Musings on the Soul

Musings on the Soul                                                                            January 17, 2018

            My reflections on consciousness conger up ideas of the soul. I do not use the term “soul” much because I do not have clear idea of what it means. I understand and like the idea of the soul as described by St. Thomas, but I think it is incompatible with contemporary science. In the introduction to my 2007 book, The Soul of Classical American Philosophy, I wrote that the issues that were treated under the name soul in traditional philosophy included: “the meaning of whatever we call our ‘self,’ especially in regard to our bodily existence, free will, moral values, community, and our relationship to the Transcendent.

            In the world view that I have been describing as a “teleological view” as opposed to a “materialist view,” these issues would have a definite meaning. But is the human soul an entity that must be taken into account to explain these things. Right now, I don’t know. Josiah Royce, who was no materialist, advised that we do not use the term “soul” to explain spiritual realities, because it is just a word and does not explain anything. In the following I will briefly describe the soul as found in St, Thomas, first explain why I like it and then why it is not compatible with modern science. Can we rethink the idea and keep its valuable insights while making it compatible with modern science?

            St, Thomas, following Aristotle, believed that every material object was composed of matter and form; matter is the indefinite stuff of which all physical things are composed, and form is what makes a thing what it is. In the case of a living thing, the form is called a soul, in Latin, anima. Plants have a vegetative soul, animals have a soul that is sensing as well as vegetative, and a human is an animal whose soul is also rational. The soul of an individual human being provides his or her body the structure that it has as, as well as making it living, sensing, and rational.

            Our rational soul enables us to comprehend universal ideas and thereby know thing that do not exist in our world of immediate sense. This ability enables us to love and choose things differently from what is given to our sense, and hence, free will. For example, while we can only see and talk to a relative small number of people at any given time, we can think realistically of more universal communities such as our local geographical community, the community of those who share our history and our hope for the future, our nation, and the whole human race. The sharing of non-material ideas and values makes community possible. We can gain some understanding of the actual conditions as well as possible desirable and undesirable futures.

Also, we can reflect on our own consciousness and thereby have a sense of self. We can understand our current habitual way of living, discern our best potential, and work to achieve it. St. Thomas, again following Aristotle, held that a human being is essentially a rational animal. To achieve our purpose in life we must each become the best rational animal that we can be. We do this by developing habits of living rationally; temperance, courage, prudence and justice. St. Thomas called these habit virtues and living a life of virtue enables us to be the best that we can be. In short, we can think of a better self and a better world and therefore nourish moral values. The ability described here requires that we possess the qualities of reason and free will. The unity of the soul enables us to develop virtues, which provide for a healthy body, control our senses and appetites, and allow us to work for social harmony

Also, we can yearn for whatever we think of as the Transcendent, something not given in our senses, although signs of it are. I don’t know if St. Thomas ever said this, but Josiah Royce and Charles Peirce describe thinking as the ability the ability to read signs. Glimpses that we have of love and understanding in our own lives can serve as signs. I will leave the issue of the Transcendent aside for now except to make one observation. As we live our lives we can see that our consciousness expands. For example, there may be people whom we once despised, hated, or feared because  they differed from us in such things as skin color, religious practices, birth place, or sexual orientation, but whom we have since learned to tolerate, understand, and appreciate. We can imagine a consciousness who understands, appreciates, and loves everyone. Such a consciousness would be what most religions and philosophes would mean by the Transcendent, or God. The ability to think of and imagine an infinitely expanding consciousness was traditionally attributed to the soul.

As stated above there are problems with the notion of the soul as the principle of life. One problem that I think is insurmountable is the reality of stem cells. (To avoid veering off into the controversy of pre-natal life, we can think of adult stem cells.) These are alive and human, but I don’t think anyone could argue that each one has what is traditionally called a rational soul. If the cells can be injected into an accident victim to restore muscle function, they become part of that person. To emphasize the conclusion, we can have human life at the cellular level without a rational soul. So to think consistently of a rational and spiritual soul, we have to think of the soul, contrary to St. Thomas, as something different from whatever makes a living thing alive.

We might think of the soul as the organizing principle of consciousness in a unique biological individual. Consciousness in this case would extend from the most basic sensation to the highest flights of reason, aesthetic awareness, and contemplation. The only consciousness that we are aware of can be found in living things. Whether there is a non-material consciousness on the one hand, or a consciousness in non-living matter on the other hand, is beyond our knowledge.

