Why Consciousness is Such a Big Deal - understanding the spiritual worldview

Consciousness is a hot topic these days, but most of the popular discussion misses the point. It either misunderstands the hard problem of consciousness, or sidesteps it.

One example of the sidestep is found in neuroscientist Anil Seth’s book, Being You. He sets aside the hard problem of “why and how consciousness is part of the universe in the first place” and instead claims to solve what he calls the “real” problem — to “explain, predict, and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.”

But despite all this neuroscientific distraction from the actual hard problem; the fact is, consciousness is fatal to the philosophy of naturalism. Hard is a euphemism, it really means impossible.

It’s a logical problem, not a procedural problem. You can’t fit a square peg into a round hole. No advances in engineering will ever solve the square peg problem, and no advances in neuroscience can solve the hard problem of consciousness.

Consciousness is naturalism’s square peg. You can’t fit consciousness into a worldview that says natural things are the only things that exist.

This shouldn’t be a controversial thing to say, but humans are attached to their worldviews and we don’t surrender them easily. The reason this simple truth isn’t recognised by everyone is that most people misunderstand what the hard problem is.

The misunderstanding is deeper than a difference of opinion over certain facts. In our modern culture, naturalism isn’t one belief that we can swap out and replace with an updated version.

Naturalism is a way of thinking, a conceptual framework we use to make sense of the world. All our other beliefs are situated within that interpretative framework.

And for many of us, this framework is invisible, like the air we breathe or the space around us. So we never question it.

Thinking outside your own mental box

Because naturalism is both invisible and foundational to our thought, we find it hard to understand any ideas that don’t use that framework. And conversely, ideas that are framed within naturalist concepts have intuitive plausibility.

So when it comes to understanding consciousness, most people don’t realise the extent of the hard problem and the profound implications for naturalism.

They’ll tell us that consciousness emerges from the brain, as if that were a respectable scientific answer, while genies emerging from lamps is a magical fairy story.

But both have the same amount of detail about the mechanism of this supposed emergence — no detail whatsoever. Both assume something can magically emerge from a completely different substrate.

There’s nothing about the properties of lamps that suggests they can create genies, and there’s nothing about the properties of synapses and neurons that suggests they can create consciousness.

Not only does our inability to think outside our own assumptions mean we fail to understand the hard problem, but these conceptual constraints stop us from understanding the actual solutions to the hard problem.

Seth’s book gives us a good example of this when he says, “the hard-problem-friendly intuition [is] that the conscious self is somehow apart from the rest of nature — a really-existing immaterial inner observer looking out onto a material external world…”

Notice the unquestioned assumption that there is a “material” external world we’re all looking out on. But this is only true if naturalism is true. It’s not a premise on which we can construct logical arguments for our naturalist conclusion.

And when we don’t notice the naturalist assumptions, we end with a caricature of the spiritual world view, that consciousness must be “somehow set apart from the rest of nature” and “immaterial.”

Leaving us with the spooky image that consciousness is a ghost floating inside a physical machine, looking out at an objective material world.

This caricature of the spiritual world view is created by retaining our naturalist assumptions, but the spiritual worldviews don’t share those assumptions.

Idealism is one such spiritual worldview, which recognises the primacy of consciousness. It doesn’t say the conscious self is apart from nature, nor does it say the self is observing a material external world.

But to understand what it does say, we need to first deconstruct our naturalist assumptions.

What does idealism really say

The irony of all this is that Seth goes on to tell us that our experience of the world is a “controlled hallucination.” This is a point many people miss.

They think naturalism respects the reality of the external world and idealism denies it.

But the price of naturalism’s objective external world is that everything you experience is an illusion, a hallucination. Naturalism’s real world has no sounds, colours, or tastes. Everything you experience is a brain constructed illusion, a hallucination.

By contrast, idealism provides a simple answer that respects the data of what consciousness is, and the accuracy of our experience of the world.

Idealism avoids all the problems with naturalism, while retaining all the advances of science as a method of gaining knowledge.

