Are You Made of Matter or Consciousness Itself?

To explore whether you are made of matter or consciousness raise the index finger on your right hand. There, that was easy, wasn't it? You just told the finger to lift and it did. Now I have something not so easy, a question. How did the finger get raised? So what is your answer? Read on for an explanation.
You did it, you tell me. Sorry, but that's not good enough. Conventional wisdom says your finger is a physical object. In terms of cause and effect, a physical effect, your finger, can only be acted upon by a physical cause--you? Are you only physical, a lump of matter? To say your brain is physical and it lifted the finger is an acceptable answer, but what is the difference between you and your brain? Are you, your consciousness, physical? I'm not saying it is or isn't. I'm just asking you to think about it.

You can say yes--that, at least, is a perfectly rational viewpoint, and one that has been developed by those who argue for emergent non-reductive physical systems. (Of course, others argue for it as reductionists.) The perspective is rational because it answers the problem of causal closure--a non-physical thing, consciousness, should not be able to act upon a physical thing, your finger. Both must be made of the same stuff because it makes sense that there should be no gap to leap from one to the other. The answer from this vantage is that consciousness is a physical system and can be regarded as an emergent phenomenon, emergent from biology and its physical explanations.

Obviously, if you accept this proposition, then you must also accept that you have no soul, no spirit, no ghost in the body machine. Your "you" along with your body is a lump of dust, so to speak. That is okay, too. It's not so hard to accept if you really think about it. Intelligent, highly moral, positive people are atheists. Again, it's up to you.

Maybe, though, you don't accept the answer, or at least not so easily. If so, then you have company. Most people would share your viewpoint, but that is because they are what philosophers call naive realists--they really haven't thought about it. Are you a naive realist?

Whether you accept or not, now that you are thinking about this, I want to take you on a trip down the rabbit hole, the same one Alice fell into. I must warn you, though, that once you start thinking about this kind of thing, Alice's pills won't help you. You will find yourself deep in the rabbit hole and will have to find your own way out if you seriously ponder the evidence of neuroscience and of those who have had feelings of transcendental unity, or experiences of Near Death. If followed relentlessly, the question of consciousness leads you to quantum physics and right back into metaphysics that a physicalist would avoid in order to have a rational model that can be discussed with others. (It can be argued that physicalism has its own metaphysics.) If you reject the physical explanation you have only inner, personal experience, and no points of comparison for discussion with others to advance understanding, yours and theirs.

First this. People sometimes experience feelings of transcendence when their brains have been damaged by cancer. This can be construed as a wholly physical phenomenon. Feelings of transcending the physical world--as parts of religious experience, or other forms of spirituality--may find their explanation, then, in scientific evidence. Notice that I say "feelings." What people make of these feelings is something else.

I quote: "The brain region in question, the posterior parietal cortex, is involved in maintaining a sense of self, for example by helping you keep track of your body parts. It has also been linked to prayer and meditation." ( From Damaged Brains Escape The Material World, in New Scientist, article on Cosimo Urgesi)

To further probe its role, Cosimo Urgesi, a neuroscientist at the University of Udine in Italy, turned to 88 people who were being treated for brain cancer."

Urgesi suggests that removal of neurons from the posterior parietal cortex--also responsible for personality change--may increase feelings of transcendence. According to this view. the sense of higher consciousness is only a biological phenomenon.

But could their removal simply widen the brain's bandwidth to attune with something it receives much as a TV set receives? I mean that there is another possible interpretation and it is this: Our brains do not produce consciousness--as suggested by non-locality in quantum physics.

Non-locality can be used to argue that consciousness is in the world. (Strange things have been indicated by quantum theory, such as the Many Worlds theory used to explain the wave function collapse.) This view would support an analogy between the brain and a television or radio receiver. The brain is attuned to what is out there and the "external" world complements the "internal," both being necessary for consciousness.

An interesting argument can be made of a kind of interactive cognition with the world. For that, in a seminal work on the philosophy of consciousness Andy Clark and David Chalmers theorized The Extended Mind: "active externalism (similar to semantic or "content" externalism), in which objects within the environment function as a part of the mind." (Wikepedia)

There is also another vantage. Instead of a material explanation for transcendent experience, isn't it also possible that our brains are wired to tap into invisible dimensions? In his The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley wrote of the brain as a dimensional filter that reduced the world to what we can deal with. In this view, sometimes the filter does not work as well and we get glimpses of a greater way of being.

Near Death Experiences (NDE) with Out of Body Experiences (OBE) sometimes occur when a patient is flat-lined or brain-dead on brain monitors. Occasional and accurate instances of remote viewing are reported. If consciousness arises from neurons and they are not firing, how can a patient recover to describe accurately what instrument the surgeon was holding, what he said, and what was worn in the operating room? Further, in a study of over 600 NDEs the majority regarded theirs as a life-changing experience. They lost their fear of death and became more compassionate toward others.

How about me? Where do I come down on this issue?  For us, consciousness cannot exist without the brain, nor the brain without it. But I can't label "myself" as physical or consciousness. There is something else I can't explain that gives rise to both.  Something sees thoughts, feels sensations and feelings, but is not thought or sensation or feeling precisely because it can witness them as they arise and pass away. This is clearly seen and understood when through deep meditation the mind is trained well enough to stop identifying with them. Taking some poetic license I call it the eternal now, though it was probably born in time with the Big Bang.. That something, whatever it is made of, is what you are, what I am.