or anything else—one has thereby eliminated all other possible causal explanations of that object. But this is a principle that is true only if materialism is true, and materialism is true only if this principle is true, and logical circles should not set the rules for our thinking.”
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
Now for the real kicker. What kind of world would exist without consciousness? Consciousness is how we experience the world. We assume a lot when we experience the world, primarily that it can be intentionally experienced and that we all largely share the same experience. You and I understand a coffee table to be the same thing. I’m not convinced that coffee table has an experience of itself. Even stranger, the odds are pretty good you don’t have a coffee table in front of you as you read this, yet you are able to conceptualize it as if it were real.
So, ask yourself, how can existence and consciousness ever be separated? Once again, what kind of world exists without consciousness. That coffee table, seen or imagined, is only a reality because I experience it in my mind. Imagine billiard balls bouncing around randomly from unintelligent forces with no one with a conscious capability to perceive them. Is that anything close to what you call reality or existence? There is no such thing as unintelligible existence. Yet you just now created this imaginary billiard table inside your own mind. That is an experience that is very real, yet you generated it.
Put another way, if you look at a coffee table and can imagine that coffee table and everything that makes up that coffee table, and you believe that your experience of that coffee table is a reasonable reflection of reality, and you can believe that I have a similar experience of that coffee table, then we must believe that experience is a marriage of existence and intelligibility. Why should our existence be wrapped up with intelligibility and intention and purpose?
At this point, the God of classical theism, an infinite mind, strikes me as a much more reasonable solution than anything a pure materialist can offer. Panpsychism cannot explain where consciousness comes from if not an infinite mind, as it is really involved in pushing emergence down to the subatomic level. A metaphor I’ve read somewhere in David Bentley Hart’s writing suggests it is like confusing ink, paper and glue for the meaning of a book. The intelligent human author used those parts to convey meaning, but we shouldn’t confuse the parts with conscious intention and purpose. Meaning requires an intelligent mind and creator. Consciousness–and thus meaning—cannot be illusions after all. If they were illusory, then nothing written here or ever thought, nor any scientific discovery has any true meaning or intentionality. The idea that consciousness is an illusion is self-defeating if we are to believe there is any conscious and intelligent dimension to that thought. If consciousness is an illusion, then so are all our ideas about consciousness, let alone every idea we’ve ever had.
This has been a bit of a brain dump, but my belief is that if a God exists as ultimate mind, unrestricted and infinite intelligence, wisdom, then consciousness makes sense. If you had to pinpoint me today, I would say that God is the ultimate and unified reality in which we all have and share our existence. This is the source of unity as well as of all life. There are not two natures, spirit and matter, no ghost in the machine. We are and ever will be unified with God, the Christ, the Word, the Logos, and God exists within us all as a divine spark off that eternal flame of infinite consciousness. It is what you experience in experience itself through contemplative practice. And this is where material science falls short in understanding mind, but contemplative and spiritual practices offer a truth that is beyond measurement and more directly connected to what existence is. In short, I currently cannot imagine an explanation for consciousness that doesn’t involve a Christian metaphysic. If you want to understand your eternal mind, I suggest sitting in a daily practice of contemplative prayer may be much more valuable than relying on materialist means.
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