Connections Through Time, Issue 15: April - June 2002
Consciousness is part of you, no doubt about it. You experience it directly when you read, think, remember, feel emotions, use your senses, etc. Here are some quotes concerning how fundamental consciousness may be.
Amit Goswami is the author of a book called, "
The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World". In an interview, Goswami says:
The current worldview has it that everything is made of
matter, and everything can be reduced to the elementary particles of matter,
the basic constituents—building blocks—of matter. And cause arises from the
interactions of these basic building blocks or elementary particles; elementary
particles make atoms, atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, and cells make
brain. But all the way, the ultimate cause is always the interactions between
the elementary particles. This is the belief—all cause moves from the
elementary particles. This is what we call "upward causation." So in
this view, what human beings—you and I—think of as our free will does not
really exist...
Now, the opposite view
is that everything starts with consciousness. That
is, consciousness is the ground of all being. In
this view, consciousness imposes "downward
causation." In other words, our free will is real. When we act in the world
we really are acting with causal power. This view does not deny that matter also
has causal potency—it does not deny that there is causal power from elementary
particles upward, so there is upward causation—but in addition it insists that
there is also downward causation. It shows up in our creativity and acts of free
will, or when we make moral decisions. In those occasions we are actually
witnessing downward causation by consciousness.
Goswami uses the phrase "monistic idealism" to describe what he sees as a pending paradigm shift associated with the idea that everything begins with consciousness.
The well-known physicist, John Wheeler, is spending time asking, "How come existence?" In the June 2002 issue of Discover Magazine, there is an article entitled, "Does the Universe Exist if We're Not Looking? Wheeler's focus is on the idea "
that human consciousness shapes not only the present but the past as well." Here is a quote from the article summarizing his ideas:Wheeler suspects that most of the
universe consists of huge clouds of uncertainty that have not yet interacted
either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate
matter. He sees the universe as a vast arena containing realms where the
past is not yet fixed.
Wheeler is the first to admit that this is
a mind-stretching idea. It's not even really a theory but more of an
intuition about what a final theory of everything might be like. It's a
tenuous lead, a clue that the mystery of
creation may lie not in the distant past but in the living present.
"This point of view is what gives me hope that the question -- How come
existence?,"-- can be answered," he says.
The following is from the introduction
of David Chalmer's
book entitled, "The Conscious Mind - In Search of a Fundamental Theory".
Chalmer is a Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Center
for Consciousness Studies.
Consciousness is the biggest
mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a
scientific understanding of the universe. The science of physics is not yet
complete, but it is well-understood; the science of biology has removed many
ancient mysteries surrounding the nature of life. There are gaps in our
understanding of these fields, but they do not seem intractable. We have some
idea of what a solution to these problems might look like; we just need to get
the details right. Even in the science of the mind, much progress has been made.
Recent work in
cognitive science and neuroscience is leading us to a better understanding of
human behavior and of the processes that drive it. We do not have many detailed
theories of cognition, to be sure, but the details cannot be too far off. Consciousness, however, is as perplexing as it ever was. It still seems utterly
mysterious that the causation of behavior should be accompanied by a conscious
inner life. We have good reason to believe that consciousness arises from physical
systems such as brains, but we have little idea how it arises, or why it exists
at all. ... Present-day
scientific theories hardly touch the really difficult questions about
consciousness. We do not just lack a detailed theory; we are entirely in the
dark about how consciousness fits into the natural order. Many books and articles on consciousness have appeared in the last few years,
and one might think that we are making progress. But on a closer look, most of
this work leaves the hardest problems about consciousness untouched. Often, this
work addresses what might be called the "easy" problems of
consciousness: How does the brain process environmental stimulation? How does it
integrate information? How do we produce reports on internal states?
These are
important questions, but to answer them is not to solve the hard problem: why is
all this processing accompanied by an experienced inner life? Sometimes this
question is ignored entirely; sometimes it is put off until another day; and
sometimes, it is simply declared answered. But in each case, one is left with
the feeling that the central problem remains as puzzling as ever. This puzzlement is not a cause for despair; rather, it makes the problem of
consciousness one of the most exciting intellectual challenges of our time.
Because consciousness is both so fundamental and so ill understood, a solution
to the problem may profoundly affect our conception of the universe and of
ourselves.
Go to another section of this
issue:
Physics: