Can We Explain Consciousness With Its Content?
This is the essential question faced by humanity at present. It is how the important questions, what does it mean to be human, why are we here, are framed in this age of material science as it searches to find its grounding in reality.
The development of large language machine learning models, so called AI, has brought a new framing of this conversation, but the kernel of the question is discernible throughout the history of thought, wherever sincere enquiry into truth encounters the materialist mental constructs, the question arises as a kind of frontier, a subtle, yet impenetrable boundary dividing the perceptible from the perceiver.
There are two basic perspectives on consciousness. It can be seen as a phenomenon in the world, what we can call clinical consciousness, a feature of certain entities: this or that person or animal exhibits the characteristics of consciousness.
On the other hand, it can be considered directly as that faculty or power with which you are right now perceiving this writing. This I’ll refer to as consciousness itself.
Consciousness itself is there in all experience. Clinical consciousness is a feature of your experience, that is, it is content. It is unique content, in that you deduce or otherwise conclude that those being’s that exhibit clinical consciousness are actually experiencing consciousness itself in the way you are yourself.
We also deduce that the systems involved in clinical consciousness, the biological infrastructure, for example, is also that which is involved in somehow producing or raising consciousness itself.
We therefore have two opposing narratives. One that experience is raised as content of consciousness, or two, that consciousness is raised as a result of the content.
Before proceeding, you should be clear as to what consciousness itself is. It is immediately available to you but it can be slippery. The feeling of dog’s fur under your hand, the sense of relief when you narrowly avoid a car wreck and the thought that 7 * 7 = 49 are all diverse experiences, roughly categorized as sensation, emotion and thought, but in their essence they are all content for the same consciousness.
Here is where you may begin questioning even the existence of consciousness itself. The different experiences we’ve described, they are so different, perhaps they are not aspects of one consciousness, but rather emerge from some hidden complex. However, you can see that everything you experience does share one fundamental fact: you are aware of it. That essential awareness, that a thing is witnessed by you, is the consciousness we are describing.
It’s tricky, because the tendency is to slip into speculation.
Many modern humans are accustomed to setting aside the immediate sensory context in order to pay heed to the mental, especially those who might think about AI and what it means for the nature of mind. You attempt to ground the mental in solid, verifiable sense data and then proceed along valid reason towards extrapolated conclusions. This is in broad strokes the scientific method of observation, hypothesis and communal verification by experimental test.
All these types of endeavors still rely upon consciousness itself. Becoming entranced or enthralled by sensory stimulus often have vanished only to awake later to our whole selves, with our emotions and thoughts. Similarly, we are hypnotized by emotions and thoughts as being real unto themselves, and we can awaken to a yet more whole self, which is that abiding consciousness, what we have called here consciousness itself.
What we are capable of, it is certain, is directing this consciousness. It is incredible plastic. It can narrow or broaden. It can focus into the world of things or turn to consider itself.
The more you question this consciousness, which is your essential nature, the more you come to sense a vastness that renders what seemed so enormous, this universe of matter and energy, as a fragmentary projection or trick of light or transient manifestation. The previously lockstep progression of causation, so powerful, is seen as utterly flimsy and ephemeral. There is something incredibly more real and prevailing.
Words fail at rendering it, since the world of words and sounds is itself but a curious artifact of the deeper thing. That unthing which made the Bard say, “All the world’s a stage.”
We began this piece with a question. Can consciousness be explained with its content?
Inevitably, we’ve drifted into the poetic, because the truth of consciousness contemplating itself is ineffably beautiful. Beauty and truth are one.
The question is then answered as you direct your consciousness itself, your innermost being and your one true possession and power. The more you direct it outward into the world of matter, energy, cause, the more it appears that it is but a vanishing side-effect. The more you direct it inwardly to its own self-evident, self-actualizing fact, the clearer it becomes that the transient world is but the form, or body, or tale, or play, if you like.
Consider the modern idea about the nature of consciousness, which runs something like this: there is an independently existing something, probably a quantum system of energy or information or other very subtle substantial reality. It begins or exists forever in some condition and gradually via natural selection becomes more and more complex in its interactions, until at some point, it develops consciousness, which then becomes able to sense and finally contemplate this very arrangement of affairs.
This is a model of reality. A model is an idea. An idea is an experience. Experience, as we have discussed, is another kind of content in consciousness itself.
Logically, it is incoherent to propose that these things explain consciousness itself. They are all within consciousness, and therefore depend upon consciousness for their existence.
In fact, any thoughts of “this is true” and “this is not true” are within consciousness. Therefore, it is invalid to consider such thinking as conditioning or limiting or circumscribing consciousness. Put another way, thinking and explaining are themselves processes within consciousness.
This is not a passing issue or something that can be resolved with better science, more data and experimentation or better models and math. Inevitably, consciousness itself will remain the essential ground or apriori factor enabling all these other factors to make their entrance.
Therefore, we can say, properly understood: no, consciousness cannot be explained with its content.
Instead, we can turn consciousness towards itself and discover that the more we do, the more we find the questions resolve themselves without being asked. It is revealed that explanations are unnecessary or that they are self-evident.
