31. Consciousness

There are questions that organize our lives, whether we ever ask them or not. And here’s one. How is it possible that matter gives rise to consciousness? Now, you may never have thought about this, and if you have, you may go years without thinking about it again. But this question lies at the heart of everything you care about. Consciousness is all you have. It’s all you are as a matter of experience. It’s what makes the people you love worth loving, and it’s what makes your failures to love so tragic. It’s what puts the sting in every missed opportunity. It is the substance of every joy and every sorrow. It is the wind that blows toward sanity or away toward madness. In whatever the state of our bodies, consciousness is the real boundary between life and death. To lose consciousness permanently, as in a vegetative state, is to leave the world before you leave it. And it is possible to have a body without consciousness. Is it possible to have consciousness without a body? Well, yes, in a way. There’s a condition called locked-in syndrome, where a perfectly intact conscious mind can become the prisoner of a body that can’t move. You should read John Dominique Bobise, The Diving Bell in the Butterfly, which is a very moving memoir of this condition. But can bodies and minds separate even further? For instance, is something like the matrix possible? It seems possible. But of course, things could go wrong even there. A glitch in your code, and it would be possible to suffer locked-in syndrome even in the matrix. If consciousness is the result of some immaterial process, some immortal soul that is integrated with the clockwork of the brain, then death really would be an illusion. And then there would be nothing to fear from it, except for everything that could happen to a conscious mind after death. Now, many of us have learned to doubt the picture of consciousness given to us by religion. We’ve come to believe that if the universe is stranger than we suppose, or even stranger than we can suppose, it’s not the corny place of provincial wish fulfillment and superstition and taboo that we find in Scripture. Whatever the explanation for consciousness is, it might always seem like a miracle. And for what is worth, I think it probably will always seem like a miracle. But we may learn to ignore this miracle and to produce conscious machines that no longer seem strange to us. Many of us will wonder whether this is the right thing to do, and worry about what our ethical obligations are to machines that can suffer or be deprived of happiness. The phrase robot rights will no longer be confined to science fiction, and what will human rights be in a world populated by sentient machines, especially ones that demonstrate superhuman intelligence and creativity and even moral clarity? I think we will one day need to face these questions. And will our children ever be given a choice to back up their conscious minds in the cloud? And how would this be different from duplicating their minds and their experiences, and therefore creating other beings who can suffer? Questions of this kind entirely depend on the question we started with. How is it possible that matter gives rise to consciousness? What was it like to be a dinosaur as a giant asteroid came crashing down in the Gulf of Mexico 65 million years ago? How bad is life for a pig or a cow on one of our factory farms? Not how bad does it seem from the outside? How bad is it on the inside for those who live it? How happy would you be in a new relationship, or in a new job, or if you had children? These are questions about consciousness and its contents. Everything we care about, or can care about, and every one who can care in turn, this entire reality is given its substance by the fact of consciousness. Consciousness is the most important thing in the universe. I would even say it’s the only important thing in the universe, because it’s the carrier of all value, actual and possible. And whatever its relationship is to the physics of things, it’s the one thing that cannot be an illusion. However confused you are right now, whatever you know or don’t know, whether or not you’re already in the matrix, or in a dream, or in some other way distant from the base layer of reality, the fact that it’s like something to be you is the fact of consciousness, and it’s the one thing that can never be in doubt. And it’s this reality in each moment that awaits your attention. You can either notice the nature of your experience clearly, really clearly, or you can be lost in thought. In each moment, thought will tend to capture you and lull you to sleep. And the practice of meditation is to notice this more and more, and then to wake up. Wake up.