From my book :
"AN EXPLORATION OF RELIGION!"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B088LH21TB
GOD AND CONSCIOUSNESS!
With all the fuss over the nature of consciousness and/or God lately..., I guess a few examples would be in order about now.
(Remember, our consciousness is just an example of God expressing Itself through us... because deep down that's what we are!)
So! You could say that we live in a duality of body and mind.
“Consciousness,” is an emergent property of the unconscious mind, which is the true seat of our identity.
***
FIRST: Eastern Philosophy:
Consciousness is not a substance that anyone can experience.
Consciousness is a concept that points to the luminosity which is behind seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and thinking.
This luminosity is the SUBJECT that is INTELLIGENT and ALIVE and is also nameless, formless, dimension-less, non-local and non-temporal.
This SUBJECT does not know any boundary, which means that IT IS infinite and eternal.
This SUBJECT is a no-thing and non-material REALITY that can never be known as an object.
IT can only be intuited by the eye of wisdom.
The eye can see everything else, in fact the entire cosmos but it can never look at itself. It can never know itself as an object but it can intuit its own existence.
All that the eye can say is “I see this cosmos and therefore I AM”.
In exactly the same fashion THIS mysterious SUBJECT can never know itself as an object but IT can only intuit itself.
All that the SUBJECT can say is “I perceive this cosmos and therefore I AM”.
This is the declaration of the "Upanishads."
The one who knows this is a knower of Brahman.
***
Second: The following arguments are along the line of thought experiments that force us to confront the limits of human experience and inquiry.
The Nature of Consciousness: By Alan Watts
What you are, basically, deep, and deep down, and far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
In Hindu mythology, the world is the drama of God.
God is not something with a white beard that sits on a throne and has royal prerogatives.
God in Indian mythology is the self: Satchitananda.
Which means:
-'sat,' -that which is-
-'chit,' -that which is consciousness-
-'ananda,' which is –bliss-
SO!
Let's suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power to dream in one night 75 years worth of time. (A lifetime.)
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes.
You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive, and after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure, you would say 'Well, that was pretty great.”
But now, let's have a surprise!
To make it more interesting, let's have a dream which isn't under your control.
“Where something is going to happen to me, and I don't know what it's going to be.”
Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would take further and further gambles as to what you would dream until finally, you would dream where you are now.
You would dream the dream of the life that you are living today.
Because the whole nature of God, according to this idea, is to play that you’re not.
Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is.
And you're all that, only you're pretending you're
not.
And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not.
The life you're living is what YOU have put yourself into.
Only you won't admit it, because you want to play the game that’s happening to you.
Now here's the drama.
You are the central self!
You can call it God, or you can call it anything you like ……, and it's all of us.
It's playing all the parts of everything, everywhere and anywhere.
It's playing the game of hide and seek with yourself.
***
From Wikipedia: New Mysterianism is a philosophy proposing that certain problems will never be explained, or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage. (This problem is most often referred to as the “hard” problem of consciousness.)
Owen Flanagan noted in his 1991 book Science of the Mind that some modern thinkers have suggested that consciousness may never be completely explained.
These "Old Mysterians" are thinkers throughout history who have put forward a similar position.
They include Leibniz, Descartes, and Thomas Huxley.
Huxley wrote, "How it is that there is anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness, which comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue!”
Noam Chomsky, meanwhile, distinguishes between problems which seem solvable …, at least in principle, through scientific methods and mysteries which do not …., even in principle.
He notes that the cognitive capabilities of all organisms are limited by their biology. E.g., a mouse will never speak like a human.
In the same way, certain problems may be beyond our understanding. (We shall talk about this some more!) The term ‘New Mysterianism’ has been extended by some writers to encompass the wider philosophical position that humans do not have the intellectual ability to solve many hard problems, not just the problem of consciousness, at a scientific level.
For example, in the mind-body problem, emergent materialism claims that humans are not smart enough to determine "the relationship between mind and matter." (Dualism)
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why there is any physical state that is conscious rather than nonconscious.
The usual methods of science involve the explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties - explanations of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together. But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question:
Why is it conscious?
This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the methods of science.
Therefore, this presents a hard problem for science. (Or perhaps it marks the limits of what science can explain.)
Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with so-called “easy problems” of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness.
These features can be explained using the usual methods of science.
But that leaves the question of why there is something there when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present.
People like Dawkins and Hitchens attempt to use a physics version of the psychological “soft” problem in defining our reality, and when they run into a limit on their conjectures they postulate this to mean that there is just not enough information, rather than admitting there is a “hard’ problem in physics.
This ‘hard’ problem is the Universe seems to be a duality.
(Dualism is strongly associated with the thoughts of René Descartes, which holds that the mind is a nonphysical, and therefore non-spatial substance. Descartes identified the mind as having consciousness and self-awareness, and distinguished this from the brain as the seat of intelligence.)
He was the first to formulate the mind-body problem in the form in which it exists today. It asserts that when matter is organized in the appropriate way (i.e., in the way that living human bodies are organized), mental properties emerge!
Hence, it is a sub-branch of emergent materialism.
The term dualism was originally coined to denote co-eternal binary opposition, a meaning that is preserved in metaphysical and philosophical duality discourse.
But it has been more generalized in other usages
lately to indicate a system that contains two essential parts, i.e. positive-negative,
matter-antimatter, observer and observed and of course the corporeal and
non-corporeal, which is the Christian dualism of God and creation. (In the philosophy of mind, dualism is any of a narrow variety of views about the relationship
between mind and matter, which claims that mind and matter are two ontologically separate
categories.)
Matter, by any definition or classification, is
inert and without purpose. (We look at it objectively.)
