Consciousness and Biological Reductionism
There’s a long-standing debate among thinkers on matters of religion, physics, and biology about the nature of consciousness. Is consciousness merely a product of physiological processes or is it more, somehow metaphysical in nature? I won’t elaborate on the extensive features of this debate, because I have another aim here, but this is still a lively topic. Several recent books by prominent writers on science assume a strongly biological stance on consciousness and, by extension, on religion. See, for example, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. While I understand that progress on understanding physiological processes (like brain functions) tends to spur thinking on such matters, I’m nevertheless surprised that such books continue to be written and published. I mean, what more is there to say, really? Those on the side of science tend towards biological reductionism; those on the side of religion tend towards metaphysics. How many converts can one really hope to win? Who really expects one side to entirely prevail in the debate?
What interests me more right now is still at the intersection of science and religion, but it’s less about biology than about physics. Consider that we humans are all individuals with our own little things going on living on a nice little planet somewhere on the outer edge of a seemingly average galaxy. We have physical bodies with brains that seem to be more or less the locus of our mental exertions and consciousness. We don’t, by contrast, seem to have consciousnesses that extend outwards to, say, the moon (though certainly our imaginations and delusions do). Nor do we seem to be able to literally live through the conscious lives of others, nor they of ours. Each of us is in a deep sense alone, though we like to think that love and other emotions help us bridge the gaps between us (and they certainly feel as if they do).
Now consider some extensions of the sobering facts about who we are and where we are. It now appears the universe we live in, while not literally infinite, is mind-bogglingly large. It’s not that there are millions of stars, or billions, or even trillions: there are trillions upon trillions of galaxies, meaning that there are stars that number in the large powers of ten – numbers that I’m sure have a name but which are not practical numbers that we ever use or would need to remember. Think again about our individual consciousnesses which, though certainly important to each of us and looming large in our, uh, consciousnesses, are barely a puff of smoke in the scheme of the physical universe. On the one hand, a vastness of matter, energy, and probably consciousnesses beyond reckoning; on the other, modestly-sized beings on a small watery planet with jello-like brains that are the seat of individual consciousnesses. Why would we ever believe that our individual lives and our kind of consciousness have any significance other than what we, in our “feeling of what happens” to quote another writer on science, Antonio Damasio, ascribe to them?
I won’t presume to offer an answer here, but I have been going through some thought experiments lately. I don’t know if ideas like mine have any currency at all out there in the broader publishing world, so I might be duplicating someone else’s original thinking; but here goes.
A Blurred Boundary Between Consciousness and The Rest of Creation
I long thought of consciousness as absolutely bounded in the physical body, the human body, and in particular in the brain. To a great extent, I still think that way – I don’t know how not to think that way. But the matter of boundaries is, in general, a problematic one to me now, and I think that the general problem applies equally to the specific case of humans and their consciousness.
Consider an example. I build a stone wall around my garden. I think of the soil and plants as the garden and the wall as a barrier or boundary beyond which there is no garden. Yet this is a chimera. The barrier is simply matter in a slightly different configuration, one that is far more difficult for, say, my hand to pass through than air. I punch the air, no bruise; I punch the wall, a bruise. To me, that’s a barrier. However, I am just another kind of configuration of matter, one that cannot without additional steps pass through the matter configuration composing the stone wall. Not so of, say, neutrinos, which are quite possibly “matter” as well and have no difficulty passing through the wall. The terms “barrier” and “boundary” mean something to us in general usage and have value – fewer hospital visits being not the least significant – but should not be confused or conflated with the actual goings-on of the universe.
This is not a trivial point. Of neutrinos we know quite little – we think but are not sure whether they have mass. But there are some shocking new certainties about the universe beyond our consciousness that go far beyond the suspected mass of neutrinos. It now seems certain that most of the mass in our universe is entirely hidden from us and does not interact with us at all except through gravitational effects that we don’t even understand. The universe that we see and know is about 10% of the whole – a sliver. Thus, 90% of the universe is around us all the time but is not interacting with us – its hand is going right through our stone wall.
