Here are a few of my thoughts and comments on the general topic of consciousness.
Consciousness: Why Is Consciousness So Mysterious?
It’s not consciousness that’s really mysterious, it’s the subconscious.
In psychology, there is the concept of the subconscious, or the unconscious, mind. Whatever you call it, you have no real apparent control over it and it’s not subject to your introspection. As such, you have no free will over this apparently automated non-awareness part of your mind (not to be confused with your automated nervous system which holds sway over your body).
Have you ever had a complex thought leap suddenly, almost or even unbidden, into your conscious (the self-aware or self-conscious) mind? Why? Was it your conscious mind that brought it to the fore, or your subconscious (otherwise more technically known as the unconscious) mind? Chances are it was your subconscious (unconscious) mind. It’s been shown that your subconscious mind makes up your mind for you split seconds before you’re consciously aware of it. It’s almost as if it was predetermined.
Your subconscious mind bubbles along under the radar without an actual conscious input from your self-aware you, processing, ever processing. What should be random bubbling should result in a mess – a hodgepodge. Instead, you seem to get a purposefully and linearly directed nebulous something which at the least expected time pops through your grey matter’s ‘wormhole’ that links your subconscious mind with your conscious mind. Your conscious mind cannot seemingly draw out of your subconscious mind the nebulous something you need when you need it.
Here are a few examples where the subconscious rules your roost.
Creativity: It’s not your conscious mind that connects the dots, it’s the subconscious. How often do you hear, or even tell yourself, “I’ll sleep on it” (which is why it is probably a good idea to always have pen and paper or a Dictaphone next to the bed)? How many people can relate to solving an out of the ordinary mental puzzle in their dreams, or the solution comes to them ‘out of the blue’ while preoccupied with something else. There are no tools, only the resources in your own mind. In fact if you consciously try to come up with an original creative idea, you’ll probably fail, but when you’re in mental neutral gear – eureka.
Is creativity pre-programmed or an act of free will? How many things do you do during the course of your day that you did not consciously plan to do, yet could have so planned in theory? Those spur of the moment things, even little things that you didn’t wake up having on your agenda, must have originated (been created) from your subconscious. You really, apparently, didn’t have any free will over doing those agenda items - that is your doing them consciously with a before-the-fact intent.
Decisions: Do you take a right turn or a left turn at Oak Street? That was the issue at hand in a popular song, and surely the resolution of the issue is a conscious decision and subject to free will. Your subconscious cubby-holes will store and provide you the positives and negatives of either choice when you drag them to the fore. But what if it’s the very first time you are required to make such a decision and you have no prior knowledge to draw on. Surely that decision will be 100% a demonstration of free will. Or will it? How can you make an informed decision when you have no data on which to make a decision? The easy option is to toss heads or tails, but there’s no free will cigar awarded for that. In such a scenario you will often rely on a gut feeling but that feeling doesn’t come from your gut or your consciousness but from your subconscious.
Emotions: Emotions are strange in that you may see a picture of X and burst into tears, or laugh out loud, whereas I’m totally ho-hum, under-whelmed, boring. However, another image may cause me to rant and rave, while you just yawn-the-big-yawn. In either case, you seemingly have no control over your feelings. You don’t seem to have much free will in terms of who you like or dislike or who you fall head-over-heels in love with, so again, I’d conclude that emotions are part of your subconscious.
Memory: The entirety of you long and short term memories cannot reside in your consciousness. They are storied in subconscious cubby-holes (for lack of a better analogy).You read the word “tree” in a book; hear the word spoken, or see a “tree” in the movies or outside your window. You must immediately reach back into that subconscious cubby-hole and draw back out what a tree is in order for the work or image to make sense. Or say you see something you’ve never seen before (or never heard or learnt about). There’s incomprehension because there’s no subconscious cubby-hole to reach back into that contains that something that will enlighten you.
Ever immediately forget something you thought of just minutes before and cannot now for the life of you consciously recall? Throw your mind into neutral, rely on your subconscious and when you least expect it, there it is back to the fore again. Now quickly, write it down!
Free Will: As noted above, when it comes to the subconscious you have no control over how it operates. So, if you are not in control of your subconscious then that implies a lack of free will of the mind and your mental processes. You certainly don’t have mind-over-matter free will (you can’t flap your arms and fly or run faster than the speed of sound), but you no doubt think you are in charge of your own mind. Free will means having control over your own mind. It’s mind-over-mind. You’re in command. But you’re not in command over your subconscious.
Conclusion: It seems however unnecessarily messy to have both a subconscious and a conscious* mind. The question arises, might the subconscious actually be doing ALL the number crunching and feeding the answers to your (illusionary) consciousness or conscious mind, sometimes unexpectedly – that eureka moment, but more often as not, humming a constant feed along to you in the background, a feeding which as far as you’re concerned is your (illusionary) conscious mind in action but it’s all just the subconscious in action. So in fact there is no consciousness housed separate and apart as an organic structure, only the illusion of one. Your automated nervous system runs the body; what we now call the subconscious runs the mind – the entire mind.
By the way, when you lack free will over the workings of your own mind, well that suggests something or someone else is pulling the strings: translated it is evidence for a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe.