Idealism means our experiences of the world are veridical. The world really is as beautiful as it appears, it has sounds, colours, smells, and tastes. The world isn’t pointless, meaningless, and coldly indifferent. Reality is conscious.

Idealism isn’t solipsism

Most often, when you tell someone consciousness is the substance of reality, their first reaction is to think that means everything is within my mind.

But that’s solipsism, not idealism. Solipsism is the thesis that only my mind exists, but it’s not a thesis anyone thinks is actually true.

Solipsism isn’t a philosophical explanation, but a sceptical scenario based on noticing that the only thing we know for certain is our own consciousness. This means we can never prove the existence of anything outside our own minds.

While this raises interesting questions about what it means to know something, solipsism doesn’t explain anything about ourselves, or the world.

Idealism isn’t panpsychism

Another common misunderstanding is that idealism is just naturalism, but with extra properties added to physical things. But this is panpsychism, not idealism.

Panpyschism says the substance of reality is matter, which has the usual properties of dimension, mass, charge, etc, but it also has consciousness. Which means even atoms have a simple form of consciousness. When the particles of matter arrange in certain patterns, like a human brain, these simple conscious states combine to form more complex conscious states.

Panpyschism is a form of naturalism, although it requires a radical change of our understanding of matter.

But like naturalism, it says matter is primary and consciousness exists only in relation to matter. Panpsychism says consciousness is encased within the substance of matter. The universe contains consciousness like a bucket contains water.

But this is still imposing a naturalist way of thinking onto idealism. Idealism doesn’t infuse consciousness into a substance called matter. Idealism is incompatible with naturalism, because it doesn’t see matter as a substance that exists independently of consciousness.

Turning naturalism inside out

To understand idealism, we need to turn naturalism inside out. Instead of thinking consciousness emerges from matter, we need to think matter emerges from consciousness. Matter is a state of consciousness, it’s an idea.

When you observe matter, you’re seeing what a particular state of consciousness looks like from the outside. For the idealist, matter is a concept, an idea that makes the world intelligible to consciousness.

Matter isn’t some kind of substance that exists independently of minds. There is no other substance, there is only consciousness.

This is a subtle point, so a familiar example helps to understand it.

A hole is a thing that exists. It has dimension, occupies a position in space, it causes things. Stepping in a hole in the ground can cause a sprained ankle.

But a hole only exists in relation to something else, it’s not intelligible without the surrounding substance in which it inheres. To understand idealism, we need to think about matter in the same way we think about holes.

Matter exists, it’s real, but its existence is relative to consciousness. Like the hole, it’s only intelligible if we include the surrounding substance in our conception of the hole itself.

That surrounding substance is consciousness. The hole isn’t made of a substance that exists independently. There is no such substance as holes and there is no such substance as matter. But despite the hole not being a substance, it’s real and it exists.

Idealism isn’t anti-realist

Which leads us to the misunderstanding that idealism says the external world isn’t real. But idealism says there is an external world, it’s real, and it’s conscious.

The entire cosmos is fundamentally grounded in consciousness. There is only consciousness, nothing else. Everything you experience, everything you know, it’s all consciousness.

Rather than thinking of the world being in your mind; idealism says you, and the world, exist within a larger consciousness. Everything is part of the universal mind - the mind of God.

As finite creatures, we’re only aware of a limited part of that universal consciousness. Our awareness of reality is limited by our senses and cognitive abilities.

Consciousness isn’t produced by the brain, but rather, the brain restricts consciousness to certain limits. We have access to those parts of reality within those limits.

Under this view, the brain and body act as a kind of filter, removing certain parts of reality from our awareness. Humans can see limited wavelengths of the spectrum of light because our eyes function within those wavelengths. We can only hear a certain range of sounds, dogs can hear much higher sounds. Bats see in sonar.

Each individual’s experience of the external world is determined by our senses and cognitive faculties. Your experience of the world isn’t a hallucination created by your brain.

The world really does have sounds, colours and tastes, because the substance of reality is conscious experience. Your experience is an accurate perception of the world, but it’s also an incomplete or limited perception.