            I can think of three models to explain the relationship between consciousness and our biological make-up – there are probably many more besides these three. First, we can think of the dualistic model in which consciousness is immaterial, matter is unconsciousness, but when a living material being reaches a level of complexity it becomes conscious and thereby overcomes the dualism by uniting matter and consciousness in one organism. According to the second model, the materialist model, matter is unconsciousness but at a certain level of complexity, consciousness arise briefly but without power to influence the flow of material processes. The third model would hold that consciousness is present in all material things, at least in a rudimentary form, and becomes manifest only in living animals. A sub-set of three is that there is a non-material consciousness toward which living things are evolving, and the consciousness found in matter is a dimmer expression of that consciousness.

            Neuro-biologists can find correlations between brain states and states and conscious experience, but it is and error, an error often made, to conclude that conscious experience is “nothing but” brain states.  As living organisms evolve to higher levels of complexity, the range and depth of consciousness also expand until we come to the human mind that can be consciousness of realities not given in immediate senses experience. This give rise to science, art, language, and everything that makes up our human culture.

Whether there is an incipient consciousness in all matter, there is certainly consciousness at the level of animals. We humans know that our consciousness can be affected by such things as fatigue, illness, injury, and drugs. If consciousness is simply a product of brain states, then the death of the brain implies the death of consciousness. But consciousness might be greater than earthly biological matter. And the little bit of consciousness that our human brains pick up may be a participation in something infinitely beyond what we can grasp at this stage of our evolution. The organization that permits this participation may be what we mean by the “soul.”

Brain-states and Subjectivity

Brain states and subjectivity

Koch’s analysis of the relationship between brain states and the subjective feeling of agency has only two possible solutions, one of which he rejects. The apparent options are that either further search will prove an unbridgeable gap between consciousness and physical science, or the progress of neuro-science will explain away the feeling of agency as nothing but the behavior of molecules. Koch considers the first option as the defeat of science.

The attitude of, “science” as expressed by practicing scientists as well as philosophers of science is that science is always unfinished, but there are no caps on what it can discover in the future. The question is whether further progress must lead to either a dualism that defeats physical science, or a complete reductionism that reduces consciousness to an illusion. A third possibility is a development of science that includes and surpasses the present state of science, but which sheds the philosophical assumptions of contemporary materialism.    

Koch, for one, offers a proposed direction of science that leaves contemporary materialism behind. He sets out to develop a theory that explains how and why the physical world can generate consciousness. After explaining the concept of “emergence,” and asserting that life is an emergent phenomenon of chemistry and physics, he asserts: “Subjectivity is too radically different from anything physical for it to be an emergent phenomenon” (119). The example that he offers to illustrate his point is the experience of a shade of blue, which is radically different from all of the electrical activity in the brain of a person who experiences the blue. Although he re-affirms the materialist premise that something such as the perception of a color cannot take place without the activity of the eye’s cone photoreceptors, he also acknowledges that the experience cannot be reduced to its physical cause. He takes a giant step if not a leap when he states, “I believe that consciousness is a fundamental, an elementary, property of matter.”119 The conventional attitude of most scientists and other modern thinkers is that the elements of the universe are unconscious until evolution accidently produces an animal with a relatively complex nervous system. Koch affirms that this is the attitude of most scientists, based on many conversations with fellow scientists.

Koch, however,  maintains that consciousness is immanent in all organized pieces of matter. The higher the organization, the greater the consciousness. Consciousness stands as a property of the organization of the elements and cannot be reduced to the elements themselves. According to his thinking, the organized matter need not be organic. Artificial consciousness in complex machines, designed by humans, looms as a distinct possibility.

Along with his late friend and mentor, Francis Crick, Koch attributes his insight to a theory devised by Giulio Tononi called integrated information. Tononi’s premises are that “Each conscious state is extraordinarily informative, extraordinarily differentiated and highly integrated. 125. Consciousness comes with organized chunks of matter. It is immanent in the organization of the system. “120.

            Since the word “information” generally means stuff that we know, the deeper scientific and philosophical meaning of the term “information” stands in need of clarification. Koch provides such a clarification beginning with the observation that when we describe every state of consciousness as “informative” we mean that its quality of differentiation makes it absolutely unique so that it can never be repeated. Its uniqueness differentiates it from every other conscious state. 

