I recently came across a YouTube video with the suitably alarming title The Disturbing Theory That Consciousness Isn’t Human. It brought together John von Neumann, Roger Penrose, Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, quantum mechanics and the possibility that consciousness may somehow reach beyond the biological brain.
I was intrigued, but not persuaded. We understand remarkably little about consciousness, and piling one speculation upon another does not necessarily take us closer to understanding it. What interested me more was the much simpler question the video left behind: what do we actually mean by consciousness?
My first thought was an analogy. Life is rather like a radio that has been switched on. Consciousness is the electricity flowing through it.
We reach for analogies when confronted by something we cannot adequately describe, and each may contain a grain of truth without providing the answer. The brain has been compared to a computer, a receiver and a machine. Consciousness becomes information, a radio signal, electricity or something still more mysterious. None quite works.
But the radio proved more useful than I initially realised.
A radio functions only when the necessary components are present, correctly arranged and operational. Damage one component and the sound may become distorted. Remove another and it may cease altogether. As in the famous Monty Python parrot sketch:
“He’s not dead, he’s resting!”
“This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be!”
“This is an ex-parrot!”
We do not suppose that the radio’s capacity to produce sound has travelled somewhere else. The organisation that made that functioning possible has ceased to operate.
The parallel with consciousness is uncomfortable.
Everything we know biologically tells us that consciousness depends upon a functioning living organism, and particularly, in human beings, upon the brain. Damage the brain and memory, perception, personality and judgement may change. Anaesthesia can temporarily abolish consciousness. Drugs can alter it. Circumstances can transform it from moment to moment.
This suggests that consciousness may not be a thing residing within us at all. It may be something that happens when living matter is organised and functioning in the necessary way.
That conclusion is difficult for us because we are conscious not only of being alive but also of the fact that we shall die. It is hardly surprising that human beings have sought reassurance that death is not the end – and religion has frequently provided it. The body may cease to function, but something — soul, spirit, consciousness, self — is said to continue elsewhere. Such beliefs may be profoundly consoling, particularly in the face of our own death or the loss of someone we love, but consolation on its own is not evidence.
The fact that one particular organism dies does not mean that all life has ended. Life continues elsewhere. But what we cannot assume is that individual consciousness continues with it. Any living entity remains what it is only as long as its necessary parts remain sufficiently present, organised and operational to make it so.
The more difficult question, perhaps, is not what happens when we die, but why we find the apparent answer so difficult to accept.
Our concentration on human consciousness, however, can make us forgetful of the fact that human beings are not the only living organisms.
An oak tree, a bacterium, a dog and a human being are profoundly different organisms. They do not perceive their surroundings in the same way, and it would be absurd to suppose that they possess the same understanding of their existence. Yet in one fundamental respect they are equals: all are part of the great gallery of life.
Perhaps, then, consciousness should not be imagined as something suddenly added to life when biological organisation reaches a particular level of complexity. Its simplest beginnings may belong to life itself, becoming progressively more elaborate as biological organisation becomes more elaborate: responsiveness, awareness, memory, choice, self-awareness and, eventually, the human capacity to reflect upon being conscious.
We know our own consciousness directly because we experience it for as long as it lasts. In other living creatures we recognise manifestations increasingly unlike our own. We cannot know what it is like to be another organism, and there may be forms of life for which the word consciousness stretches beyond its normal meaning. But all belong to the same extraordinary phenomenon of organised living matter.
We participate equally in that fundamental category of living things, although we experience and express life in very different ways. The distinctiveness of human consciousness may lie not in our possessing something denied to the rest of the living world, but in our greater capacity to recognise the connection.
We recognise something of ourselves in all creatures — great and small. And with that recognition comes responsibility.
If we understand that the life we possess belongs to the same extraordinary biological phenomenon that exists throughout the living world, greater consciousness should lead not to a greater estimate of our own importance, but to a greater sense of the value of life itself.
