GoKawiilConsciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.
Credits Carlo Rovelli is a theoretical physicist known for his work on quantum gravity, the foundation of quantum mechanics and the nature of space and time.
A fierce debate is raging around the slippery notion of consciousness. It retraces a trotted pattern of cultural resistance: We humans are often scared by anything that may disturb our image of ourselves.
Famously, Darwin’s realization that we have common ancestors with all living organisms on our planet met ferocious resistance. Many felt confounded or degraded by the idea of sharing a family tree with donkeys. The cultural history of modernity is dotted by similar ideological rearguard battles, wherein old worldviews fight in retreat against novel knowledge to save some concept held dear. Amid the current cultural backlash against progressive ideas, today’s debate on consciousness reflects our human fears of belonging to the same family as inanimate matter and losing our dear, transcendent souls.
During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul. The body was an interconnected bunch of matter that decayed and died. The soul belonged to a transcendent spiritual world independent from vile matter. Angels were souls without a body and so were people after their material death. The soul, taken to be immortal and created by God, was understood as the repository of memories, emotions and our subjectivity. It could speak and fall in love. It was the agent of our agency; the subject of our freedom; the entity that bore responsibility, culpability, virtue and value; and deserved to be judged, saved or damned.
The current debate on consciousness is influenced by our entrenched traditional ideas of ourselves and by the long, slow effort to update them with our new understandings of reality developed over the last three centuries.
Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can “explain everything,” most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding. We still can’t cure the flu or accurately predict the weather two weeks ahead. We do not know the basic physical laws of the universe. And even where we are confident that we know the basic underlying natural laws, we still cannot account for what they imply. I am confident that my bicycle diligently obeys the laws of particle physics, yet those laws are useless when it breaks down. To fix it, I ask a mechanic, not a particle physicist.
The functioning of our own body and brain is among the phenomena we understand the least and are curious about the most. This is the proper intellectual space where the “problem of consciousness” is located. That is, consciousness is hard to figure out for precisely the same reason thunderstorms are: not because we have evidence that it is not a natural phenomenon, but because it is a very complicated natural phenomenon.
Updating the understanding of a phenomenon is not to deny it. Sunsets were understood in Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the descent of the sun in its daily motion over the Earth. Today, we understand them as a result of the Earth’s rotation, which turns us toward its shady side, where the sun gradually becomes no longer visible. Such an update in understanding does not make sunsets illusory or unreal.
Similarly, our soul won’t become illusory or unreal if we get a better sense of how our brain functions. We can still call our soul our “soul,” even if we understand ourselves better. I call it so, because this notion — the soul — is dear to my soul.
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