In addition to being differentiated, every conscious state is integrated. We cannot experience components of a state of consciousness apart from the whole. For example, if we are looking at a colorful landscape, we cannot experience it as black and white. While an artist may sketch the landscape using only black pencils, our experience of the sketch would be a different state of consciousness from that of seeing the landscape. If the areas of brain activity, which interact in a state of consciousness, become fragmented, as happens under anesthesia, consciousness fades. Also, if there is little specific information as happens in sleep, consciousness also fades. Consciousness requires a rich supply of differentiated information integrated in a single system. 125   “Any conscious system must be a single integrated entity with a large repertoire of highly integrated states.” 126

The implications of integrated information include the affirmation that consciousness constitutes a property of the universe that pervades every integrated system beginning with sub-atomic particles and becoming ever more prevalent in more complex molecules, and more obvious with the evolution of life and higher organisms.  Koch connects this conclusion with the ancient belief in pan-psychism, the belief that all matter is to some degree sentient. More specifically, he draws the parallels between integrated information and the belief of the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1954), whose law of complexification “…asserts that matter has an inherent compulsion to assemble into ever more complex groupings. And complexity breeds consciousness.”

            Although Koch affirms that consciousness constitutes a property of the universe that is distinct from matter and that cannot be reduced to matter or an emergent property of matter, he does not deviate from his reductionist stand that consciousness cannot exist without matter.  As he sums it up: “But without some carrier, some mechanism, integrated information can’t exist. Put succinctly: no matter; never mind.” Nevertheless, he affirms a Socratic-like scientific humility reminiscent of William James who said, “Our science is a drop, our ignorance the sea.” In Koch’s words, “Our knowledge is but a fire lighting up the vast darkness around us, flickering in the wind. So let us be open to alternative, rational explanations in the quest for the sources of consciousness.” 135.

Koch’s research and his interpretation seem to be more compatible with a teleological than a mechanistic view of the universe. Rather than consciousness being an accidental and insignificant by-product of matter, matter seems to be moving purposively toward the development of consciousness. Although Koch rejects the notion of a soul that can subsist without the brain and also rejects the religious notion of God, he affirms a trust, some might call it a faith, that the universe is not meaningless. Part of this attitude is a faith in science, specifically that it is poised to solve the mind-body problem. But he rejects the temptation to think of science as the final and absolute form of knowledge. “I do not know what will come afterward, if there is an afterward in the usual sense of the word, but whatever it is, I know in my bones that everything is for the best.” “I do believe that some deep and elemental organizing principle created the universe and set it in motion for a purpose that I cannot comprehend.” If his hunch is right on the last two statements, then consciousness, not human consciousness, but consciousness, has a priority over matter. Not everything is lost with the inevitable disintegration of the physical universe and there is a pathway for dealing with the problem of the good.

            As stated at the beginning of these posts, consciousness while the most universal and familiar of topic, eludes attempts to provide analytical understanding. Yet, consciousness stands out as the most essential condition for anything that we might call good. Materialism reduces consciousness and therefore all good, to an accidental product of blind, indifferent, unconsciousness physical events. But my thesis affirms the reasonableness of holding that consciousness precedes the evolution of the human brain, which becomes a channel of consciousness. If this view, as opposed to the materialist view is correct, then goodness is real and the meaning of our life consists of promoting that which is good aesthetically and ethically   In the following posts, I will strive to show what the priority of consciousness has to do with Biblical religion, how it can also provide meaning for those without religion, and how it enhances our understanding of environmental, economic, and social ethics.  

Is Free Will an Illusion?

Is Free Will an Illusion?

The issue of free will is closely linked to the meaning of consciousness because the whole question of free will asks whether consciousness can determine matter without being completely determined by matter. Put more specifically, can the conscious subject decide on particular brain events without the decision having been predetermined by other brain events? For example, consider a person who resolves to improve his or her fitness by taking up running. It seems, from the person‘s point of view, that the resolution causes the mind to focus on health and fitness so that physical changes takes place. The person now devotes time and energy to running on a road or track, time that would otherwise have been spent on some sedentary activity such as playing with a computer. But was the origin and continuation of the resolution caused by some other physical brain event of which the person had neither awareness nor control? Here I will resume the dialogue with Christof Koch’s Consciousness.

