We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system — with all these exalted powers — Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Moral Code dept.
If there is no transcendent moral code, then all our moral values are results of our environment, basic human decency is merely a product of evolution, and there is nothing sacred about it. Somehow, it seems like a relatively bleak prospect to me to know to that there is nothing inherently sacred about human life, our life.
Meaningful Questions?
When we are wondering about the essence of a thing, it will at some point be asked whether the question is meaningful. In the context of scientific models, the answer is no. The model is isomorphic to "the real world counterpart", and for scientific and practical purposes we consider the two identical. First of all, stating the model is identical to the thing it describes, i.e. that there is no further essence to the thing, assumes the model is indeed isomorphic to the thing -- that we have described it completely. Secondly, even if we have described it completely, have we understood it completely? For example, we may ask, "does an electromagnetic field really exist?" In other words, does a description of how a thing behaves completely describe what it is? Here an essence may still be relevant. For tests and thought experiments that I propose, see below.
While such utilitarian approaches may work well for scientific purposes (after all, if we are only concerned with how things work and building technology, essences are not relevant) they may not be enough for philosophical discourse. Increasingly, I feel a reduction in the perceived relevance of philosophy among those educated in modern science. The invention of machines with advanced computational potential, and the discovery of the fundamental underpinnings of biology and reproduction lead one to believe, after being exposed to these observations, that the world is simply a complex, functioning system and an idealistic paintbrush of philosophical thought may be too crude to say anything accurate anymore. Perhaps it turns out things like life are more complicated than we can usefully describe? Science restricts its scope to questions it can answer through empirical experimentation. Philosophy was always exploring further ahead. But as science starts to shed more light on topics that were previously beyond its reach, the broad strokes of philosophers seem to be replaced by hard, materialistic truth -- the world is complex, and a myriad interactions underlie even the simplest phenomenon. Perhaps the very phenomena that we consider ubiquitous and almost fundamental, like the laws of physics, are simply the most common (by far), and indeed there are entire worlds of possibilities -- and not wonderful possibilities, because they undermine our simple descriptions that we do consider wonderful.
While scientific exploration has given us tremendous knowledge, technology, and other useful things, it seems that they were all based on certain assumptions, accepted because it allowed us to proceed. Assumptions such as: there is nothing special about the conditions of the experiment (time, place, air pressure, etc.), and that if the system contains components we have not yet observed, then these components affect nothing of consequence in our model of the system. In particular, scientists are unconcerned bout the 'essence' component to the system. The components that we do observe, we always observe from the outside, by detecting the system's effect on its surroundings, such as how it reflects particles being bombarded at it, or how it emits light.
This seems to work pretty well for everything, except ourselves. Because whenever we turn the microscope of empirical observation inward, we must bend it back from pointing outward; and however close to our real selves we bend it, it will still be on the outside looking in. There is a fundamental mystery, for we are on the inside, looking out. Our existence, our consciousness, in this age when science knows so much about the outside world, still remains to all people something mystical. Can one think of an external property that consciousness has? If the properties are all internal, does consciousness really exist, or is it just a self-consistent hypothesis that cannot be proven? All I can say is, I am conscious, therefore I am, and that gives meaning to the world.
Life and Death dept.
Are we indeed a spirit living inside a body, as a person inhabiting a house? Or does consciousness somehow miraculously emerge from a functioning biological system? If the latter, then our problems will continue to stem from how we refer to ourselves. Our language with its "I", "we" and other pronouns will cause us to keep asking, "what am I?"
One can entertain the image of a soul as a dot moving forward in time through the space-time continuum, which otherwise -- with the exception of quantum mechanics model -- is indeed predetermined and exists for all time. Our existence gives meaning to the universe! That is why it is hard to imagine what it is to die. I suppose that, when we are dead and not conscious of this world, it may be very similar to the situation during the times we weren't born yet. People are not particularly upset about not living before they had been born. The desire to survive beyond our own death is probably the result of our human instincts, but the inability to comprehend what it is like not to exist is much more fundamental than that.
There is a fundamental mystery in the fact that we even exist. How can we speak of the odds against our existing, if we are not sure what we are? If we say "I" makes sense and define it as the state of our brain at every moment, or isomorphically (there's that word again), the action of our brain at each moment of our life, then anything being off would preclude our existing. The odds are beyond astronomical.