I believe that this boundary problem should be factored into our thinking about consciousness. Thus, is it possible that the physical/physiological aspects of consciousness are not entirely localizable in the matrix of matter that we observe? I won’t dare suggest, as some hokey new-age writers do, that “energy”, loosely termed, is psychic glue of some kind. Nor do I believe that loose talk about “string theory” as having something to do with metaphysical consciousness is useful (or even makes sense). What I do suggest is that a science that so self-righteously declared “the end of science” (Horgan, “The End of Science”), might equally well have missed something about consciousness when it asserted that all that was left to do in physics was tidying-up the list of fundamental particles.
I’m suggesting that consciousness, deriving from not just chemical, but also and of necessity particle interactions that we know next to nothing about, may have a more porous relationship to the physical universe than we can observe as of now. That is to say, continuing with the analogy of the stone wall, the stones may be something on the order of dry-laid, with gaps large enough for our hand to pass through unscathed. I will continue thinking about this issue and hopefully touch on it again in a future blog entry.
The Form of Consciousness
My first point was that human consciousness might not be bounded in the physical universe in the way that hard-core biological reductionism would posit. My second point, tangentially related to the first, is that if consciousness is not strictly boundary-limited in that way, that fact suggests that consciousness is a phenomenon of a sort that need not be strictly “biological” in the way we understand biology.
Again, because of our own uniqueness from our own embedded point of view, it’s natural for us to think of consciousness as distinctly a feature of a certain sort of biological creature, if not necessarily of a human. Science fiction often dreams up examples of biological creatures different from us who also have consciousness. However, this is not a difference in kind; it is assumed, for example, that the creature in question has some sort of brain that works more or less like we expect a brain to work. A reasonable assumption, perhaps, if we project our kind of evolution as a good model for the universe. (Science fiction also dreams up robots that obtain consciousness, about which more below).
However, projecting our kind of evolution as a model now seems absurd given both the size of the universe and the quantity of matter that we cannot understand or account for. That is because our statistical significance would seem to be very small and unrepresentative. Were there merely the observable universe, we’d have a better case. It would be entirely reasonable to make the a priori assumption that we are both nothing special and therefore probably close to the average of things. I like this kind of statistical reasoning a lot, since it’s both humble and elevating at the same time. However, when it becomes clear that our kind of biological organization occurs in a very small sliver of the matter in the universe, it’s much harder to use that kind of reasoning. There is no longer a reason to believe that we are average, and it might be better to assume that we are a rarity among kinds of matter organization.
Now, the statistical argument, it seems to me, is that our kind of consciousness is but one kind of many that in a universe on the scale we’re now talking about, there are probably many routes to consciousness. (Let’s set aside for a later blog the issue of robot-consciousness, not because I don’t believe it can happen but because it isn’t an example of consciousness arising from a non-conscious process. Consciousness created by a consciousness is a different category (whether it’s robots or the God-human idea)).
The core question or insight or whatever you want to call it is this: why is it necessarily the case that consciousness must arise within a biological being of the type we’re familiar with and be bounded by a biological matrix of that type of being? Isn’t it about as likely that consciousness has arisen at various times and in various ways? For example, might there be a consciousness that arises from a physical process of some unearthly kind? And might not that consciousness occupy a vastness of physical space from our vantage point, though nothing but a trifle from its own?
This question can only have arisen in its strongest form with the discovery that the matter of the universe is far more extensive and mysterious than that which we see. It’s still a relevant question under the old view, but what power it takes on when statistically we have so little reason to view ourselves as even average!
There is definitely a religious way to view this: there might well be a consciousness that is physically vast and that manipulates large amounts of matter (relative to our size and scale, that is, but still small on a universal scale) and that (or perhaps I should say “and who . . .”) is involved in or set in motion the processes that gave rise to us. That might be a kind of “god.”
Another, less religious way to view this is that consciousness might be encountered in many forms, and we would be unwise to limit our searching for answers to that which seems so familiar to us. More, it would be foolish to venture recklessly into the universe (we’re talking the long-term, here) in the belief that we are in any way privileged or unique. Tread lightly.