Koch offers as a definition of free will: “You are free if, under identical circumstances, you could have acted otherwise. Identical circumstances refer to not only the same external conditions but also the same brain states” (Koch, 92). He considers debates on the reality of free will to be futile since we cannot go back and do things differently. I think that his observation about the futility of debates on free will stems from his definition rather than on the real possibility of free will. His definition looks backward, “Could you have acted differently?” This definition sets up a sure failure for free will since, to the best of my knowledge, no free will theory would say that we are free to change the past. What’s done is done. But free will takes on a different meaning when we apply it to the future. The question of free will can be restated as: “Can I, through ‘attention with effort,’ make my future different from what it would be without such effort.” The phrase, “attention with effort,” flows from William James and his notion that ideas control action and that through effort we can determine which ideas control our action. This understanding need not slip into futility since it has a real impact. Suppose a young person heard this idea from someone whom she respects and tries to apply it to her life. Would this notion not make a difference in the way she lived? The practical significance of this question can best be understood by reviewing William James’s description of free will.

According to James, every idea has some bodily expression and ideas either instigate or inhibit muscular movements. Since we generally have several ideas at any one time, some contradicting others, we act on the most dominant one. We are free if and only if we can, by effort, make a chosen idea dominant by deliberately attending to it.

For example, a person who has a plate of fried chicken in front of him may eat it without effort since the dominant idea is how good it tastes. But if the same person turns his attention to the desirability of clean arteries and a healthy body weight, he may, through effort, make this healthy image dominant and so change his eating habits. The whole question of free will comes down to whether “we,” our conscious selves, can determine the ideas that we attend to and the amount of effort that we can exert to maintain the attention.

            If the materialists are right, then the whole process of “attention with effort” originates in molecules of which we may not be consciously aware, and “we” are mere spectators of a process over which we have no control. We cannot prove that the materialists are right or wrong, However, it is reasonable to believe that we can, perhaps to a very small degree, choose what we think is good, pay attention to it with effort, and thereby make our lives different from what they otherwise would be. If this assumption is true, then we have a free will and consciousness has a degree of control over matter.

            Koch offers two reasons to doubt that consciousness can exert control over matter. The first reason is based on the conservation of energy. Anything that happens in the physical world depends on the existing energy. Nothing happens without using some amount of energy that constitutes the physical universe. So the neural correlates of thought, the physical conditions necessary for any thought, depend on some physical event. They cannot originate from any non-physical entity, even if there are non-physical entities.

            Koch leaves an infinitesimal crack in the closed neuro-physical system that may provide an opportunity for free will, but he considers the degree of freedom to be insignificant, and on a practical level, indistinguishable from mere chance. In describing the one opportunity for free will, Koch refers to the view of Karl Popper and John Eccles, advocates of free will, that “the conscious mind imposes its will onto the brain by manipulating the way neurons communicate with each other in the regions of the cortex concerned with the planning of movement.” According to the Popper-Eccles view, the mind need not supply the physical energy for the movement of the chemical signals, but it can “direct traffic” by promoting activity in theses neurons and preventing it in those. But Koch argues that such influence is possible only in quantum-mechanical states in which there is a certain probability that a synapse will or will not switch. According to his argument, the mind cannot change the probability, but it might determine what will happen on any given event. Control over a single event does not change the probability that the person will act this way rather than that way. But, we may ask, if the mind can control this one event, might it also influence the next one and the one after? Could this type of influence, over time, not change the probability?

            Koch follows up with further arguments against the feasibility of free will (Koch 105-105). He cites and describes experimental evidence that brain activity that instigates an apparent act of will, actually begins before the actor is aware of making a decision. In Koch’s example, a person indicates the instant that he or she decides to move an arm. The actual movement of the arm coincides with the moment of their awareness, but EEG information shows that the process has started prior to the decision. This experiment implies that what we feel is a free choice is, in fact, the result of brain activity of which we are unaware.