Mind, or consciousness, on the other hand, is separate from any material state and it operates with a certain purpose. (It is subjective.)
This confirms our contemporary scientific hypothesis that without the subjective mind to do the observing, there would be no objective matter!
(If a tree falls in the forest, etc.)
***
The Mystery of Consciousness.
So! How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness?
This is the hard problem, and the only reason the hard problem of consciousness is hard is that we don’t accept the fact that it is “ab extra,” or not part of this Universe.
We are an expression of what is referred to as Cosmic Consciousness, just as all living things are to a greater or lesser degree.
This system explains how consciousness can exist to varying degrees among humans and other animals.
(The theory incorporates some elements of panpsychism, the philosophy that the mind is not only present in humans, but all things.)
This flies in the face of theories of self and identity by people such as Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore and Richard Dawkins as they postulate that the concept of “Me” or “I” is an illusion.
If anything, it’s the other way around. The Universe is the illusion!
***
The Mystery of Consciousness by Sam Harris:
The term “consciousness” is notoriously difficult to define, therefore many a debate about its character has been waged without the participants’ finding a topic such as common ground.
By “consciousness,” I mean simply “sentience,” is the most unadorned sense. Whatever else consciousness may or may not be in physical terms, the difference between it and unconsciousness is first and foremost a matter of subjective experience.
Either the lights are on, or they are not. To say that a creature is conscious, therefore, is not to say anything about its behaviour…., no screams need to be heard, or wincing seen, for a person to be in pain.
It is surely a sign of our intellectual progress that a discussion of consciousness no longer must begin with a debate about its existence.
***
By Sam Harris:
The hard problem, however, is that no evidence for consciousness exists in the physical world.
Physical events are simply mute as to whether it is “like something” to be what they are. The only thing in this Universe that attests to the existence of consciousness is consciousness itself. The only clue to subjectivity, as such, is subjectivity.
Absolutely nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a focus of the experience.
Were we not already brimming with consciousness ourselves, we would find no evidence of it in the physical Universe.
Nor would we have any notion of the many experiential states that it gives rise to the painfulness of pain, for instance, as it puts in an appearance only in consciousness!
If we look for consciousness in the physical world, all we
find are increasingly complex systems giving rise to increasingly complex
behaviour.
The fact that the behaviour of our fellow human beings persuade us that they are
conscious does not get us any closer to linking consciousness to physical events.
Most scientists think that consciousness
emerges from complexity and we have compelling reasons for believing this
because the only signs of consciousness we see in the Universe are found in evolved organisms like ourselves.
Nevertheless, this notion of emergence strikes me
as nothing more than a restatement of a miracle.
To say that consciousness emerged at some point in the
evolution of life doesn’t give us an
inkling of how it could emerge from unconscious processes,
I believe that this notion of emergence is incomprehensible — rather like
a naïve conception of the big bang. The idea that everything (matter,
space-time, their antecedent causes, and the very laws that govern their
emergence) simply sprang into being out of nothing seems worse
than a paradox.
“Nothing,” after all, is precisely that which cannot give rise to
“anything,” let alone “everything.”
Many physicists realize this, of course. To say “Everything came out of
nothing” is to assert a brute fact that defies our most basic intuitions of
cause and effect—a miracle, in other words.
Likewise, the idea that consciousness is identical to (or emerged from)
unconscious physical events is, I would argue, also impossible to properly
conceive.
Consciousness - the sheer fact that this Universe is illuminated by sentience - is
precisely what unconsciousness is not.
And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully
account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however
juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work.
An analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of
consciousness.
The Universe is filled with physical phenomena
that appear devoid of consciousness. From the birth of stars and planets to the early stages of cell
division in a human embryo, the structures and
processes we find in Nature seem to lack an inner life.
At some point in the development of certain complex
organisms, however, consciousness emerges.
This miracle does not depend on a change of
material, for you and I are built of the same atoms as a fern or a ham
sandwich.
Many readers did not understand why the emergence of consciousness should pose a special problem to
science.
Every feature of the human mind and body emerges throughout
development: Why is consciousness more perplexing than language or digestion?
The problem is that the distance between unconsciousness and
consciousness must be traversed in a single
stride if traversed at all.
Just as the appearance of something out of nothing cannot be explained
by our saying that the first something was “very small,” the birth of
consciousness is rendered no less mysterious by
saying that the simplest minds have only a glimmer of it. This situation has been characterized as an
“explanatory gap” and the “hard problem of consciousness,” and it is surely both.
But couldn’t mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation
of human consciousness in terms of its underlying brain
processes?
We have reasons to believe that reductions of this sort are neither possible
nor conceptually coherent. Nothing about a brain, studied at any scale (spatial
or temporal), even suggests that it might harbour consciousness.
Nothing about human behaviour, or language, or
culture, demonstrates that these products are mediated by subjectivity. We
simply know that they are - a fact that we appreciate in ourselves directly,
and in others by analogy.
Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness and studying its contents becomes
paramount. For these reasons, it is difficult to imagine what experimental
findings could render the emergence of consciousness comprehensible. This is not to
say, however, that our understanding of ourselves won’t change in surprising
ways through our study of the brain.
While we know many things about ourselves in anatomical, physiological,
and evolutionary terms, we do not know why it is “like something” to be what we
are.
The fact that the Universe is illuminated where you stand—that your thoughts and moods and sensations have a qualitative character—is a mystery, exceeded only by the mystery that there should be something rather than nothing in this Universe…….!
By Sam Harris
(For the sake of simplicity... and brevity, let's describe God as something similar to "The Force" in the Star Wars movies!)
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