But if we didn't exist, in what sense would the universe have any meaning? For that matter, in what sense would it exist? What is existence, anyway. That is why I call it a fundamental mystery. I feel some kind of large disconnect between the qualitative notion of existing as a person, and the quantitative probability of not existing, embedded on something that does exist.
I am sure David Chalmers must feel something similar, for he is ever trying to probe into what it means to be conscious, even as we already have a rough physical description of the brain and its activity. I agree there seems to be something qualitatively different about consciousness and physical systems of any kind. Perhaps it is through ignorance, but none of us are able to imagine, today, how exactly consciousness arises from a physical system. If it indeed emerges from the complex interactions of a physical system, then perhaps we would be able to understand the essence of ourselves someday. That would be incredible.
The philosophical/ontological questions of existence are predicated on consciousness. My personal definition of existence would be, to wit, "a thing exists if its effects can be detected by a conscious observer." In such a sense, we are not sure whether superstrings exist. We are also not sure whether a completely different universe in another dimension exists. But once we detect it, we can deduce that it has always been there, and thereby become convinced of its existence simultaneously for previous times. (It is interesting to ask what time is, in this context, and whether it must have one dimension, but that's a separate issue altogether.) This has some connections to quantum mechanics theory, whereby events may happen without deterministic causes (if nothing can travel faster than light), and collapse of the quantum wave function at the first conscious observer, in one interpretation of Schrodinger's cat "paradox".
The debates continue on. Daniel Dennett on the one hand, a complete physicalist, and Chalmers on another, saying there might be more to consciousness than we may know at this point. (Although, in his principle of organizational invariance, he seems to suggest that all that's needed for a consciousness to arise is a particular organization of a system.) Thing is, right now we have no experience with investigating the link between phenomenal qualities and physical processes, because science has not concerned itself with the question of "essence" of things, and perhaps never can.
We are extremely fortunate to have consciousness, whatever that may be, so that we are aware that physical descriptions of behavior may not be the complete descriptions of what things are. If not for this, one analyzing the world might never raise the question. Chalmers postulates that the existence of a philosophical zombie is logically possible and one can imagine it. Well, yes, this does show that there may be something more to consciousness, some "essence" or "life force" that gives rise to a person. But just because something is logically possible does not mean it is empirically possible. Just because one can imagine (in some sense) an extra component being present or missing, does not mean there actually is an extra component, which is what we would like to investigate further.
To close this post, I would like to propose some questions and thought experiments that might, if considered, advance our intuition about whether consciousness exists. The p-zombie is one such question. Here are some others:
- The Contrapositive: Suppose consciousness really is the result of something besides the physical body -- call it a spirit. What would happen if your spirit were placed in another body?* This may happen through reincarnation, but let us consider an immediate transfer between you and another human being, say, of the opposite sex. Suddenly you have access to all the brain functions and other bodily functions of the other person, and only to those. So in particular, your memories are that of the other person. You believe you always were the other person. What has changed, then? We are assuming here that "you" refers to the spirit. In the physical world, nothing has changed. What changes for you? You can never remember being in your prsent body. In fact, you may be flitting between bodies every second, and not know it. But there is something - you would be experiencing the world through the body to which you are connected.
- Challenging the one-ness: what about people afflicted with what is termed dual personality disorder? In what sense are they one person? Could they, indeed, be two spirits inhabiting the same body? But surely, then, "spirit" would not be solely in the extra-physical sense, since memories, behavior etc. are all physical. Still, it shows that our idea of being an identity, one person, as an inherent property of the brain, may be wrong. We have millions of cells. Perhaps some subsystems also have consciousness, or a form of it that we cannot fathom right now. We already know our brain has a conscious mind as well as unconscious cognitive processes. But how does the notion of a spirit deal with multiple personalities?
- Argument from historical error: it could be argued that most of our ideas about a non-physical spirit come from reading the ideas of others. Those earlier authors believed that the spirit had a will, and other such things. Now, we know that emotions, memories, and so forth have purely physical roots (one can also, facetiously, ask if they have an essence), and most likely desires have also. Therefore, if the sources of our ideas about dualism are wrong about the properties of the spirit, then we will now be making up our own ideas that they have never thought of. We will no longer be corroborating or proving some previously suspected theory. Perhaps we have refuted all versions of previous beliefs. Why consider them at all? And yet, in science, it was sometimes a new version of a previously held belief that finally won out. (I need to revise this section better.)
