Is consciousness overrated?
Consciousness is a slippery word. On the one hand it seems to be transparent, anyone who is reading this is conscious, yet on the other hand it is mysterious and resists explanation, a quality that we can only define by synonyms – awareness, cognition, thinking about thinking. We have individual consciousness, I am aware of writing this as you are aware of reading it, and there are structurally higher understandings of consciousness as a kind of collective representation, how we as a community represent and understand ourselves. I suppose we could call that ‘culture’.
And there are trans-individual patterns of sociality, particularly the family, that we might understand as a mode of perception: if consciousness is our capacity to interact and engage with a world, then the family is a trans-individual unit that engages with world as a kind of perception. How these different representations connect is a keenly important question with social, political and even environmental ramifications. A provocative and interesting question might be what if consciousness is not the key mystery we should be trying to explain, but a limited evolutionary achievement within the much greater mystery of life?
So, I think our mistake lies in trying to isolate consciousness from the embodied and social forms of life that make it possible: namely, that different kinds of sociality constrain consciousness into its different forms, including language, family, and culture. Some traditions of India that I have studied (especially Kashmir Shaivism ) radically enlarge the concept, claiming that there is a universal consciousness, by which they mean that the universe of subjects and objects (including what we call matter) is an appearance or manifestation of that supreme consciousness. But between the individual and the universal are other levels and realms. I always think that one of this school’s insights is that the body is a way of experiencing a world and that the kind of body we have determines the kinds of experience open to us.
This is obvious, in a way, but nevertheless insightful. In this view, as we rise through the cosmos to higher worlds (as Yogis in samadhi are believed to do), body and world overlap, which is actually a claim about levels of consciousness: as is our awareness, so is our world of experience (or in the technical terminology, as is the citta so is the loka). There is a commonsense truth to this, that our states of mind affect our experience of the world (singing in the rain!), although I think there is a more radical thesis implied here about transforming our world of experience and consciousness as a state of wonder.
That is a capacious understanding of consciousness in an ancient Indian tradition. But in a different way of thinking, I sometimes wonder whether human consciousness evolved as a limiting constraint to prevent us being overwhelmed by sensation. We would not have survived unless we could focus on a limited range of experience for functional purposes. If so, then we might say that there is something much larger going on that cannot be captured by the word ‘consciousness’ (which only comes into the English language in the 17th century from the French ‘la conscience’). This larger something might be termed ‘life,’ a force that is mostly unconscious but that is the necessary condition for consciousness along with our reflections and social institutions. Indeed, the focus on consciousness may be a narrowing from the abundance of life itself and we should be cautious about making consciousness the measure of reality: what deserves affirmation is embodied life .
Those classical questions about whether consciousness is an emergent property of brain states, whether consciousness is the product of evolution, or whether consciousness is everywhere as immanent, are as fresh today as they always were. About the last question, speaking personally, I’m not sure that the Shaiva claim that consciousness is immanent to reality is particularly illuminating because it does not explain anything and simply adds to the mystery. But that consciousness has an evolutionary function makes sense. If pressed, I would sum up my own philosophical position as a kind of spiritual materialism, where consciousness is the icing on the cake and the temporal thrust of the cosmos is not conscious (at least in any way that makes sense to me). If by ‘consciousness’ we mean ‘awareness’, then most, if not all, life forms are conscious in this sense (some even claim this of plants). But in the human case, then consciousness is deeply implicated with language (we think mostly in words) and so there is a qualitative difference between different kinds of consciousness.
Today AI shows us that there can be language and rationality without consciousness (as far as we know). Lastly, I think we need to be cautious in our talk about ‘consciousness’ because it runs the risk of denigrating the body (as Gnostic traditions have done throughout the history of religions), which seems the wrong way to go. If we are to prosper and thrive as a global, human community, we need to affirm the body and materiality and our embodied ways of being in the world over the idea of consciousness. So, consciousness may be overrated in the sense that embodied life is more fundamental and perhaps consciousness matters less than we think, because life matters more.
And there are trans-individual patterns of sociality, particularly the family, that we might understand as a mode of perception: if consciousness is our capacity to interact and engage with a world, then the family is a trans-individual unit that engages with world as a kind of perception. How these different representations connect is a keenly important question with social, political and even environmental ramifications. A provocative and interesting question might be what if consciousness is not the key mystery we should be trying to explain, but a limited evolutionary achievement within the much greater mystery of life?
So, I think our mistake lies in trying to isolate consciousness from the embodied and social forms of life that make it possible: namely, that different kinds of sociality constrain consciousness into its different forms, including language, family, and culture. Some traditions of India that I have studied (especially Kashmir Shaivism ) radically enlarge the concept, claiming that there is a universal consciousness, by which they mean that the universe of subjects and objects (including what we call matter) is an appearance or manifestation of that supreme consciousness. But between the individual and the universal are other levels and realms. I always think that one of this school’s insights is that the body is a way of experiencing a world and that the kind of body we have determines the kinds of experience open to us.
This is obvious, in a way, but nevertheless insightful. In this view, as we rise through the cosmos to higher worlds (as Yogis in samadhi are believed to do), body and world overlap, which is actually a claim about levels of consciousness: as is our awareness, so is our world of experience (or in the technical terminology, as is the citta so is the loka). There is a commonsense truth to this, that our states of mind affect our experience of the world (singing in the rain!), although I think there is a more radical thesis implied here about transforming our world of experience and consciousness as a state of wonder.
That is a capacious understanding of consciousness in an ancient Indian tradition. But in a different way of thinking, I sometimes wonder whether human consciousness evolved as a limiting constraint to prevent us being overwhelmed by sensation. We would not have survived unless we could focus on a limited range of experience for functional purposes. If so, then we might say that there is something much larger going on that cannot be captured by the word ‘consciousness’ (which only comes into the English language in the 17th century from the French ‘la conscience’). This larger something might be termed ‘life,’ a force that is mostly unconscious but that is the necessary condition for consciousness along with our reflections and social institutions. Indeed, the focus on consciousness may be a narrowing from the abundance of life itself and we should be cautious about making consciousness the measure of reality: what deserves affirmation is embodied life .
Those classical questions about whether consciousness is an emergent property of brain states, whether consciousness is the product of evolution, or whether consciousness is everywhere as immanent, are as fresh today as they always were. About the last question, speaking personally, I’m not sure that the Shaiva claim that consciousness is immanent to reality is particularly illuminating because it does not explain anything and simply adds to the mystery. But that consciousness has an evolutionary function makes sense. If pressed, I would sum up my own philosophical position as a kind of spiritual materialism, where consciousness is the icing on the cake and the temporal thrust of the cosmos is not conscious (at least in any way that makes sense to me). If by ‘consciousness’ we mean ‘awareness’, then most, if not all, life forms are conscious in this sense (some even claim this of plants). But in the human case, then consciousness is deeply implicated with language (we think mostly in words) and so there is a qualitative difference between different kinds of consciousness.
Today AI shows us that there can be language and rationality without consciousness (as far as we know). Lastly, I think we need to be cautious in our talk about ‘consciousness’ because it runs the risk of denigrating the body (as Gnostic traditions have done throughout the history of religions), which seems the wrong way to go. If we are to prosper and thrive as a global, human community, we need to affirm the body and materiality and our embodied ways of being in the world over the idea of consciousness. So, consciousness may be overrated in the sense that embodied life is more fundamental and perhaps consciousness matters less than we think, because life matters more.
Next Story