Summary

The website content argues that the nature of consciousness challenges materialist and scientific explanations, suggesting a need to reconsider the role of the transcendent in understanding reality.

Abstract

The article "Consciousness as Proof of the Transcendent" critiques the materialistic worldview's ability to explain consciousness, suggesting that it is a fundamental aspect of reality that eludes scientific explanation. The author contends that the "God of the gaps" argument is misguided, as it fails to acknowledge the profound mystery of consciousness and being, which are foundational to scientific inquiry itself. The piece further asserts that neither evolutionary theory nor neuroscience can fully account for the subjective experience of consciousness. Materialist evolution overlooks the non-causal nature of consciousness in survival, while neuroscience, despite advancements, struggles to integrate consciousness into its models. The author concludes that consciousness, with its inherent quality of well-being, invites a response of gratitude, indicating that current scientific frameworks are inadequate for explaining such a transcendent aspect of existence.

Opinions

The author believes that the accusation of worshiping a "God of the gaps" is a mischaracterization of religious apologetics, as it oversimplifies the complexity of explaining consciousness within a scientific framework.
There is a critique of the assumption that science will eventually explain all aspects of reality, particularly consciousness, which the author argues is an incorrect and overly optimistic view.
The article suggests that consciousness is not a product of evolution in the traditional materialistic sense, as it does not have a direct causal relationship to survival benefits.
Neuroscience is seen as limited in its ability to explain consciousness, as it may never fully integrate subjective experience into objective models of the brain.
The author implies that the current materialist worldview is insufficient to address the profound nature of consciousness, hinting at the necessity of incorporating non-materialist perspectives, such as those found in religious and spiritual traditions.
The piece posits that the experience of consciousness, with its intrinsic quality of well-being, naturally leads to feelings of gratitude, which aligns with the teachings of various spiritual practices.
The author hints at a possible theological interpretation of consciousness as a "givenness," suggesting that it may imply the existence of a "giver," though this is considered beyond the scope of the article.
The article concludes that modern materialism offers "shallow conceptions" and that there is still much insight to be gained from the language and narratives of myth and religion when it comes to understanding consciousness.

Consciousness as Proof of the Transcendent

Some reasons we have got our worldview backwards

One of the accusations often made of religious apologetics is that it worships a “God of the gaps”, by suggesting that wherever there are areas that cannot be explained by science the religious person says “God did it”, as if this is enough for proof.

Granted, sometimes the lowest apologetics may sometimes do this, or they will use apparent gaps in theories to suggest theories themselves are widely invalid. But for the serious minded this accusation reveals several fallacies in the narratives that oppose themselves to religion. The first is the idea that science can already explain such quantity of reality that all that is left are insignificant gaps believers are trying to plug, and secondly that science itself will be able to explain everything that there is if you give it enough time.

This is to say the least, incorrect. To start with there are basic facts of reality that cannot be understood by science for any more than I can bite my own teeth. The ontological fact of being and its intelligibility are assumed by science as a starting point, all scientific law is grounded on the acceptance that such law already exists, and law itself is ultimately a description as much as an explanation.

Within this also is the strange fact of consciousness, a reality, like being itself, both utterly mystifying and completely familiar to us. As philosopher Thomas Nagel puts it:

No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it (consciousness) as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness.

Yet our modern worldview does not see consciousness as something to be expected but rather something inexplicable to be brushed under the carpet as something that will be explained later by science. Philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has described consciousness as “the mind’s user illusion” and suggested that the hard problem of consciousness is just “vitalism reborn”, dismissing it completely.

So is consciousness a ‘god of the gaps’? Are we at the cusp of explaining it as a scientific operation? Let’s have a look at some of the reasons why our current worldviews appear to be falling short.

Materialist Evolution will never explain consciousness

Our current concept of evolution is entangled with a materialistic concept of reality. The theory of natural selection rests on an idea of a fairly simplistic sequence of causation, in which a survival benefit acquired by random genetic mutations within a species out-competes those of the same species without said mutation, and if you accept the creative abilities of said mutations, gives us a highly generative creative process.