* Though I might concede consciousness to equate to your awareness, awareness being that you are conscious of nearly all that goes on around you RIGHT NOW, and self-awareness, which is just the concept that you think and you respond to your awareness. Therefore, I am personally self-aware that I am aware of my surroundings (even if they are only virtually real).
Consciousness: Do Persons Have Souls?
The Concept of a Soul: The trouble here is that ‘the soul’ has so many diverse definitions that it can mean just about anything you want it to mean. Probably no two people would describe the concept in the exact same way. However, I think we can agree that an egg cell has no soul – however you define it. A sperm cell has no soul – however you define it. Therefore, at conception, you have no soul. No cell has a soul, therefore no tissue (a group of common cells) has a soul, therefore no body organ has a soul (an organ being composed of various tissues), therefore you, as a collection of various organs and organ systems must have no soul!
So when did you get a soul (assuming there is such a thing and that it has some degree of tangibility)? Did you get your soul at birth? Perhaps it was on your first birthday? Perhaps you received you soul when you became of age, say 21. Perhaps it’s just as likely that you don’t receive a soul at all – there is no such separate and apart physical thing you get from any higher authority. Perhaps your soul just develops or evolves naturally as part and parcel of your growing maturity over the years, in which case it can’t be totally separate and apart from the body. In other words, if you develop a soul akin to your developing a sense of morality or spirituality, then it can not ‘leave’ the body after death. Translated, your soul (however you define it) isn’t your ticket to an afterlife. It resides somewhere in that brain-thingy of yours, locked somewhere within that maze of biochemistry that collectively makes up your grey matter. As an aside, if you were to clone yourself, would your clone have a soul?
So, do you have a soul? Nope! The burden of proof is on those who advocate that humans possess an indestructible, immaterial ‘soul’ that exists separate and apart from the body and which survives the body’s demise. If such proof (or even evidence) were set in stone the is-there-or-isn’t-there debate would have ended long ago. No one can demonstrate where the soul comes from, how it becomes a part of you, or where it goes to after you’re gone. No one can explain how an immaterial concept can contain hardcore data – your essence in other words. Does a person with a multiple personality disorder and sense of selves have more than one soul? I think not. There’s also the double standard of humans anointing themselves with a soul but not animals. This is another example of humans patting themselves on the back without justification.
Consciousness: Life After Death
Is There Life After Death? Nope. You get one go, and when you snuff it, that’s it, the bucket’s well and truly kicked! Your consciousness (and subconscious) – collectively termed ‘the mind’ does not survive your death. But, and there’s always a but…
There can be an afterlife if we exist in a Simulated (Virtual Reality) Universe. Terminate Joe Citizen’s life software subroutine; run Joe Citizen’s afterlife software subroutine. Otherwise, I’m afraid the answer is “no”. If you assume an afterlife, you are probably also assuming that you will have possession of all of your five senses, and the ability to process input from those senses and also have your intellect (memories, creativity, emotions, IQ, etc.) intact. Unfortunately, that requires an afterlife where matter and energy exist and your existence will also be grounded in matter and energy. That means, something of your essence, what makes you, you, has to be also grounded in matter and energy and survive your biological death. There’s no evidence that that happens. The entirety of you when you die stays grounded and intact. Your neural network doesn’t detach itself from your deceased body and waft away to La-La Land.
If what makes you, you is entirely nebulous and has no actual substance and structure, like a ‘soul’ (whatever that is it is certainly not composed of matter and energy) then even if that nothingness survives your biological death (which is a pretty nebulous concept in itself), it would not be physical and thus not able to process any stimuli in wherever your afterlife is, and in any case how nothingness can store and process memories, creativity, emotions, IQ, etc. is far beyond the realm of what’s rational.
Finally, you really may not want to die, but you really don’t want an eternal afterlife either, so be careful of what you wish for. I mean you’d be bored to ‘death’ after the first million years with billions and trillions of years yet to come and that’s just the beginning! Sounds a bit more like a hell to me! But since your afterlife must take place within the Universe, somewhere, what happens to your afterlife when the Universe finally hits its heat death or collapses back on itself in a Big Crunch (the opposite of the Big Bang). Regardless, it’s curtains for your afterlife. It’s also clear that your body, when it dies, doesn’t go to an afterlife. If you go to an afterlife, it’s your mind, your consciousness, the essence of what makes you, you that has to make the journey. But what kind of afterlife would that be for a one day old infant or for a 110 year old with severe dementia or for someone middle aged who was an ex-boxer or ex-gridiron player whose head and brain had been so pummelled as to now leave him just a fraction above a vegetative state. The same might apply to someone who had been starved of oxygen for a lengthy time, like a near drowning victim. What if your afterlife were pretty much the same as your life with a nine-to-five job, a rotten boss, bearing a heavy email galore and unproductive and worthless meetings burden, lots of bills, taxes and a lawn to mow, plus those in-laws and horrible relatives. Add to that mix now a supreme deity that’s cracking the whip at all hours. Now think back to pre-life. Wasn’t it peaceful and tranquil and tax free? What if your post-death were the same as your pre-life, wouldn’t that be ‘heavenly’, and as an added bonus, it’s all somebody else’s problem now.