            However, free will is not about a single action but about a life-time of habit formation. In the case of the arm movement experiment, it might be just as well if unconscious neuro-physical events choose the moment to move an arm. But there are many human activities in which it is crucial to choose a particular act at just the right moment. Such examples abound especially in sports. For example, if a baseball player is deciding to steal second base, he must pick the right moment. If he leaves a second too early he might get picked off; a second too late and he will be thrown out. So an unconscious physical brain event, which occurs before the actual steal attempt, might serve him better than slower conscious deliberation. But a baseball player has spent a lot of time deliberately developing the habit of running bases. He has chosen to develop these habits, therefore he has chosen the neural pathways that enable him to seize the moment without deliberation. The deliberate development of habits applies to all sports, music, dancing, cooking, hunting, and many other activities. We may freely choose to spend time developing these skills. When time sensitivity is not an issue, we are free to the extent that, over time we can choose how we develop our habitual behavior. The habits serve us well when we must act “in the blink of an eye.” While the above description does not “prove” free will, it does provide a feasible belief in free will that survives Koch’s argument against it.

            A further look at Koch reveals that he himself believes in free will. He affirms a "compatibilist” notion of free will, which means that you are free if and only if you can follow your own desires and preferences. For example, smokers who wish to stop smoking are free or not free depending on whether they are able to follow their desire to stop. Some can and some can’t. But even in the case of those who successfully follow their desire, the desires themselves stem from biological and psychological events over which the person has no authorship. (93). The person who wishes to smoke would be free if he were allowed to smoke without limitations and prohibitions. The same holds true of those who wish to express their preference for unlimited acquisitions, sexual encounters, or physical expression of anger. In Koch’s case, he not only wants to be able to express his desires and preferences without coercion or prohibition, but also specifies what he wants his desires to be. (I assume that this is also true of Dennett and most other materialists in spite of their theory).

It is worth quoting Koch at length to show his position regarding free will.

After rejecting both classical determinism that sees the future as already fixed, and also rejecting the notion that an immaterial “soul” can influence matter, he concludes:

“I’ve taken two lessons from these insights. First, I‘ve adopted a more pragmatic compatibilist conception of free will. I strive to live as free of external and internal constraints as possible. The only exception should be constraints that I deliberately and consciously impose upon my self, chief among them constraints motivated by ethical concerns; whatever you do, do not hurt others and try to leave the planet a better place than you found it. Other considerations include family, health, financial stability, and mindfulness. Second, I try to understand my unconscious motivations, fears, and desires better. I reflect deeper about my own actions and emotions than my younger self did” (emphases added).

Who or what is the “I” that “strives,” “deliberately and consciously imposes,” and “tries?” It seems that if consciousness has no autonomy, we can only hope that our molecules will do these things or, depending on the molecules, hope that they don’t. A dogmatic materialist may argue that Koch has gone soft in the paragraph quoted above.  But, on the contrary, the hopeful resolute paragraph may simply show the limitation of materialism.

An unpublished letter sent to the Wheeling Sunday News-Register.

                                                                                                                                                                October 24, 2017

Editor Sunday News-Register:

                Many critics of the Affordable Care Act argue that nobody should have to pay for insurance to cover services they do not need, including maternity care. Most recently in a column published in the October 22 issue of the Sunday News-Register, Betsy McCaughey complained: “You have to pay for maternity care even if you’re too old to give birth.” She could have added that even a lot of young people will never need maternity care. McCaughey praises the current administration for rejecting the maternity provisions of the Obama era.

                The problem is that few people could afford health care without insurance and all insurance is premised on the fact that there must be more payers than users. Specifically, if only those who hope to have babies paid for maternity care, the cost of childbirth would be prohibitive for most families.

                If the financial base of maternity care is removed, we can expect that the rate of abortions, which has been steadily declining, will take a sharp upward turn. Why are pro-life groups, including the Conference of Catholic Bishops, not protesting against the attack on maternity care? If politicians and citizens who call themselves “pro-life” really care about the value of all human life, they will want to assure that all women of child-bearing age have maternity coverage.

Richard P. Mullin

160 Poplar Avenue, Unit 4

Wheeling, WV 26003

e-mail: Mullin160@comcast.net

Consciousness and the Challenge of Neuroscience

Consciousness and the challenge of neuroscience.

            The whole notion of consciousness as a reality independent of and higher than the brain has come under attack in recent years. Scientists and philosophers, most notably Daniel Dennett and Francis Crick have presented explanations reducing consciousness to brain molecules. As noted in an earlier post, Francis Crick in his 1994 book, the Astonishing Hypothesis, depicted consciousness and the very awareness of self as nothing but the activity of molecules. Daniel Dennett offered extended arguments for understanding both consciousness and freedom in physical terms In Consciousness Explained (1991), and Freedom Evolves (2003).  