The problem is that consciousness itself is not a property that has any causal relation to survival. Thought, self awareness, intelligence, or any of the other features we may associate with consciousness are not themselves consciousness, which is only the awareness present in a mind that possesses said features. The evolutionary sequence can be modelled objectively, but consciousness is pure and only subjectivity.

This is superficially simple but somewhat hard to grasp. If a mutation produces, say an auxiliary flight feather on the wing of a bird that enables it to better evade the stoop of peregrine, said flight feather has an objective causal property that makes its survival more likely. Consciousness itself, according to materialism, can only be a correlate of objective features of the mind such as self-awareness or intelligence, but said correlate is itself not causal without leaving a blank in the objective causal chain. This leaves us without explanation for why it is there, unless some property of matter makes it already present, and something which an evolutionary process enables or permits rather than creates in some reducible objective sense. If an explanation for consciousness is so be incorporated into an evolutionary narrative, it has to come from outside of evolution itself as a theory.

Neuroscience in its current form will never explain consciousness

It is generally assumed in our current materialist worldview that the mind must ‘emit’ consciousness, and that we will find a part of the brain in which consciousness is produced or resides, and then discover some explanation for how our complex intelligence somehow produces the conscious you-ness that you are experiencing.

Of course this is nothing but an assumption, and one might suggest it is not a particularly rational one. You might suggest that since damage to the brain alters experience or causes consciousness to cease that this offers proof that the brain alone produces it, but it is not to simple. On the surface, a cassette player and radio both appear to be producing the sound that you hear, and since when you smash both with a hammer they stop, so one could propose a radio emits the sound that it is actually receiving. This of course would not be correct.

Not only this but neuroscience has much the same subject/object problem that an evolutionary solution does. In theory according to our current approach we could map and model every single neuron and synapse in the brain, follow sequences of the causation of thoughts or feeling or intentions by their objective correlates, and so have a virtually total understanding of the brain without ever integrating consciousness into the model. In fact it seems more and more likely that this is where neuroscience is going to end up. Our understanding of various processes within the brain is becoming more sophisticated, our attempts to explain consciousness remain at virtually zero.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth was asked in an interview in the Guardian if his thoughts on consciousness had “ever taken any spiritual swerve — in terms of the why of there being something rather than nothing?” He responded:

It’s more that I think there’s hubris in assuming that everything will submit to a mechanistic programme of explanation. I think it’s intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the existence of conscious experience as a phenomenon in a universe for which we generally have physicalist accounts seems weird. I want to figure out the ways in which we can undermine this seeming weird.

Even for a neuroscientist such a Seth who acknowledges the “hubris” of physicalism, there seems to be an acknowledgement that all neuroscience can do is kind of chip away at the “weirdness” of the problem of consciousness, in the hope that some explanation will simply appear. But to say we are a long way from that is to offer significant understatement.

Consciousness properly observed is gratitude

In an interview about spirituality conducted in the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, atheist philosopher Sam Harris spoke about why he considers meditation and mindfulness to be useful:

…merely witnessing experience, the fact that consciousness itself has an intrinsic quality of well-being, that that which is aware of sadness isn’t truly sad and that which is aware of joy is the same thing as that which is aware of sadness and so you can keep falling back into that position of merely witnessing and that can become very very expansive and that can become a context of a kind of self transcending love and happiness.

This strange nature of consciousness in relationship to reality as a kind of givenness, possessing an “intrinsic quality of well-being”, is perhaps as difficult for us to grasp as its subjective role in objective causation. Many forms of mindfulness and meditation, as well as a plethora of spiritual teaching and self-help involves the recognition that the best response to this givenness is to cultivate gratitude. Naturally a theological response would be to suggest that givenness implies a giver, but such arguments are beyond the scope of this article It is enough to observe the strange mire we are in in our current worldview, and that as much insight is still to be found in the language of myth and religion than in the explanations offered by the shallow conceptions of modern materialism.