Science tell us that we are made of the same atoms as the world around us. The implication is that our brains and sensory organs, too, are made of atoms, and that the laws of physics can explain everything about how we function as living beings.
However, nothing about a pile of atoms would initially suggest that it should be able to have consciousness.
Physics textbooks say nothing about how sad potassium atoms get on Mondays, how pretty iron atoms think the colour blue is, or how uncomfortably cold the hydrogen atoms thought it was last week. Pencils don’t know how it feels to get sharpened, microphones can’t appreciate music and your breakfast cereal doesn’t get anxiety attacks.
Atoms aren’t normally understood to notice that they’re there. Why do they suddenly do that when they’re in the brain of a conscious being?
Professor David Chalmers first brought these questions up in his paper Facing Up to The Problems of Consciousness in 1995, where he wrote:
. . .even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?
Chalmers divided the problem of consciousness into two parts: The easy problems and the hard problem.
The so-called easy problems are about physics. Over time, we have been shown, to a greater and greater extent, how humans think and behave in terms of the physics of the brain. We can point to parts of the brain and measure activity in it when certain mental processes take place. These are considered “easy” problems because physics offers a clear path to discovering solutions to these problems, and the solutions, the questions, are all possible to explain — to answer — in terms of physics.
The hard problem is, put simply, to figure out why we even notice anything at all.
It’s possible to imagine something that manifests as a human being but doesn’t feel or sense anything. In their better moments, chat bots or the voice assistants on our smartphones can seem almost human in how they respond, but if you asked the computer programmers who developed them if they are conscious, the answer would be a definite “no”. And supposing we one day develop computer programs with realistic android bodies that seem fully human all the time, should we consider them conscious? Do they fear death if we make them flinch when we reach for the power switch?
David Chalmers calls a being that looks and acts, walks and talks, like a human, but lacks consciousness, a “philosophical zombie”. Such a being would respond exactly like a real human would, but wouldn’t be aware of its own existence. If you inflicted physical violence on such an entity, it would exhibit all the trappings of a suffering being, but it would feel nothing, because it would be incapable of feeling. It was merely programmed to do so.
When many simple parts combine to produce complex behaviour, this is known among philosophers and scientists as emergence. When many atoms interact on a massive scale to produce a living cell, this is emergence. An anthill is an example of such, but does emergence make the anthill a conscious being? Individual ants suffer horrible fates on a regular basis. So do human cells, but does this make the overall organism suffer?
Given what we know at the current time, it seems to me that a reasonable solution to this problem is either Spinoza’s God, or Buddhism.
Spinoza essentially believed that God is physics. All of creation is God. The Universe is God and we are God.
Or, as Alan Watts, former priest, later turned Zen buddhist teacher, said:
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
I’m inclined to subscribe to this, because nothing else seems more plausible at this point. The scientists are all too welcome to prove me wrong. However, if what I state is true, to some extent, all matter possesses some low-level degree of consciousness, depending on the level of complexity. Thus, in terms of the ethics of it all, you cannot avoid hurting another living being.
This brings us to Buddha, who said that life is suffering.
Based on what conclusions were reached earlier, this makes sense. You will eat the smaller fish, and it will suffer, but the bigger fish will also eat you, and you will suffer from it. The bigger fish will itself be eaten by an even bigger fish, someone is always better than you, and so on.
It is also a belief among the buddhists that none of this matters at all, because the universe and all living beings are ultimately connected, so you should not view yourself as separate from the universe as if you’re fighting some kind of external enemy, but rather as part of the universe, looking upon yourself. If you came from the ocean, as it is said that all life did, and you are a wave breaking on the beach, perhaps it is best if you don’t fight the fact, because waves are not eternal.
So, what are the counterarguments to this?
One of the more popular ones is that consciousness is an illusion. However, in order to deceive, there must be someone to deceive. A someone is a thing that senses and experiences. So, once again, we are back to the beginning.
What is consciousness?