A virtual reality

If the external world consists of consciousness, a universal mind, it means the world is just like your experience of it. The world itself has colours, tastes, smells and sounds.

If we want to view it from the outside, the surface only, what does that look like?

As far as science has investigated, the foundation of the world is a non-local quantum field. A quantum field isn’t a thing in our usual macro-level understanding, it’s a field of probabilities.

With the act of observation (or measurement), the probabilities solidify into actualities. Within the quantum field, everything exists in potential. A potentiality is a possible thing that doesn’t yet exist, but it could.

So what turns a possible thing into an actual thing, what makes it real?

A potential thing becomes actual when a conscious agent measures it, limits it to some chosen parameters, and then brings it into consciousness (reality).

When there is input from a conscious agent, the potential becomes actual. We don’t create the substance of matter itself, the field already exists. But we create the particular form matter takes by bringing it into our awareness.

Consciousness infuses matter with a kind of kinetic energy, and matter continues in that form for as long as we pay it attention. Once we lose interest and it’s no longer the object of our awareness, its energy dissipates until it returns to potential existence, a mere possibility.

This may sound abstract when thinking about the quantum level, but on the macro level of our interactions with the world, it’s common sense.

If you want to create something, whether it’s an article on medium, a painting, a family, a holiday, or a career; you have to focus your consciousness and your available energy on making it real. All these things require a particular input from a conscious agent to create certain arrangements of matter.

The world is an ocean of possibilities which you survey. You’re like a surfer perpetually standing on the crest of a wave, moving in response to the movements of the ocean. The world is continually on the verge of actuality, a dynamic reality.

You participate in the continual creation of the world. We’re alive to the world, engaged in a cooperative dance of creation.

If we express this in the less poetic language of modal logic we’d say we exist in a world of contingency, nothing here contains the ground of its own being. Everything is perched on the edge of non-existence, continually moving to maintain its existence.

Creation ex-nihilo isn’t a cosmic event in the past like the big bang, but a continual renewal of the world. God is the necessary foundation of that continual creation and we participate to choose the form that creation takes.

To speak of God this way isn’t to contrast him with the contingent as if his necessity was somehow merely the absence of contingency, or the opposite of contingency. God as the necessary foundation of existence is the absolute. The absolute is in a class of its own.

The Absolute and Infinite

The absolute is the infinite. The infinite isn’t just a really, really big, powerful, finite thing. Infinity isn’t a gazillion plus one. It’s an entirely different category.

Infinity is unlimited.

Our intellect isn’t equipped to grasp the infinite. The infinite can’t be contained within the finite. But a helpful image to understand what happens when we try is a vessel which overflows.

God’s infinite existence overflows and everything else participates in that existence.

The fullness; the completeness; the unlimited nature of God’s existence means that he exists completely and makes other things exist in and through his existence.

His infinite knowledge means that he knows and makes others know. His infinite joy overflows and we participate in that joy. This participation isn’t something separate from God, everything exists within God.

In the modern world this understanding of God’s nature as the absolute has been forgotten. It’s buried beneath the superficiality of our naturalist worldview that reduces the world to our object.

This habitual naturalist way of thinking sees only the surface of phenomena, and this infects our understanding of God. It reduces God to a big and powerful object within nature. A finite but magical super-being who grants our wishes.

But the meaning of the word God is the absolute ground of all existence. The foundation and source of all knowledge and joy. God is he in whom we live, and move, and have our being.

The spiritual world view

Instead of trying to squeeze consciousness into the naturalist world view, we should construct our explanations of the world to fit the observed data. Taking consciousness seriously leads us directly to a spiritual world view.

The implications for all of us personally are profound.

Consciousness doesn’t emerge from the brain, so the death of the body isn’t the end of your existence. Reality isn’t an insentient mechanism. The world isn’t pointless and your life isn’t meaningless. Good and bad are part of reality, not merely social conventions to enhance biological survival.

You aren’t continually suffering a controlled hallucination, experiencing sounds and colours and smells that don’t exist.

You’re immersed in a wondrous and beautiful reality.