Unravelling the Mysteries of Consciousness

Dr. Rajesh Bhola
India
Jun 20, 2014

Our conscious experiences are constantly shifting and changing, making us ‘multi-experience’ every moment. For example, while working in the kitchen garden our consciousness may be connecting with a conversation we have had earlier with a friend; the very next moment we may notice how uncomfortable our shirt has become, while mentally planning the weekend. This ever-shifting stream of thoughts can change dramatically from one moment to the next - but our experience of it seems smooth and effortless. What is Consciousness and from where does it originate? How does a universe composed of unconscious matter give rise to conscious entities such as you and me, capable of thinking, analysing and uncovering its secrets? These questions constitute the Consciousness conundrum, which is one of the toughest and most complex problems facing science today. Consciousness refers to an awareness of our unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations and the environment. Consciousness has been compared to a stream: unbroken and continuous, despite constant shifts and changes. Spiritualists, philosophers and scientists have been working hard for centuries to break the conundrum of consciousness, sub-consciousness, unconsciousness, the divided or multiple self, and body-mind dualism. However, psychologists may in fact be avoiding the problem of Consciousness, which made the mental realm so puzzling in the first place; and thereby ignoring the mystery that is at the heart of the nature of meaning and mind. Despite several centuries of research on the brain, communication through language or gesture remains the only way we can discover the conscious thoughts and experiences of others. But, if thoughts and feelings arise from patterns of neural activity in the brain, then it should be possible to directly decode such conscious experiences from brain activity alone. Recent advances in human neuron imaging raise just such a possibility, by showing that it is possible to accurately decode people’s conscious experiences based only on non-invasive measurement of their brain activities. Such brain reading abilities may transform our understanding of the brain and provide important new medical insights, but also raise important ethical issues concerning the privacy of personal thought. For each of us our own conscious mental world of thoughts and feelings is private.

Consciousness is a subjective experience. For each of us the world intriguingly appears partitioned: comprising an inner world of a conscious subject ‘I’ who is aware, and an outer world manifesting the objects and things that we observe. This is known in philosophy as the subject-object split. While we are able to analyse phenomenon that occur (outside) in nature, it becomes virtually impossible to analyse the subject, the very Consciousness (inside) that makes us aware. This challenge is better illustrated with the help of an example. I go for a stroll in the garden, where I see a beautiful rose - an external object whose shape, colour and behaviour I can determine. But how do I observe the very awareness (within me) that is letting me observe the rose? In other words, how does one come to know the knower?  Further, if a scientist friend of mine wishes to study my consciousness, she is faced with yet another dilemma – there is no real method or instrument by which she could get inside my head, so to speak, and experience ‘my experience of admiring the rose’. Because of these inherent difficulties, modern science - since its very inception in the 17th century in Europe - has for the most part omitted analysing the subjective or inner experience of Consciousness, and instead trained its energies on the objective (or the outer). Its focus has been on the universe of matter, comprising things that can be accurately probed, quantified and measured. However, an increasing number of scientists is starting to seriously doubt whether the subjective experience of Consciousness emerges from matter – that is, from neurological activity in the brain. While the firing of neurons can explain the mechanism by which a sensation such as pain or smell is transmitted, it cannot fully account for the experience. Consider the activity of the brain during sleep. If the firing of neurons was responsible for generating the subjective experience of Consciousness, then the neurological activity in the brain of a person who is awake and conscious should be higher than when he/she is in deep sleep and therefore unconscious. But this is not what scientists have observed. It turns out that neurons in the brain’s cortex are firing just as much, whether a person is awake or in deep sleep. So, while neurons are the necessary mechanism by which a sensation, such as the smell of a rose, is transmitted, for us to believe that neurological activity also endows us with the conscious experience or awareness of smelling the rose is surely a giant leap of faith. What scientists have perhaps been missing so far is that, besides matter and energy, there is a third and more fundamental reality in the universe – and that is Consciousness. This non-material field of Consciousness does not emerge out of the combinations of matter; rather, it exists independently, on it’s own, distinct and separate from matter.

The consequences of science’s historical focus on matter have been double-edged. On the one hand, science has triumphed in unravelling many of the mysteries of the material universe, but these very successes have caused many (especially in the Western scientific community) to get locked into thinking that matter must be the primary and ultimate reality. They believe that every phenomenon in the universe can be fully explained by the laws and interactions of matter. Armed with this faith in the supremacy of matter, many biologists have, over the last few decades, made fresh attempts at ‘solving’ the Consciousness conundrum. They have begun their foray by discarding a belief held true for thousands of years, by many religions of the world – that there exists a spiritual entity called the soul, which transcends matter and is the real source of Consciousness within all. These scientists have propounded ‘the matter hypothesis’, according to which the origins of Consciousness lie not within a living soul; instead, Consciousness, they believe, is most likely a by-product of interactions between atoms and molecules of matter. This hypothesis has been boosted primarily by one significant factor - the ‘disproving’ of the theories of creation by modern science. Modern science has reduced all living organisms, including human beings, to soul-less robotic machines, running on a pre-programmed code. Modern scientists believe that we, our joys and sorrows, memories and ambitions, and our sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. In short, we are nothing but a pack of neurons. 

At a spiritual level, Consciousness is One, and all creations are its manifestations. In this elevated world there is no high and no low; all beings and the whole existence partake of the same sublimity, just like drops mingled in one ocean. Yet, it remains difficult or out of reach of human wisdom to comprehend and conceptualise this Consciousness. The truth is out there somewhere… or perhaps already inside us!

There is a tale in which the central character, who is evidently suffering from amnesia, is judged for an act that he cannot remember. According to the ‘view of self’, the man’s self, which is held in prison, is not the same self that has committed the murder of his wife and children. The self that he, the first-person, is aware of, is not the same self that the judge or the doctor, the third-persons, perceive him to be. He now exists with a different set of memories and character traits and cannot remember his past experiences. He is not conscious of his actions and therefore he is not the same self who has  committed the crime; he is another self in the same physical body. With an argument that claims that the self is separate from the body, we can say that the man in jail is technically not the man who has committed the crime. Hanging him in his amnesiac state would not be of much help, as the purpose of punishment is to help correct a person’s mistake as well as to act as a deterrent to others – both of which would not really apply or work in this case. The man would die in a torturous way, punished for actions that he does not and cannot remember. This would be akin to killing an ‘innocent’ man. If word (of his amnesiac state) did reach the people, they could question the effectiveness of the judicial system. The punishment will therefore not serve its purposes. A proper psychiatric evaluation and treatment should be performed on such a patient. When he does remember his wrongdoings, his death sentence should be commuted to imprisonment. It would also be hoped that the experience has taught him remorse.

Dr. Rajesh Bhola is President of Spastic Society of Gurgaon and is working for the cause of children with Autism, Cerebral Palsy, mental retardation and multiple disabilities for more than 25 years. He can be contacted at rabhola@yahoo.com