Why am I me, and not someone else?
Why do I see through the eyes of this body?
How do I know anybody but myself is conscious?
These are timeless questions that, by their very definition, science can never answer, because no scientific study can BE you.
It may one day be able to map out the technical features of the brain; but it will never know what it is like to experience being inside your own brain.
Difficulty of Subjective Experience
‘Qualia’, the subjective experience of a person processing the world around them, which one could argue is the essence of consciousness, is a major problem in philosophy.
It is best summarised in the classic ‘Mary in the Black and White Room’ thought experiment, referenced in the film Ex Machina (2014).
Mary knows everything there is to know about ‘what’ colour is, its various wavelengths and categorisations. But because she is confined to a black-and-white room, she cannot ‘experience’ colour. Only when she steps outside, can she understand what ‘colour’ is.
When it comes to consciousness, neuroscience is like Mary. It may be able to explain the ‘how’ of consciousness, but never what it is like to ‘be’ conscious, aka, the ‘qualia’.
This is the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’.
Materialist and Analytic Fallacy
Physicalists (those who believe the physical world is all that exists) have for decades shamed and ridiculed people for even trying to explore consciousness outside third-person physical descriptions of neuroscience. Some have even called these discussions part of a dark theocratic agenda in braindead New Atheist-style polemics.
But the complete inability for physicalism to answer this question, even in theory, is damning, and why physicalism CANNOT be seen as the most parsimonious philosophy, ( ‘parsimony’ meaning ‘the simplest explanation which relies on the least arbitrary assumptions’.) The critiques just talk completely past the point, always defaulting to ‘the science’ when it literally can’t answer.
These are philosophers who always defer to ‘science’, yet have no clear definition about what ‘science’ is, so their trust is placed on mere accreditation and vibes against anything smacking of ‘religion’.
Philip Goff has tried engaging on their own terms, and has at least made a splash in academic philosophy.
I, however, think that the entire Analytic framing is soul-crushing.
Sure, you should define your terms and address counter-arguments, but the reduction of philosophy to ‘word-maths’ syntax is high on its own supply, a cloak of ‘standards’ to prevent their own philosophical assumptions being challenged.
I’m going to define what I mean by ‘nondualism’, and then compare it with alternatives. I will then argue why I think it is the most parsimonious to explain consciousness.
This method, rational deductive parsimony, is in my opinion, the only way the study of metaphysics can proceed, as unlike the hard sciences, metaphysics answers questions about nature that cannot be answered by empirical observation and experiment.
Other people may come to different conclusions to myself, but my Neo-Xenophanian philosophy, the unique distinction from Doug Bates’s ‘Modern Pyrrhonism’, posits that lack of certain knowledge on metaphysics doesn’t mean we shouldn’t explore metaphysical ideas, try to justify our theories, and engage in argument, whilst being open-minded enough to admit we could be wrong and persuaded by another argument.
What is Nondualism?
Nondualism is the view that the concept of an individual ‘self’ is an illusion. In truth, all living beings share the same soul/consciousness, and one’s own consciousness is merely one window that a ‘superconsciousness’, aka ‘God’, looks out of.
The term literally means ‘not two’, and it has multiple meanings, not just questioning merely the distinction between one individual and another, but also between God and all living beings, and between ‘God’ and the entire universe.
Its most common expression theologically is the Hindu ‘Advaita Vedanta’ philosophy, that all beings are ultimately Brahman (the Hindu ‘God’) who is the same thing as ‘Atman’ (the true self).
However, this has Western precedents as well. Plotinus’ concept of ‘The One’, and all individual souls being emanations from ‘The One’ through the ‘Anima Mundi’ (translating to ‘World Soul’, somewhat similar to the Christian ‘Holy Spirit’), is a notable example.
Why Alternative Explanations Fail
Solipsism
Maybe you are the only conscious being in the universe, and everybody else is actually just a simulation, an ‘NPC’ (non-playable character, internet slang pejorative for people who seem to think in a pre-programmed way, almost like a video game ‘non-playable character’ controlled purely by programming language)?
This view is called ‘Solipsism’.
I will accept that this view is just as plausible as nondual consciousness.
