The role of consciousness in human spirituality - Lent 2023: Day six

Consciousness, the subjective experience of being aware of one's existence, is, I believe, fundamental to what it means to be alive. And indeed, being aware of being conscious is what it means to be human. But does consciousness transcend our brain and our body? And survive biological death?

All my life, I have had intimations that it can. Only weak hints; yet persistent and consistent, familiar over time, since childhood until today. 

But how to prove this? I don't think you can - nor can science disprove it. Try as science may to reduce consciousness to a phenomenon that arises from the physical structures within brains - it can't.

Perhaps it might - in 30 or 40 years. Perhaps artificial intelligence will go on to acquire not just a characteristic that resembles consciousness - but that would suggest consciousness is computational. Again, my intuition is that consciousness is not computational.

I cannot begin to posit in scientific terms how consciousness works. All I know is that it is the basis of me being me, sentient and aware. Consciousness is not the same as intellect; I am sure that a horse or cow, cat or dog or rat or mouse all possess consciousness without necessarily being aware that they are conscious. Is an ant or spider conscious, or just keratin-covered automata? Is a rosebush or pinetree conscious? A rock? A droplet of water?

Panpsychists believe that consciousness is everywhere. But is it a property of matter, along with mass and charge and spin? Or is consciousness just there in the background, a continuum, a field, between matter as well as within matter? Is consciousness present at the moment a subatomic particle pops into existence? I have no clue. I can merely intuit. The physics - the equations - are all too much for my intellect to grasp. But I do feel that there's something fundamentally special about the role of consciousness within our Universe. 

"If a tree falls over in a forest and there's no one there, does it make a sound?" The answer is clearly 'no', because the presence of an ear connected to a brain is needed to convert the effect of waves of displaced air into the phenomenon of sound. Similarly, without conscious observers to marvel at the night sky - would the Universe exist at all? This is without even running through all those amazing coincidences that were essential to the formation and expansion of the Universe in the first place.

The conscious observer is key to quantum physics, to observe the collapse (or not) of the wave function - is light a wave or a particle? And this suggests that consciousness is indeed fundamental to matter - and not a by-product or epiphenomenon of matter, as reductionist-materialists would have us believe.

Consciousness is different to thought, which is a process, a succession of neural interconnections. Thought powers the intellect, but intuition guides it. I shall be writing more about intuition as Lent goes on.

So if we can get a handle on consciousness, I'd then pose the question: Is consciousness the same as the soul, the immortal soul devised by theologians? [Worth having a read of my review of Are We Bodies Or Souls by Prof Richard Swinburne.

Lent 2022: Day six
Do you believe in life after death?

Lent 2021: Day six
How should we see God?

Lent 2020: Day six
Build your own religion - the tenets