Where does consciousness come from?

"Easy," you might say. "Consciousness is an emergent property resulting from the evolution of Life. It's something we feel as the result of activity going on inside our brains. And it may also be found in the higher-order animals - large mammals... and cephalopods." 

Well - actually, it is not that easy; our paradigm is shifting. If octopuses and squid can be seen to display sentience - why not, in smaller creatures? Why not in the simplest of all life forms?

The leap from Non-Life to Life is something that science has yet to explain. The Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago (I expect the James Webb Space Telescope will help narrow that date down by to within plus/minus a few million years), was the start of our Universe. What happened before the Big Bang - what led up to the Big Bang - is another thing that science has yet to explain.

But happen it did. And a mere 150m to 200m years after Big Bang, the first stars began to form. Within those stars heavy elements were formed from atoms of hydrogen and helium - by-products of nuclear fusion - and from those heavy elements, planets formed. And then after a couple of billion of years - on at least one of the trillions of planets in our immediate cosmic neighbourhood (!!!) - a miracle happened. Life emerged. What was once non-life became living. Simple single-cell life-forms began to evolve, becoming ever more complex animals. Some would go on to form specialist structures called brains, and within those, more and more neurons would appear over time, leading to more neuronal connections and more activity in that brain to process signals from the environment.

In Darwinian terms, the growth of brain power was the result of the survival of the fittest; the more neuronal connections, the better your chance to survive and reproduce. This process - determined by nothing more than natural selection - reached a point (so materialist reductionists would say) when within these brains, something that one could call 'consciousness' suddenly emerged.

Many eminent neurobiologists say that you shouldn't even attempt to inquire about the nature of consciousness - the only worthwhile pursuit, they say, is to look for the brain processes that result in consciousness. This line of thought suggests that consciousness is nothing more an illusory epiphenomenon formed by the sensory inputs that come into the brain from our physical surroundings via our eyes, ears, skin, nose and tongue. And that consciousness is actually just the same as thinking. Therefore, consciousness can be reduced to brain processes. 

This is the 'realist' way of looking at consciousness. The trouble is that science is no nearer discovering a seat of consciousness in the brain than ever it was. Meanwhile more and more scientists are begin to intuit that consciousness is not computational.

But I find the 'realist' way unconvincing; there's an entire Cosmos out there, and all the consciousness that we know of is bottled up within the skulls of a few billion sentient creatures here on Planet Earth? That don't feel right!

So what is it then?

Panpsychism (which comes in many flavours) posits that consciousness is a fundamental property of the Universe; without it, say some philosophers and physicists, matter could not even exist. But the next question - one that divides those who do not believe that consciousness is merely an emergent property of matter - is whether consciousness is something that's present in the background - a kind of cosmic sea within which everything swims - or whether consciousness exists in discreet units; granular consciousness that is not the background, only present within the quarks that form matter, consciousness as a fundamental (rather than emergent) property of matter - along with mass, charge and spin. If indeed it is the 'sea', the 'background', then maybe the dark energy and the dark matter that science has yet to explain is actually conscious. Maybe flora and lesser fauna also experience consciousness - but to a lower degree than what we human feel? If consciousness is an inherent property of matter, it suggests that the non-life/life barrier is not as fundamental as we thought. "Is this table conscious?" asks Robert Lawrence Kuhn in several of his Closer To Truth podcasts on the subject. I'd be happy to accept that the tree from which the table was made did once experience some low level of proto-consciousness - nothing beyond the awareness of existence, of swaying in the wind, of feeling water in the roots, the sentience of being cut down. But once dead - is the wood from which the table is made still conscious? 

Could machines become conscious - when levels of complexity within computers start reaching that of sentient life, could they demonstrate that they too are conscious? Philosophically tricky... If biological life is the only substrate within which consciousness is to be found - no. But if consciousness really is everywhere, and a machine is given the means to merely voice that consciousness - then why not?

With each passing year, scientists picking away at the nature of reality find that it's stranger and harder to pin down than it seemed a century ago. There are so many things we know we don't know; acknowledging that makes us suddenly more open to ideas that once sounded crazy.

Maybe string theory (another hotly-debated attempt by science to present a theory of everything), explains that all matter is somehow connected? We just don't know. But at least today, serious scientists can talk about consciousness openly as a mysterious subject, perhaps a fundamental property that underlies the entire Cosmos and guides its unfolding.

This time last year:
Unpicking the Rational Revolution
[one to read after reading this piece - unplanned - synchronicity!]

This time two years ago:
Ride to Roztocze

This time three years ago:
Poznań and Wrocław - two boomtowns

This time nine years ago:
Scaling the highest peak in Wales

This time ten years ago:
Beaches of the north coast of the Llyn Peninsula

This time 11 years ago: 
The Accursed Soldiers - a short story

This time 12 years ago:
Driving impressions of the Toyota Yaris
[12 years on - still rock-solid! No need to change.]

This time 14 years ago:
Poland's dry summer

This time 15 years ago:
The UK's wettest summer ever