The Conscious Clan (Part 1/2)
Explorations beyond unconscious bias
»I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.«
〰 Max Planck 〰
Brainy Scientists In the Know
Beginning of December 2023 we were invited to a small gathering for a remote attendance of the Holberg Debate on consciousness. The Holberg Lectures are an annual event in Bergen, Norway. The organisers invite three scientists each year to give a brief presentation on a particular topic, followed by a discussion.
The theme of 2023 ~ Does Consciousness Extend Beyond Brains? ~ was presented by David Malone and discussed by Prof. Anil Seth, Prof. Taya Luhrmann, and Dr. Rupert Sheldrake ~ three experts introduced as ‘heretics’ among ‘consciousness-scientists’.
Does Consciousness Extend Beyond Brains???
Following the lead of (some) scientists many people assume that the brain, somehow, produces consciousness. Although no one has found out how this miracle happens, many experts (mostly neuroscientists?) cling to this hypothesis, as demonstrated by the title of the Holberg debate.
Cognitive scientists have established fairly recently that the whole brain is a neural plexus. The discovery supersedes the previous theory of the so-called ’triune brain’, which assigned distinct evolutionary stages to different parts of the vital organ in a human skull.
We also know, and can agree on the fact, that the brain is not the only neural plexus in the human body. Neurons and their plexuses extend all through the organism, fulfilling many vital functions.
(See previous wordcasts Getting our Head around the Brain and Cognition at our Fingertips.)
If we assume that the cerebral plexus ~ this web of nerves which we call ‘the brain’ ~ generates consciousness, somehow, then it would make sense to conclude that the other plexuses in the body do the same thing.
Therefore the question ‘Does Consciousness Extend Beyond Brains?’ would be a no-brainer.
Biologists and foresters/ authors Suzanne Simard (Finding the Mother Tree), Florianne Kœchlin (Chatty Tomatoes, Mozart and the Cunning Millet etc.), Peter Wohlleben (The Hidden Life of Trees), Merlin Sheldrake (Entangled Life) and others have explored plant consciousness for decades. Does their work qualify as ‘consciousness beyond brains’?
The German physicist Max Planck (1858 – 1947) said:
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Max Planck was a highly respected scientist. He thought and wrote about this stuff ± 100 years ago! Why are neuroscientists still so hung up on the ‘brain-producing-consciousness’ theory?
It must be a common phenomenon in scientific circles, captured in an offhand remark made by the great Max Planck himself: “science progresses one funeral at a time.”
States of Consciousness
Viewed through the linguistic verbioscope, the English noun consciousness was born in the 17th century, first in the sense of internal knowledge, later settling on the meaning of 'state of being aware of what passes in one's own mind.'
The ‘parent’ of the noun was the adjective conscious [from Latin con = with, thoroughly + scire = to know]. A conscious person was originally defined as someone “knowing or perceiving within oneself, sensible inwardly, aware.”
About two centuries after the birth of the word in its original sense conscious took on a secondary identity. The sense of “active and awake, endowed with active mental faculties" (from 1837) developed in the field of medical science.
Unconscious, a sibling and counterpart of conscious was born soon after. Initially carrying the meaning of unaware it also adopted the sense of ’temporarily knocked out’.
As a noun the unconscious or unconsciousness (from 1876) became a key term in psychology. The adjective has been used in the psychological sense since 1912.
Subconscious (from 1886) was introduced within psychological terminology to describe “mental processes taking place without consciousness.” (This is confusing, I know... what is meant here by 'consciousness' is actually awareness!)
Here are the definitions of conscious, and its relatives in common use today.
The adjective conscious has 6 meanings
1 – awake, alert, being in charge of one’s mental faculties, not dulled by sleep, coma or stupor
2 – perceptive, noticing what’s going on around you
3 – aware of one’s own feelings and experience
4 – aware of others, aware of opportunities and details in your environment
5 – marked by critical awareness or moral conscience
6 – capable of or marked by deliberate thought or intention
The noun consciousness is used in 6 definitions
1 – the quality or state of being awake and alert
2 – the quality or state of being aware of objects or facts
3 – awareness of a situation, esp. social or political causes
4 – perceptiveness of one’s own sensations, emotion, volition and thought = mind
5 – the totality of conscious states of an individual
6 – the ‘upper level’ of the mind, in which a person is aware, in contrast to unconscious processes
The adjective unconscious can be used in 5 ways
1 – having lost consciousness (when in a coma or under general anæsthesia)
2 – not driven by conscious thought or decision
3 – coming from the so-called ‘unconscious part’ of the mind
unconscious matter
4 – marked by lack of awareness
5 – not deliberately planned, located in a blind spot
The noun unconscious is defined in Merriam Webster's dictionary as “the part of mental life that does not ordinarily enter the individual's awareness yet may influence behavior and perception or be revealed (as in slips of the tongue or in dreams)."
