Our modern understanding of consciousness comes from the Latin phrase conscious sibi, which translates to "knowing with oneself," or less formally, it is knowing that you know something. To be conscious is to have awareness, which means that you have thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. When someone loses consciousness, they lose awareness of themselves, and of their surroundings, and when psychologists speak of the unconscious mind, they refer to the part of our mind which operates without our awareness. Thus, we often use the word consciousness interchangeably with awareness.

As you probably may tell from this vague definition, consciousness is a fairly mysterious phenomenon. Is it a sensation? A thing? What causes it? The fact that we may think about what we think and know about how we know is a strange and fascinating thing, and yet even with the discoveries of neuroscience, we seem no closer to a scientific explanation of consciousness. We have observed important correlations between regions of the brain and mental processes, but the underlying basis of these processes, consciousness, is still elusive. This has led some to surmise that science may never explain consciousness.

The 17th century French philosopher Rene Descartes used his famous statement cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am") as the first piece in a puzzle allegedly showing that all true knowledge must ultimately be grounded in god. Descartes believed in what is called mind-body dualism, a philosophical view that the mind is separate from the body in the sense that the body is physical and material, while the mind and all mental aspects are non-physical and immaterial. In other words, the thoughts we have are not just about neurons firing in that organ in our skulls called the brain, but they are part of a separate component called the mind, which is a metaphysical, or spiritual, phenomenon.

Modern religious believers, especially Christians, have found a great deal of inspiration from Descartes, and his dualism has been adopted by countless men and women. One of the arguments for the existence of god that has met with some popularity in recent times is the argument from consciousness, as it may be called. This argument generally holds that consciousness is inexplicable by science and can only be accounted for as something that is metaphysical and rooted in the divine (god). Another way of understanding this claim is that it is an argument against metaphysical naturalism, or the view that the natural, physical world is all that exists. If consciousness requires a supernatural or immaterial explanation, then naturalism is false, since something beyond the natural world must exist. In theism, this "something" is commonly asserted to be god.

Is consciousness perhaps evidence that a god exists?

I. Ignorance is Divine

One example of the argument from consciousness is found in philosopher Richard Swinburne's book, The Existence of God:

Brain states are such different things qualitatively from experiences, intentions, beliefs, etc. that a natural connection between them seems almost impossible. For how could brain states vary except in their chemical composition and the speed and direction of their electro-chemical interactions, and how could there be a natural connection between variations in these respects and variations in the kind of respects in which intentions differ - say the difference between intending to sign a cheque, intending to square the circle, and intending to lecture for another half an hour? There does not seem the beginning of a prospect of a simple scientific theory of this kind and so of having established laws of mind-body interactions as opposed to lots of diverse correlations. [1]

Swinburne illustrates a major problem that seems inherent to all formulations of the argument from consciousness. The fact that we currently lack a "simple scientific theory" to explain every little intricacy and objection from mind-body dualists is not evidence that such a theory is impossible. Swinburne falls directly into the argument from ignorance fallacy, asking how there could be a natural connection between brain states and intentions, and then presuming his ignorance in the matter to be evidence against any natural explanation. Before Anton van Leeuwenhoek first observed micro-organisms in the 17th century, anyone could have protested that the lack of a simple scientific theory of germs meant that disease has a spiritual rather than natural explanation. Of course, they would have been wrong, but it just goes to show why it is fallacious to mistake ignorance, personal or collective, for a matter of fact.

Because consciousness is still a loosely defined and ambiguous concept, it seems that all arguments from consciousness are likely to fall under the fallacy Swinburne commits. Our present inability to understand something does not mean we will never understand it, and in addition to this, introducing god or the divine as a cause does not actually explain anything. Suggesting that demons are the agents of disease would not tell us how we become sick by them, even if it were true. Like most mind-body dualists, Swinburne rejects the possibility that mental events are reducible to physical events, yet the only explanation he offers for why there is some connection between the mental and physical is basically that 'god willed it' to be that way.

There is something absurd about expecting a simple scientific explanation for a process like consciousness. A process is not localized in one single place or event, and the complexity of mental activity makes it unreasonable to demand a reductionist explanation of the miniature scale that Swinburne calls for. No theory in the history of science has been able to address the most complicated and precise objections at its onset, and theories of consciousness are still very much in their infancy. Swinburne has found a gap where he has inserted god, not out of practical necessity, nor out of rational deliberation, but in a manner of begging the question. He merely assumes that (i) there can be no natural explanation of consciousness, and that (ii) god is the only explanation that will suffice, when he should be demonstrating these core elements of his argument.

