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.
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.
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 is not evidence.
The fact that one organism dies does not mean that life itself has ceased. Life continues elsewhere. What we cannot therefore assume is that the consciousness of the individual organism continues with it.
Something is what it is only while sufficient necessary parts remain present, organised and operational.
That brings us to a question human beings have wrestled with throughout history: what happens to us when we die?
Perhaps part of our difficulty has arisen because we have asked the wrong question. If consciousness is a property or activity of an extraordinarily complex living organisation, asking where it goes after that organisation has irreversibly broken down may be rather like asking where the music went when the radio ceased to function.
It did not necessarily go anywhere.
The conditions that made it possible no longer exist.
But this way of looking at consciousness leads in another direction as well. Human beings are not alone in being alive.
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: they are living things.
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 distinction 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”. The old phrase from All Things Bright and Beautiful may contain rather more biological truth than its author intended.
And with recognition comes responsibility.
If we understand that the life in ourselves 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.
Perhaps morality does not have to be imposed upon life from outside. Our capacity to recognise ourselves as part of the living world may itself provide one of its foundations.
I think it has now moved beyond being merely an article about consciousness. The final movement gives it a reason for being written: the question of consciousness eventually becomes a question about how we regard life.
