Imagine this scenario: You’re a farmer living in medieval Europe, and while tending your livestock, a neighbor races up to you, bursting out the town crier’s latest news: "Geographers and other learned men are declaring the earth is round, not flat!" This is a shocking contradiction of your common sense, a far cry from how you’ve thought about the world. Your instant reaction is to dismiss the news as wildly speculative—eggheads blathering quackery.
A Paradigm Shift
Of course, it wasn’t quackery. But it demanded a gargantuan paradigm shift, a reconceptualization of the world as it was understood at the time. A similar shift may now be required of us to throw off our own “medieval thinking“ about human consciousness. To make sense of the accumulating, provocative data on consciousness and answer the difficult questions it poses, we may need a gargantuan shift in our thinking.
The Easier and Harder Questions
Easier questions about consciousness consist of locating its physical correlates, or where and how our brain actively processes information from our senses, sculpting awareness, attention, self-referencing, and, ultimately, our adaptive behavior. Neuroimaging, like functional MRIs, maps where and how much oxygen gets metabolized and how various activities of the brain direct the flow and quantity of blood, the hemodynamic response.
The Mystery’s Hub, Qualia
The harder questions are: How does consciousness emerge from the electrochemical activities of physical matter? Why do we have subjective experience or qualia—the felt experiences or sensations of the color red, for example, or the sweet, agreeable taste of sugar, or the anguish of pain? Without qualia, would our lives have the same meaning?
Does qualia serve an evolutionary purpose? Does it confer survival or adaptational advantages? Do infrahuman populations, up and down the phylogenetic scale, even the tinest expressions of life, microbes and atoms, have subjective experience or the precursors to it? Does their very existence mean they possess some level of consciousness?
Moreover, as opposed to bits and pieces of disjointed, patchy sensations, our experience is singular, unified. To explain this, researchers have looked at interconnections of the claustrum of the brain as a potential unifier of experience, but a scientific consensus is lacking.
No Answers
Scientists and philosophers don't have definitive, consensually agreed-upon answers to these mystifying questions. Instead, there‘s a small batch of competing theories, the surest sign of a healthy but frustratingly incomplete science. Research fails to explain how consciousness arises from the brain’s seven-pound, water-based mass of convoluted gyri and sulci, with their interconnected, integrated neural networks, unless, as some theorists have postulated, all matter by its nature possesses degrees of consciousness—“universalism.“
From Physical to Electrochemical Energy
Physical energy from distant sources, like electromagnetic energy from the sun, arrives in a tiny “family“ of visually discernible wavelengths of light—the visual spectrum, a narrow band of photons ranging from 380 to 750 nanometers which makes up a rainbow of colors. Then, through the process of phototransduction, photons impact specialized cells, rods and cones, in the retina and bleach the light-sensitive chemicals within these cells. This innervates clusters of retinal ganglia near the fovea centralis, speeding the neural transmission of visual information along the optic nerve en route to the visual cortex in the occipital lobe for additional processing.
Thus, physical energy, photon particles or wavelengths of light, converts into electrochemical energy comprehensible to our brain, giving rise to our visual perception or awareness. Using this information, we suss out our visual environment, testing our grasp of it and adapting our behavior accordingly—“brain-generated reality.“
A Radio Receiver
As with our visual system, our larger brain can be described as an apparatus that receives, integrates, and transmits physical energy or information whose origins may lie in the greater cosmic environment. Hypothetically, our brain is comparable to a radio tuned to receive and transmit signals buzzing around Earth’s delimited terrestrial parameters and perhaps the far reaches of the cosmos via its shared network of connections, or shared consciousness.
Consciousness Essential Reads
Deeply Debated, Panpsychism
Consider an exercise in divergent, outside-the-box thinking, which may be a prerequisite for theorizing about consciousness: Does everything have a conscious “mind“? Could consciousness be a fundamental, irreducible property of everything, like space-time, gravity, and mass? Could all matter have awareness? Even rocks?
How vs. Why
With Stephen Hawking’s metaphor in mind, “What breathes fire into the equations [the laws of physics/ultimate reality] and makes a universe for them [scientists] to describe?“ Rephrased, physics describes the universe, how it's structured and behaves, but has nothing to say about its intrinsic nature or why it exists at all.
Our brains have evolved to be exquisitely sensitive and responsive to our environment for obvious adaptational or survival purposes. Now, extend this reasoning to the infinitely larger environment, the cosmos: Is our adaptation or survival also connected to or contingent upon our attunement to this infinitely larger, ever-expansive cosmic environment? Is our consciousness a minuscule part of the whole of a conscious universe?
Cosmic Origins
To think of ourselves as separate from the cosmos is obviously ill-conceived, at odds with physical science. Carl Sagan stated, “We‘re all the carbon-based stuff of stars..." So, is this titanic, enigmatic cosmic environment, of which we’re an integral part, composed fundamentally of consciousness on an infinitely massive scale? Is consciousness the connective tissue linking us intimately to the cosmos? Perhaps the origins of the cosmos and consciousness are indistinguishable.
Matching Photos
The brain’s physical structure bears an uncanny, micro-scaled resemblance to the structure of the “cosmic web,“ our galaxy-filled cosmos. Side-by-side, photos of the two highlight their striking similarities. The brain has a multi-tentacled, entangled but integrated network of neural connections. Theorists have speculated that our brain mirrors a minuscule, yet highly adapted version of the larger cosmic network of stars and galaxies. Could the cosmos be a humongous, conscious brain?
Can you imagine life without consciousness or consciousness without life?