Where Does Consciousness Come From?
Where Theology Meets The Cutting Edge of Science
Please, do me a favor.
Take a moment. Close your eyes. Breathe.
Notice what's going on around you. What do you hear? What do you smell?
Notice what is going on inside of you. What do you feel?
Now, ask yourself, "How is it that I know this?" "How is it that I am aware of what is going on outside and inside of me?"
"How is it?", indeed.
It is the mystery of consciousness.
The simplest way to think of consciousness is to say it is "awareness". Many scientists have tried to figure out where it comes from.
All have failed…so far.
General consensus says consciousness somehow has to come out of evolution. It makes sense. After all, we started as single-celled organisms, and over time (a lot of time) those organisms evolved into people.
There seems to be a connection between the brain and consciousness. Yet, despite several theories and exploring different parts of the brain, scientists have yet to find the bridge across that gap.
So far, the best we can say is that somehow amidst the complexity of the brain, there is an interaction that leads us into consciousness.
In other words,,,
we know the brain is a real thing
and we know that consciousness is a real thing
but how we get from one to the other is an educated guess.
But, what if the scientists studying consciousness are asking the wrong question?
A few months ago I was watching a video that featured Donald Hoffman, a cognitive psychologist. With a relatively simple thought, he threw a wrench into the current scientific quest to find consciousness.
He said (and I paraphrase)…
We assume that time-space is fundamental to the universe. Therefore, when we are looking for where consciousness comes from, we assume that it comes through matter that evolves. What if time-space is not fundamental to the universe and consciousness is?
What Hoffman sees as an alternative comes from his understanding of physics. Below a certain level, we step out of time-space and step into the fundamental structures of the universe. Those structures underlie everything that exists. That includes time-space.
He believes the reason scientists have yet to discover the seat of consciousness is because there is no seat of consciousness to be discovered inside time-space.
Let me try to describe the difference using analogies that may not be the best, but are the best I can come up with at the moment.
The way the scientists approach the quest is like going through a toolbox to find a particular wrench. The assumption is that the wrench is in the toolbox and is thus able to be discovered.
It seems to me that Hoffman sees it like a jug of water. The jug is plastic. By examining the plastic jug, you will never find water. But, when conditions are right (let’s say a hole opens) water emerges.
I think Hoffman presents an exciting challenge to biological sciences by throwing in physics. It's as if one science is actually challenging the capacity of another to answer the question on the table.
While I find all that interesting, even more interesting to me is the theological implication of what he's saying from a scientific perspective…
Perhaps consciousness is eternal and time-space is not.
Going back to the mystics
Is life a dream?
Could it be that all of existence is God's dream being made manifest?
Could time-space ultimately be an illusion?
According to my understanding, this is part of what Hinduism teaches.
And now, science seems to be revealing it's right.
Hoffman emphasizes the idea that we are all living in virtual reality. Believe it or not, this isn't a new idea. It's commonly accepted.
The brain lives in a very dark box and it does its best to interpret what is going on around it so that it can respond accordingly.
When I look at a tree, for example, my brain (through the eyes) perceives how light is organized. It takes that light and interprets it as a distinct shape that it knows as “a tree”.
Here’s the significance of that: Because we can never move past our brain’s interpretations of our reality, we can never know what an actual tree (or anything in the world, for that matter) actually looks like.
This, the brain creates a virtual reality for us to live in and interact with.
So yes, it seems the Hindus are right: the world is indeed an illusion.
To say that the world is an illusion and that we are the dream of God is basically the same as saying…
Divine Consciousness is fundamental to the universe and time-space is not.
Paging Meister Eckhart
Do you remember what we talked about last week? I dipped into the theology of the Christian mystical theologian Meister Eckhart.
According to him, the Godhead is the Ground of all Being.
From the Godhead flows all things.
The Godhead is found in everything that was, is, and will be.
In other words…
The Godhead is fundamental to the universe and time-space is not.
Beyond “religion vs. science”
Back in seminary at the turn of the millennium, discussions about how the church needed to connect with people in the emerging culture were hot. Many concluded the time had come to admit our culture had experienced a dramatic paradigm shift…
We no longer lived in the modern world, but the postmodern one.
That meant that we could no longer be the church in the same way we used to be if we wanted to be relevant to the lives of everyday people.
Of course, that was two decades ago, and it’s safe to say that the church still hasn't been able to make any significant, meaningful shifts to adapt to the new environment.
And, to make matters worse, there are those who would argue…
We no longer live in the postmodern world, but the metamodern one.
Yes, they say we have shifted again.
The metamodern solution
Metamodernists argue that we don't have to live in the either/or dichotomy of "either science or religion”. Instead, we can move into a reality that equally embraces both science and spirituality while remaining unburdened by the outdated, unreasonable dogma of religion.
So, what we see emerging in the “spiritual but not religious” sphere is a series of thinkers making sense of our universe and existence as viewed through the lens of complexity science.
This is where Jamie Wheal's Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind comes in. Wheal sees religion and the Enlightenment as the frameworks for Meaning 1.0 and Meaning 2.0, respectively. He then synthesizes the two into a spiritualized understanding he calls Meaning 3.0.
Alongside that, we have Brendan Graham Dempsey's Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. Essentially, it is a theological interpretation of a scientific understanding of our universe that intends to articulate a new religious paradigm. Regarding consciousness, he believes that conscious beings are an expression of the universe through which the universe is coming to understand itself.
Could it be that we are witnessing a new theology for a new age?
I suspect so.
That’s why I’m extremely interested in the work of Diarmuid O’Murchu. And, I want to talk about how he reconciles scientific revelation with the Christian tradition in my next article.
I suspect you are going to be surprised.
Peace, Bo
www.evolvingchristianfaith.net
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