Rene Descartes called it with, ‘I think, therefore I am’.
But it is also highly anti-social and arrogant. Society can’t function if everybody believes only they, the self-awareness inhabiting the body they see the world through, truly exist.
I’m writing this now, so obviously, I’d think only ‘I’ exist, but you reading this will think only ‘you’ exist; for you the ‘I’ and ‘you’ are flipped.
It’s also the inbuilt view of psychopaths, sociopaths, and far less competently, autistics like myself. Autists are far more likely to retain their childhood Solipsism for longer, and only develop empathy, also called ‘Theory of Mind’, on an intellectual basis.
I still have no idea what it is like to be neurotypical, and I never will, but I’m told there is something missing, a ‘sixth sense’, like colourblind people being told there are colours they can’t see, that allows a more ‘inbuilt’ awareness of other’s consciousness.
If you believe you are, to state it quite literally, the ‘centre of the universe’, you are far more likely to ignore the interests of others, and you therefore have no society.
It’s unfalsifiable either way, the study of metaphysics is.
But I can only live my life on the assumption that your consciousness is just as real as mine, and vice versa.
Separate, Individual Souls
This is by far the most common view, and within the West, effectively the only one.
Some religions believe in reincarnation, some in heaven and hell, and some a mixture of the two, but it’s effectively the same account of consciousness, the traditional religious account.
In this, the reason that ‘I am me’ and ‘you are you’ is because we both have a soul. This ‘soul’ is what makes the me ‘me’, and the you ‘you’, the presence that makes me see the world through my eyes and not yours, and vice versa.
Usually, this account is combined with a ‘cosmic justice’ of where your consciousness goes after you die.
Most variants of the Abrahamic religions believe in heaven and hell, and an eternal identification with the body you currently inhabit.
Others, like most forms of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism in the East, and Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and Neoplatonism back in Western antiquity, believe in reincarnation (in Western antiquity ‘metempsychosis’) that post-death your consciousness will inhabit another being, whether a human or an animal until a ‘self-annihilation’, called ‘Nirvana’ in Buddhism or ‘Henosis’ according to Plotinus. Who you are reincarnated as depends on your behaviour in this life.
Heaven and Hell
Most sects of each Abrahamic religion believe people who believe in their religion suffer ‘eternal bliss’ in heaven, and all who don’t believe in their religion suffer ‘eternal conscious torment’ in hell.
Xenophanes’ comparative study of religion, the ‘Argument from Inconsistent Revelations’, remains unmatched in pointing out the absurdity of this for those not possessed by dogma.
With comparative religion showing all of the religions that believe in it have ‘people who agree with my religion go to heaven’ and ‘people who don’t believe in it suffer in hell forever’, and because they all believe in it, you’re always going to hell in most scenarios, that this is a psychological control mechanism to keep societies in line.
I’m not saying that’s BAD, it obviously worked for millennia, and societies need both carrots AND sticks.
But in the modern age, where easy access to information of all of the different religions is available to the vast majority in the developed world, unlike in the past where the religion of your culture was often your only point of reference within your local area, this becomes untenable.
It is like the majority of the West has the means to become a well-travelled sage like Xenophanes was, and realise the arbitrariness of each religious truth claim.
Now, even if we were to accept it as false, is the idea that much of a comfort blanket EVEN if you go to heaven?
There seems to be two possibilities of experience of the Abrahamic Heaven in my mind, where I am ‘John Arcto forever’;
An artificial, induced mania akin to the use of ‘soma’ in Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, which is completely meaningless pleasure.
Eternal anxiety, boredom, and meaninglessness in my individual existence. Even if you get everything you want, all that constant gratification for an extended period of time will mean, is complete lack of value in all of it. It would be like living in an ‘eternity of AI slop’ which you can feel, smell, and taste as well as see and hear. You might start to wonder if the ‘atheist death’ of ‘nothing/forever sleep’ would have been nicer.
Christians say to me heaven will be neither of those things, but I don’t see how it can’t be one of, or some combination of these.
At the very least, it fails as a comfort blanket even if I assume I’m going to heaven. I don’t want to be ‘John Arcto/my-real-name’ for eternity.