            Christof Koch, a younger colleague of Francis Crick took on the project of fully explaining consciousness in physical reductionist terms. In his 2012 book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist, Koch sets out to “describe a plausible quantitative theory of consciousness that explains why certain types of highly organized matter, in particular brains, can be conscious.” Koch argues that consciousness will ultimately be explained by the physical sciences, especially neuro-biology. But while he insists that consciousness cannot exist without matter, he rejects the notion that the reduction of consciousness to the activity of billions of tiny nerve cells excludes the possibility of meaning in the universe. 

            Koch grapples with the hard problem, a term used by David Chalmers, which refers to understanding why anybody can be conscious at all. He summarizes the great progress that neuroscience is making in connecting conscious states with neural events, but admits that all of the science is from a third person point of view. He poses the question that involves the hard problem from a reductionist’s perspective: “…how does nervous tissue acquire an interior first-person point of view?” Koch rejects the notion that the gap between brain’s mechanisms and consciousness is unbridgeable, dismissing such views as defeatist and a denigration of reason. His premise asserts that since science has been the best method for understanding the external world, it should also help us explain the interior world of consciousness.

            Koch contends that science can close the gap that still separates neurological understanding of the brain and actual first-person states of consciousness. Describing the advances that have been made in exploration of the brain he writes: “Neuroscience textbooks describe this organ in mind-numbing detail yet leave out what it means to be the owner of one.” Koch intends to make up for this “remarkable omission” by showing the link between the experiencing subject and the perspective of the brain scientist. His specific goal is to find what he and Francis Crick call the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) defined as “the minimal neural mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious concept.”

It would seem that if he is successful, he will have refuted my thesis as explained in my opening post, namely that it is reasonable to believe that consciousness precedes matter. But even if Koch, or other researchers show how matter becomes conscious by developing a highly complex brain, and I am assuming that they will, it will show what a material being needs to be conscious, but not necessarily entail that all consciousness requires a material base. A full explanation of how matter becomes conscious leaves open the question of whether any conscious reality existed prior to matter becoming conscious.

When in Doubt, Start with William James

When in doubt, start with William James

            The vastness of literature on consciousness presents a problem of selection, especially a starting point. In this case, I will follow a personal maxim: “When in doubt, start with William James.”  In his Principles of Psychology (1890), James writes extensively about the meaning of consciousness. He points out that no one can deny that they have “states of consciousness,” although finding an adequate vocabulary to describe them poses enormous problems. Everyone who thinks about thought, including those in what was then the new science of psychology, can distinguish between the object of the thought and the thought itself. If they turn to reflective introspection, thinking about the thought itself, they can distinguish between the thought and the thinker. The thought is part of what James calls the empirical self, the “me.” But the thinker is the “I.” When I try to think of the thinker, I make it an object, part of the empirical me. While I cannot deny that there is a subjective thinker, its nature eludes me. For the sake of creating a naturalistic psychology, James defers the metaphysical question of what the thinker is, and limits himself to describing the most recent thought as the thinker. If I introspectively try to capture this thought, it is now a part of empirical me, which consists of all the thoughts of which I am aware. A new thought is now making this judgment. 

In his later works, James takes on the metaphysical question of consciousness.

The “Conclusions” to his 1909 work, A Pluralistic Universe, describes “religious experiences of a specific nature.” Significantly, James calls them “experiences,” rather than objects of faith or reason. These experiences reveal a range of happiness and power that supersedes our naturalistic thinking and “seem to show a world that is wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine.” He describes these experiences as a kind of life after death. Here James does not mean our biological death, but rather, “…death of hope death of strength…death of everything that paganism, naturalism, and legalism pin their faith on and tie their trust to.”  James contends that reasoning would never have inferred these experiences of a larger world revealing itself after the experience of despair.  But once they reveal themselves, anyone trying to develop a more complete philosophy must a take them into account. These experiences give individuals a sense that their own consciousness is continuous with a wider self from which the experience flows in. Describing an individual life as being “continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him,” James refers to “words which I have used elsewhere,” an allusion to the “Conclusions” of his 1901 Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

            In Varieties of Religious Experience James provides more insights on consciousness than this post can accommodate. The experiences that he describes in terms of expanded consciousness include unifying the divided soul, conversion, saintliness, and mysticism. In his chapter “Mysticism,” he expresses what he calls a truth that had earlier forced itself on his mind:

It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special types of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. 298.