II. Mind-Body Dualism

Although the argument from consciousness collapses at even the slightest examination, the claim of mind-body dualism is worth looking at. If the evidence points to a separation between brain and mind, then naturalistic explanations of consciousness will be incomplete. This is how a proper investigation of the subject should be done, rather than the inverse seen from Swinburne and others, who presume that the incomplete status of natural explanations supports dualism.

One of the most common arguments for dualism involves near-death experiences (NDEs) or out-of-body experiences (OBEs). Those who have had these experiences typically claim to have momentarily seen loved ones, or a religious figure, in heaven, to have risen out of their body in a hospital bed in a spiritual way of some sort, and so on. In 2009, the Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza published a book entitled Life After Death: The Evidence wherein he argues that NDEs and OBEs constitute evidence that we live on in some form after death. These experiences are linked to mind-body dualism because they supposedly endorse the idea that part of us is non-physical and immaterial (the mind or soul) and does not die as the body dies.

Unfortunately, NDEs and OBEs rarely amount to little more than anecdotal evidence. The scientific literature on these experiences is rightly skeptical for the most part. In her book Dying to Live, psychologist Susan Blackmore attributes the cause to the loss of oxygen associated with brain death. I mention in my article on The Elusive Afterlife that, in the 1970s, James Whinnery and a number of pilots discovered how g-force chambers can induce NDEs when the brain begins to lose blood as the chambers reach higher speeds. Anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee published a book, Mortal Minds, showing how NDEs can also be simulated by using drugs or electrical stimulation.

As of yet, no one has ever demonstrated the ability to actually leave the body. There are stories and documented cases of people meeting a loved one in 'heaven' when they were not aware that their loved one had recently died, finding that fact out only later. But these are still anecdotal reports, and without access to the individual's mind, there is no sure way of telling if they might have received the information from somewhere before the NDE, either through subconscious exposure or having just forgotten they knew. There is, of course, the additional possibility of deceit, though very few of the defenders of these experiences ever seem willing to seriously consider that some of their fellow believers are lying for the cause (if motivation seems questionable, note that Raymond Moody - who coined the term NDE - has sold over 13 million copies of his book, Life After Life, where he presents the stories of 150 people who claim to have had NDEs).

Another argument for dualism hinges on the subjective and experiential side of things. We find it summarized in a popular thought experiment called "Mary's room":

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like �red�, �blue�, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence �The sky is blue�. [...] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? [2]

If Mary learns something new when she leaves her room, then there is some element of knowledge she did not have prior to leaving. However, the thought experiment asks us to imagine that she already possessed all physical knowledge about color before leaving the room. Thus, say dualists, there is a kind of non-physical knowledge, like the experience of color.

Synesthesia is a condition where a person perceives certain things with an immediate and involuntary association to other things. For example, someone might see letters or numbers as being inherently colored a certain way. Neuroscientists V.S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard have observed the fascinating case of a colorblind synesthete who, when looking at numbers, could see colors in his mind that he had never seen in the real world. [3] This could be true for Mary as well, and she might feel like she's witnessing a new color even though her mind already had the information. Frank Jackson, the originator of the thought experiment, has since recognized the likelihood of this too, drawing a comparison to someone unable to see the movement of objects. [4] The surprised reaction to seeing movement would not indicate new knowledge, since the person obviously knew that objects move even before witnessing it. Rather, the surprise comes from the brain at last allowing them to perceive that motion.

Qualia are the subjective and qualitative properties of experiences, as philosophers and psychologists call them. In naturalism, an experience is a physical process, which implies that qualia are physical properties. Mary may know what qualia are associated with a particular experience, but she will not have had the experience until leaving her black and white room. When she finally experiences color, the only thing that changes for her is that she now has a more direct apprehension of color that comes from the correlation between her knowledge and her experience. Because she already knew the qualia associated with the experience of color, if she did indeed learn all physical knowledge about color before leaving the room, then her experience cannot be called new knowledge.

III. The Reductionist Case

There are few arguments for mind-body dualism, and as we've just seen, two of the prominent ones don't have much in the way of evidence when we look at them closely. On the other hand, there is good evidence for the reductionist case that proposes the mind and brain to be one and the same. We have a wealth of documented cases going back centuries that show a strong correlation between the physical brain and the mind (where personality comes from, according to many dualists). Traumatic brain injury can drastically alter personalities, impair language, memory, thought processing capability, and other functions generally associated with the mind. [5] Stimulation of certain regions of the brain has even produced religious experiences in many people. [6]

These seem like exactly the sorts of things we can expect if consciousness is a natural process of the brain. Like with a computer, damage to the hardware will inflict damage on the software. If the mind is separate from the brain, should we not expect the mind to retain its contents without falter in spite of severe harm to the brain? Taking this into account, some dualists describe themselves as "property dualists" and contend that the disturbance of the brain affects the mind because the mind is a property that only emerges from the right arrangement of matter. While this may be true, it appears much more physicalist than dualist, since the mind is dependent on the brain's 'pieces' being in the correct order. The relationship between the brain and mind is also very vague. Is the brain like a damaged radio, picking up a good signal but through bad equipment? This is nothing but speculation - speculation that presupposes the externality and independence of the mind.