Reincarnation
Now I will say openly that, despite being a Cultural Christian, of these two I view reincarnation as both more likely and more comforting than hell and (even) heaven.
More likely because, this is what we know happens to the particles making up your body; some of those will make up the particles of other life forms, so it is quite rational to assume the same happens to your consciousness.
It is far less of an arbitrary abstraction than the presence of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, for whom there is no process present here on earth comparable to it.
More comfortable because… just like you’ll sometimes delete a Game Boy Advanced Pokemon game save file because you want to ‘play again’, I feel like I’d like to retire John Arcto/my-real-name, and play ‘life’ again.
But, sticking to the ‘likely’ side of the question, it still can’t answer what the system is for how consciousness is transferred.
Ancestor Reincarnation
The most parsimonious of reincarnationist beliefs is probably ancestor worship, believed in by religions like Chinese Folk Religion, Yoruba Folk Religion, Igbo Folk Religion); the belief that one’s consciousness is the reincarnated consciousness of relatives deceased before they were born.
This seems rather plausible, as one shares genetics with them.
But it also can’t account for any population growth.
Are new consciousnesses created when the population grows?
How is it decided who gets their great grandfathers consciousness and who gets a brand new consciousness?
You then return to arbitrary speculation and assumptions to bridge these gaps, and it then familiarly becomes ‘why this assumption, and not that assumption?’
Non-Ancestor Reincarnation
Then, there are the Typical Hindu/Jainist/Buddhist ideas of reincarnation. They bring in arbitrary moral criteria for what you are reborn as.
As far as social control mechanisms go, a reason for people to be good even if they might benefit or get away with doing evil, ‘karma’ is rather a beautiful concept, i.e., what goes around comes around. Abusive assholes get to be reincarnated as an ant.
It works for a ‘religion’, which almost always combines a metaphysical belief with an ethical component.
Sadly, ‘useful belief’ is distinct from a ‘true belief’, and since humans so radically disagree with what ‘morally good’, and ‘morally evil’ is, how are we able to parsimoniously assume such a judgement is baked into the fabric of the universe?
There have been investigations into claims of past lives, with thousands of people giving evidence to Ian Stevenson, who did qualify his findings by saying they didn’t confirm reincarnation but did merit further investigation. Sceptical scientist Carl Sagan was sufficiently impressed, although not believing in it himself due to parsimony.
However, the philosopher Paul Edwards scrutinised his work as anecdotal and cherry-picked, and pointed out the vast majority of the people he studied came from cultures where belief in reincarnation is strong.
I haven’t read and compared these reports, so I don’t know who to believe. But it just goes to show in the ‘social sciences’, including psychology, there are normative claims whereby ‘for every argument, an equal argument is opposed’, and this doesn’t meet the parsimony test.
It doesn’t meet the parsimony test because it has to make arbitrary judgements as to which souls transfer to which bodies.
It also doesn’t explain ‘why am I me NOW, and not someone else NOW?’ It merely delays that big problem until death, and so the subjective experience of ‘being’ remains unresolved.
The Universal Soul
This leads to my belief; in the Universal Soul/Anima Mundi, which can also be called ‘Cosmopsychism’, typically by those enthralled to the Analytic ‘word-maths’ and scientistic-accommodating framing.
This is the belief that there is a singular soul, that is part of the universe, or ‘God’, that IS consciousness, and living beings participate in this universal consciousness.
In this account, each of us is merely a ‘window’ into the consciousness of God, conditioned to identify with our physical bodies and our memories. This identification isn’t ‘bad’, it is required for us to survive and co-operate with other physical bodies and sets of memories, but it is ultimately not fundamental.
The book ‘Seeing No-Self’ by Kat (Katrijn) Van Oudheusden (which I would highly recommend) questions one to inquire ‘where does your body end?’ Our sense of spatial awareness is separate from our consciousness, as no part of our body is more ‘us’ than any other.
‘Seeing No-Self’ has therapeutic implications, but the reality it describes is, through my best efforts at parsimonious rational deduction, true to me.
