Fuel, the energy within food, and sunlight the source of that energy are all similar, energy without which life would stop.
Ditto language, the codes of our DNA, the software of life, thoughts, dreams, daydreams, hopes, desires, the software of consciousness.
Individual consciousness and group consciousness exist, yet without clear distinctions. A group may easily become ‘aware’ of something whilst an individual may not.
This last statements presupposes that your consciousness and my consciousness are to a degree separate. Yet I defy anyone to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are in fact separate, and not the same to begin with.
I breathe air, you breathe air. . is the air we breathe the same? . . . The consciousness/identity issue is something like that . . . we have a ‘lease’ so to speak on consciousness, a lease granted when we took occupancy of our bodies, of our lives.
Wait, so that implies consciousness is separate, something that inhabits us, lives within us, is on sometimes, off sometimes. It varies.
Or does it? If consciousness is always ‘on’ what vacillates our subjective perception of it? We’ve hit some kind of circular argument, consciousness relying upon itself to know it is there. Like attributions to a divinity, could early concepts of “God’ simply have been the projections of an elevated form of self-awareness in early man?
Yet consciousness exists. But where? The question asks if there’s materiality to something that doesn’t possess a material dimension.
Early Egyptians regarded the heart as the organ responsible for consciousness. The brain, a reservoir of mucus, was removed and discarded before the rest of the body was embalmed for a journey to the stars.
We seem to be looking for a place where consciousness lives. If consciousness resides somewhere in the body does it have a locus? A focus?
Leonardo believed the soul lived in the brain or just below it. In an early anatomical drawing of a dissected brain his note in cryptic Italian reads “Is this where the soul resides?”. There’s a small arrow pointing to a spot just above the pineal gland.
‘Soul’ doesn’t mean ‘consciousness’ in the same way as modern psychologists seeking solutions to the hard problem, the subjective “I”. Soul doesn’t carry that ego-driven ‘conscious’ label with it, because soul isn’t about itself. The subject of soul is something vaster, greater, and eternal, not the aims and goals of a single life.
Carl Jung and his followers have tried to caution against Western science’s stampede into the conscious sphere claiming soul, or the subconscious was being overlooked, misunderstood, and frankly ignored at the peril of our very left-brained society. Modern cognitive psychologists for the most part haven’t even listened to the Jungian dialogue, representing it as ‘artsy’, based on myths, and not accessible to the neurologist’s probing electrodes. Jung, Hillman and others countered that the greatest hazards posed to the modern world were almost entirely of man’s conscious creation, resulting perhaps from his biggest tragedy, failing to know himself.
But whose soul is it to begin with? Are we not to take clues from Jung who introduced us to the collective unconscious? Since heightened states of being attained by yogis and Buddhists practice at emptying the mind, clearing it of conscious thought, doesn’t this imply freedom is to be found away from the subjective conscious experience? Isn’t the more powerful ‘consciousness’ one that is unencumbered, and doesn’t require the serial tool of subjective identity. Modern psychology is uniquely focused on the subjective experience, of course. This the ‘hard problem’ in cognitive studies is about the mind knowing itself. But such emphasis on the “I am me” dismisses the possibility of enlightened conscious states where the mind is ‘clear’, but can act more ‘swiftly than the reflection of the moon on the water’.
Does the soul or the more finite form of consciousness roam about? Where does it disappear to after we die? Is consciousness even ours to begin with? Can it be be possessed, or owned by some other being? These hands that are typing are ‘my’ hands, attached to me. Without the rest of me they can’t work. Man has found ways to transplant body organs, eyes, hearts, kidneys, but not consciousness, not the soul, nor the contents of memory.
I’m not arguing that consciousness is ‘pinned down’, by materialist co-ordinates for time and place. If consciousness is fugitive does it elude attempts to locate or entrap it? A deer in the forest. Is it itself alive?
The question of ‘live’ brings us to another myth. We define ‘life forms’ with convenient boundaries and categories. A human being, a buffalo, a blade of grass. Yet the Vedanta is ahead of us on this. The ancient Vedic philosophers saw no distinction between the grazing bovid and the grass it eats. A cow, in ancient India, was ‘grassness’, or the essence of grass. So humanity inhabits a film of life on this planet. We live as part of it. Bacteria and parasites live within us. The deer is the forest and we are the earth.
Could the subjective experience of intelligence, and sub-conscious forms of intelligence simply be ineffable cross products of material circumstances, for whose purposes our bodies have evolved. Look in the brain, there is seems to be little but nerves, flesh, and channels filled with fluid. Yet we intercept nervous impulses, and they do not explain themselves, or their contents. The act of searching for what is conscious is a lost quest, as difficult as locating an electron or computing the exact trajectory of a particular photon. The experimenter intervenes and destroys the experiment.