Throughout the Varieties, James offers such experiential evidence that consciousness consists of much more than the awareness of any single human organism.

In the “Conclusions” he offers a way to interpret the larger consciousness. These experiences; conversion, saintliness, and mysticism, reveal a larger world from which our ordinary consciousness draws its significance. On the near side, it seems to be an extension of the conscious individual self. But it may extend further to include what religious believers call God. Based on the real impact that the larger consciousness has on human lives, often leading to heroic work and saintly behavior toward others, James infers that what seems to be a higher consciousness is in fact higher and greater than the individual, rather than something that the individual brain secretes.

            If James’s interpretation holds true, then consciousness is prior to matter, specifically prior to the matter of any individual brain. As the brain develops in human evolution and in the maturing of the individual, it becomes a vessel of what we call consciousness. In this interpretation, growth in consciousness, manifested in greater awareness, intelligence, and love, stands out as the goal of human life. From this point of view, whatever promotes the development of consciousness is good; whatever inhibits it is evil.

Consciousness, Freedom, and Evolution

Consciousness, Freedom, and Evolution

The subject of consciousness would overflow even a very large tome devoted to describing it. The purpose of this post must be limited to demonstrating consciousness as the exemplar of good in the universe. Part of the task consists of showing how consciousness develops in evolving species like our own, and how freedom flows from consciousness.

My reasoning about consciousness in the context of these post on the “justification of the good” rests on the assumption that the growth and development of consciousness stands out as a commonly accepted instance of something which is good. Anyone reading this paragraph will probably agree or they would not be reading this or anything else. While it is true that a person suffering clinical depression might prefer sleep to wakefulness, wish they had not been born, and become suicidal, they and anyone who loves them would clearly see their state as a tragic misfortune. Much of psychotherapy consists of enabling people to enjoy greater consciousness. The same can be said of most medical care and of almost all education.

Do we know what consciousness is?

           

A seemingly insurmountable problem faces us at the beginning of any conversation about consciousness, namely, trying to state clearly the very nature of consciousness. For starters, it is indefinable. Consciousness stands alone as a reality that does not belong to any genus and is not like anything else. But although we cannot define consciousness, we can describe it in the literal sense of the word “describe,” meaning that we can write about it. We can also talk about it and certainly think about it. We come to understand consciousness by contrast to unconsciousness as when we temporarily lose consciousness because of an accident or anesthesia. Other contrasts include sleeping and wakefulness, dreaming and awareness of our external surrounding, and boredom compared to full interest.

Further, we can look at conscious development both in the individual and in the species to show how consciousness moves from mere sensation, to perception, judgment, reasoning, and beyond. A problem presents itself in that all of these methods assume that we already know what consciousness is. The good news is that in fact we do know what consciousness is. Everyone who has ever thought of this question already knows what consciousness is. So the only task of this work is to articulate and interpret consciousness to show how it exemplifies the problem of the good. 

We can clarify our understanding of consciousness by comparing the poles of a spectrum from material to spiritual. If there is a totally non-consciousness being, what is it like?  Imagine a particle of matter as conceived in traditional Newtonian science. It appears to be dead, inert, moved and determined only by external forces, and impenetrable. By contrast, whether or not we believe that any non-material being exists, we can think of a pure spirit, in contrast to matter, as conscious, self-determined, and able to enter communion with other spiritual beings. We humans are obviously not pure spirits and we have much of Newtonian inertness about us. But if we have a degree of self-awareness, self-determination, and openness to community, then we are to that extent spiritual. An increase in spirituality as I use the term here, coincides with an increase in consciousness. 

            When we have moments of heightened awareness, we experience a more clear and intense knowledge of our world, a greater sense of freedom, and a feeling of oneness with people and perhaps things around us. Such heightened states may be generated from a wide and diverse range of human activity as reported by those who experience life-threatening emergencies, sports, music, contemplation of nature, and traditional religious meditation.  We can imagine that consciousness, freedom, and communion extend to infinity as all of our ordinary physical and psychological limitations lose their hold. Every spiritual tradition claims saints and mystics who actually experience unity with infinite being. More on the next post.