There is no ‘New Age’ occultism attached, it merely shows that the idea of the ‘self’ is useful, even fundamental, for day to day purposes. BUT that it is not actually real.
Yet, a consciousness still inhabits our bodies, even though it is not ‘ours’.
And to me, this is where the Universal Soul comes in.
It answers the question ‘why am I me, and not someone else?’ with ‘my physical body and my social role exists, and as a ‘camera’ or ‘speaker’ of God, I can only experience through my lens/speaker/radio. But at a fundamental level, my consciousness is merely the consciousness of God’.
There is no individual soul, there is only the ‘Word Soul’ (called in the Christian tradition ‘Holy Spirit’) which is God, and living beings animated by it.
Responses to Objections
“Why couldn’t consciousness have emerged gradually through evolution, like what Daniel Dennett says?”
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Because the ‘combination problem’, of what constitutes a ‘semi-consciousness’ or a ‘quarter-consciousness’, is a lot harder to picture than assuming there is a ‘super-consciousness’ that different animals have to differing degrees, even if all are just a small fragment, at least to me anyway.
The problem with Dennett’s book ‘Consciousness Explained’ (1991) (jokingly called ‘Consciousness Ignored’ by David Chalmers, is that it merely gives a neuroscientific account of the ‘how’, and thinks, in a typical positivist and scientistic account, that’s all there is, when, presumably, he is (was) conscious.
The book instead merely describes the physical brain processes, sidestepping and ignoring the question, by openly denying that ‘qualia’, that is, the subjective experience of reality, like ‘seeing red’, is a meaningful concept.
It puzzles me why he wrote a book called ‘Consciousness Explained’ if he is so fundamentally uncurious about the question.
Even neuroscientists rebuked him, correctly stating he was using the cult of ‘science’ to shame people away from alternatives to philosophical physicalism; his admission to be a Logical Positivist, one of the worst philosophies ever invented that claims ‘science’ but would destroy science in the fog of their word games, is rather revealing.
Of course, then, in a New Atheist-style fashion, calling everyone who disagrees with him ‘superstitious’ and a believer in ‘folk psychology’.
I feel sorry for him to have closed his mind in hatred of all things to do with religion, to forbid in himself all curiosity of his own consciousness.
“We couldn’t initially explain ‘life force’, but we did, and ‘Vitalism’ was disproven. Why couldn’t consciousness be similarly explained at some point in the future?”
I reject the premise because I don’t think Vitalism (not Dissident Right Nietzscheanism in this context, but the theory of a ‘life force’) WAS disproven.
We discovered homeostasis as a ‘technical’ understanding of ‘how life works’, but the distinction between biological and non-biological objects, for instance, the distinction between a frog and rock, is still obvious even though we know more about how life works on a mechanical level.
Metaphysics is just as much of a mystery to us as it was to the Ancient Greeks, because it is a separate field to science and one with far less certainty. Part of why I find the Pre-Socratics so compelling is because, whilst the domains between science and metaphysics were not as separate, and some of their questions have been answered, many of them are just as mysterious as when they were writing on scrolls.
“Could AI be conscious?”
At the moment, no.
But it could be. ‘If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck’.
Obviously Blade Runner which I discussed in my last article is an example of a work of media asking this question, but this question goes all the way back to Frankenstein and earlier.
Just because AI is a reality now, doesn’t mean it’s easier to answer that question than when it was merely theoretical.
But so far, I see no evidence to suggest that it is doing more than mimicking human behaviour as of present.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading my exploration of consciousness. Yes, this is only my inquiry, and could well be wrong, but to me it seems to make the most sense.
I’m sure people will disagree, as people have disagreed for centuries, but this is MY argument.
Maybe it persuades you, maybe it doesn’t. But it was still interesting and enjoyable to write.
I really enjoyed reading your article. Neurobiology indeed cannot explain qualia. I propose that consciousness is a fundamental property present in every cell, rather than a mechanism generated by the brain. In an article I wrote here (link below), I also say that the universe may be understood as a single consciousness. In addition, I find it hard to believe that consciousness is created at the moment a living thing becomes complex enough.
https://amirgroisman2.substack.com/p/a-definition-of-consciousness