Consciousness
... The Evolution of Mind and Matter
Blog 4: February 2022
Who am I? How do I experience the world I see around me and the reality of my sensory existence?
An apparently mundane but deeply mysterious phenomenon, the so-called ’Problem of Consciousness’ is a lifelong soul-searching process: Why and How do I feel the way I feel and act the way I act? How to explain a conscious inner life experience from my material brain?
Such a quest is as old as humanity itself. Human mind has evolved for over 1,5-million-years, a process particularly accelerated since the origin of language, fire, and ritual. Early humans could only survive in view of protection received within their small hunter-gatherer families: ‘I belong, therefore I am’. Up to the outset of sedentary life 12 000 years ago only a confined level of self-consciousness would have prevailed, until urban life and related leisure to decisively refine the way humans perceived nature, spacetime and identity.
A steeper spiritual shift occurred 2 600 year ago when Ionian (Greek) and Far Eastern gods, as if in a synchronic spiritual bliss, invested societies with a revamped sense of the self [1]. Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ is paradigmatic: once set free from their chains, the ancient prisoners sudenly realize that the everlasting human shadows they had seen projected on the wall were just fireplace-made ghosts banned from a real outside world. Such existential insight defines the subsequent 17th century Enlightenment, bringing about an ever more liberated self-awareness and the way we presently understand the duality of mind and matter: 'I think, therefore I am' (the Cartesian ‘Cogito, ergo sum’).
The last two centuries bear witness to the unprecedented scientific and thecnological revolution shaping the current material development and its perceived materialistic attitude regarding the supremacy of matter over mind. High-tech, over and above theoretical science, is now the new gospel; and yet, whatever material well-being and 'good outcomes' are demonstrably unfit to guide us towards universal spiritual progress: Homo sapiens [sic] is now an uncontrolled, irrational force, responsible for the worst planetary crisis ever.
Understanding consciousness is arguably one of the major issues of modern physics and philosophy. It is the ultimate demonstration that –if we are ever to grasp how the world operates– we must go beyond fallacious assumptions regarding a mechanical view of a matter-like cosmos and need to query three alternative hypotheses:
(1) Does mind and matter, thoughts and ‘material things’ have a dual, independent, existence? (2) Could consciousness be brain activity emerging from unconscious matter? Or else (3) Is mind prior to matter, matter being an image in our minds [2]?
These are questions that I am very much interested to follow-up in subsequent blogs.
[1] Erwin Schrödinger, Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism, 2019 (1st published in 1951): 54
[2] Ibid.: 115.
Photo: Mullsjö Reflexion with water lilies, 26 June 2018 (J.de Morais)