Other beings might see time much in the same way we look at a landscape. As earthlings we are possessed of three dimensions, aware conceptually of a fourth, time, which is not visible but is for our purposes, measurable. Surely there must exist life forms that directly perceive four, five or six dimensions with a kind of sight, and understand some final dimensionality, as a kind of fiction, much in the same way as we understand time.
We see space (1,2,3 dimensions), we think time (a 4th), but we feel conscious (the 5th)?
Or perhaps intelligence inhabits that fifth dimension, and the subjective self-awareness that intelligence has of itself, i.e. consciousness, could inhabit the 6th?
Asking ‘where is consciousness?’ is somewhat like looking for time within the three dimensional measurements of a cup of coffee. One may only perceive a cooling liquid if one admits time as a 4th dimension of study.
A 5th dimensional entity similarly cannot be measured by a 4 dimensional space. It can sit there, just as we in our 3 dimensions can park ourselves on a 2 dimensional carpet. Have we been looking for self-awareness in all the wrong places? Is consciousness, rather than a ‘substance’ which we can’t see, is instead a dimension, from which other beings in turn see us?
Cause and effect? . . . Cause and effect are a temporal ‘patch’ over an eye that cannot see.
The notion of cause is a vestigial necessity for thinking about time, whilst being unable to see it. If consciousness is yet another dimension, then looking for it within 4 dimensions is as fruitless as looking for time within 3.
Suppose consciousness were everywhere and not contained within a 3 or 4 dimensional space-time continuum. It could be bound up within a 5th dimension. Once there, it might perceive us with the same clarity that we perceive a print on a museum wall.
The human mind/brain has no lock on consciousness. Water is conscious. Fire is conscious. Stones are conscious, and so is air. It all exhibits behaviors of consciousness. Infinite detail. Infinite complexity. Fire processes energy. Fire sorts out an infinite number of inputs and produces a result, computes a path, allocates resources etc. Water also. An ecosystem. An atmosphere.
We speak of ‘light’ from people who are uniquely intelligent A ‘star’. But what of actual stars? The universe is a massive computer of possibilities, computing more conscious activity in just one bit of solar surface than all human life on earth.
Such a claim begs for clarification. What is consciousness? Isn’t that the question we’ve been asking all along? Aren’t we investigating where it occurs, how it occurs, what creates it, what are its thresholds, its behaviors, its realms?
I say this. . . The subjective “I” that is ‘thinking’. . . . it’s all real yes, but that’s the only thing that is real. No other realities may be confirmed. The tags ‘conscious’, ‘self-aware, or ‘intelligent’, may now be filed as endorsements by a lower set of vectors, that are aligning votes behind a power they cannot comprehend.
In other words language creates expression for quantities it does not fully understand to begin with. The word ‘consciousness’ is really only a sign, for an abstraction like ‘God’ or ‘matter’ or ‘energy’, useful only so far as we make them so.
The abstraction “God” has been useful to mankind, even though most in the current generation of scientists contend that the gods are dead, surprisingly the father of archetypal psychology would argue that they are more alive than ever. The most fundamental of man’s technologies evolved when the prevalent paradigm of humanity was God fearing. Science was not even born. I’m making the point that paradigms of thought, whether dominated by gods or science, are complexes of behaviors, not self-evident truths.
Science, as the complete evolution of materialism, demands a return in practices and technologies that are useful for our survival. Viewed in this way the paradigm of science may be viewed as a set of conclusions from a thought process. Yet our science is hopelessly locked to the hip of materialistic assumptions. So we are unable to ‘divine’ higher concepts from our simplistic conceptions of matter and consciousness.
“Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts, not an everlasting truth in itself.” C.G. Jung
The natural root of language indeed produces something useful. Consciousness is language, and one byproduct of that language may be science itself. Science verifies the subjective conscious experience that created it, producing technology, enabling our economy of rising populations, that has made our civilization possible. The Gods are with us, or rather, the myth of science seems with us. For now.
Yet we are in neglect of a greater consciousness, that which we share with all nature. Is our subconscious, our soul, simply a victim of repression by a new sort of self-flattering parasite that has taken over the wheel? We’re enamored of the subjective experience, the language using, category creating, diary writing effacer of the earth. Yet what we are, that is a question we do not like to ponder. Is western consciousness, if we dare call it such, a belief based mythos, an illusion, not a truth?