The adjective subconscious is used synonymously with unconscious in the psychological sense, referring to knowledge which exists within 'consciousness' but lies beyond awareness.
Likewise, the noun subconscious refers to mental activities which are hidden behind the veils of ignorance, oblivion, inexperience or repressed memories.
This brief overview captures the wide range of meanings (and also the confusion) which the word-clan of conscious represents in today’s language. Forced to play a considerable range of different roles, the 'conscious-words' have to spread themselves thin, which comes at a cost.
As conscious and consciousness slip seamlessly between different ‘states’ and environments, wearing an obscure array of diaphanous expressions, they are difficult to pin down. Coming from a vast infinite space, they have been forced to convey a restricted amount of human mental activity.
Consciousness, in English, has become synonymous with mind, awareness, wakefulness, alertness, responsiveness, sentience.
Conscious is used in the sense of aware, awake, alert, responsive, reactive, feeling, sentient, compos mentis.
Given the fact that Sanskrit has up to a dozen different words which can be translated as ‘consciousness’ we must consider the possibility that perhaps these verbionts are either overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the task.
Conscience, the forgotten Ancestor
Long before conscious and relations came to life in English, a different word was born from the same combination of the Latin [con = with, thorough + scire = to know].
Conscience (adopted in English around 1200) was originally associated with Christian ethics in the sense of the ‘faculty of knowing what is right.’ In contrast to its more general descendant 'consciousness' as defined above, it was loaded with a sense of moral responsibility, fairness, justice and conforming with the ideal of goodness.
This was purely the English interpretation! The original Latin conscientia is far more neutral. It simply means knowledge, or ‘a joint knowledge of something, a knowing of a thing together with another person.’ Conscientia refers to knowing something well, thoroughly, or in depth.
Deep knowledge within oneself naturally leads to a sense of right and wrong. It is not a moral obligation imposed by a religious superior power. The parallel Old French conscience carried the meaning of innermost thoughts, desires, intentions and feelings.
The word science, another close relation, was adopted in English in mid 14 c. Without the prefix con- it simply meant state or fact of knowing, knowledge of something acquired by study, a body of human knowledge, or expert skill. The systematised knowledge of the physical world, acquired through a scientific method developed gradually through 17–18 c., originally referring to philosophy.
The current use of the word science in the modern sense of natural and physical science and restricted to the study of phenomena of the material universe emerged by the mid 19-c.
“The men who founded modern science had two merits which are not necessarily found together. Immense patience in observation, and great boldness in framing hypotheses.”
Bertrand Russell wrote in A History of Western Philosophy in 1945.
“The second of these merits had belonged to the earliest Greek philosophers; the first existed, to a considerable degree, in the later astronomers of antiquity.”
Conscientious Science
Ironically, science itself, the knowledge which earlier knowledge seekers had restricted to the study of the material universe, soon came to the conclusion that matter doesn’t exist at all.
“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clearheaded science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such!”
- quantum physicist Max Planck explained in his lecture on ‘The Nature of Matter’ in 1944.
This has been confirmed by Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) and Hans-Peter Dürr (1929-2014), two nuclear physicists and directors of the Max Planck Institute.
Austrian born quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961) stated with equal clarity that
“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms.”
These statements are echoed by contemporary mystic and Serbian author Ivan Antic when he writes,
“At the base of the whole misconception about consciousness is the belief that it comes from matter, from the body. It is completely unsustainable nonsense, because the nature of the consciousness itself is such that it can’t come from something that is unconscious.”
Despite all claims of a ‘mysterious puzzle’ which nobody can explain, the answer has been in front of our eyes and inside our neural plexuses all along. It has been stated over and over ~ from the Vedic science of mind in Ancient India to 20th century physicists, philosophers, and contemporary mystics:
Consciousness is a living process.
Consciousness is the source of our existence.
There is only one consciousness, and the human mind is an expression of it.
But what does that mean?
If consciousness is not a product of the brain…,
you may wonder…
I know, this chases up a whole flock of new questions.
… to be continued next week
Will read this 10X! Is the brain just a big antennae? Seems so. Consciousness is beyond something physical. You have been a writing machine as of late and all you keep doing is knocking me on my ass! Thank you! Bless you.
Woah, there's an awful lot in here. I think the quote by Ivan Antic captures it very well. Scientific Materialism has now revealed it is but a religion with all the attendant aspects of any ideology (its high priests, picking out certain scientists as heretics, shutting down debate under the guise of 'accepted protocols', gatekeeping, etc, etc) -- which is amazing given its own people (true scientists) disproved it about 80-100 years ago. Looking forward to part-2.