The development of consciousness is easier to account for in naturalism too. Human beings evolved from organisms that had lower levels of consciousness, and they in turn arose from the interaction of non-conscious materia like amino acids. Clearly, at some point in the history of the universe, consciousness began to evolve. The alternative is quite arbitrary: humans and other animals were 'injected' with consciousness by some agency at a fairly late moment in time. This hardly looks different from the fixity of species dogma held by creationists. If consciousness has not evolved with the evolution of each species, then we should find that our ancestors from two million years ago or more had the same mental faculties we have today. Yet with the learned use of tools and other such things, it's highly probable that consciousness has evolved over time.

Consider what this would mean if dualism is true. Can the metaphysical or spiritual evolve? If the mind is separate from the body, and it evolves, then what is the reason for its evolution? Assuming, as most theists do, that god has given the mind to humanity so that we might apprehend morality and other phenomena, why would he permit our under-developed minds to suffer through centuries of primitive conflict? Furthermore, if the mind does evolve by design, then how are we justified in declaring anything in our history to be immoral? Perhaps slavery was just a consequence of our unevolved minds, and yet god must have a reason for making our minds to evolve, which would imply a reason for slavery as well. Under reductionism, the mind simply evolves with the rest of the organism, because it is inseparable from the brain.

Finally, there is a great deal of empirical evidence of physical interactions between thoughts and technology. The most obvious example is Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which measures changes in blood flow across the brain to map neural activity. Although its success is often over-stated in the media, fMRI technology is becoming increasingly capable of identifying the relationships between specific thoughts and specific regions of the brain. One peer-reviewed study published this year traces counterfactual thinking to a neural network also involved in episodic memory. [7] Thought identification technology has even reached the point that a headset can read thought patterns to manipulate digital content. [8]

If thoughts were really mystical, supernatural things, we would not expect to be able to see these clear physical relationships with them. There is obviously something from the brain communicating with the headset in the last example. If thoughts are non-corporeal, the headset would not receive the signals, and if we surmise that non-corporeal thoughts generate physical responses that do send signals to the headset, we are still at a loss to explain the correlation of these physical responses with our thoughts. At a point it starts to seem like the insistence on thought being immaterial is little else but special pleading on behalf of dualism. Practically all of the available and cutting-edge evidence emphasizes the primacy of the brain over consciousness.

IV. A Universal Mind

I will wrap up this article with a brief mention of another sort of argument from consciousness, albeit one very different from Swinburne's. On occasion, it is asserted that consciousness argues for the existence of god because god is, in fact, collective consciousness, a universal mind, or the consciousness of the whole universe. Bishop John Spong makes this assertion in his book Eternal Life: A New Vision. This is mind-body dualism yet again, but instead of approaching the subject from an individual perspective, with the intent of explaining consciousness, we are given an utterly unsubstantiated claim about the 'interconnectedness' of minds.

Since the evidence is against dualism, it is also against a universal mind or shared consciousness. If minds do not function independently of a brain, then there is no reason to suppose that each individual consciousness can communicate or connect with others. Likewise, there is no reason to suppose that the universe is a giant brain when there is no evidence of large-scale neural activity going on in the vast expanse of the cosmos. These twists on the already vague concept of god are pretty much incoherent. Perhaps the fault is not with the universality of the claims, but even with consciousness itself. In his 1949 book The Concept of Mind, philosopher Gilbert Ryle criticized the traditional view of consciousness as dependent upon mind-body dualism. We are misled into thinking of consciousness as a thing, he argued, when all that really exists are the behavioral and linguistic phenomena underlying it.

Whatever is meant by consciousness, it cannot effectively argue for the existence of any god.

Sources:

1. Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 171-172.
2. Frank Jackson, "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Philosophical Quarterly (32): 127-136.
3. V.S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, More Common Questions about Synesthesia, p. 4, Scientific American (2003). Retrieved May 12, 2012.
4. Frank Jackson on What Mary Knew, Philosophy Bites podcast. Retrieved May 12, 2012.
5. What are the Potential Long-term Outcomes of TBI? Centers for Disease Control (2010). Retrieved May 12, 2012.
6. Jack Hitt, This Is Your Brain on God, Wired (1999). Retrieved May 12, 2012.
7. Nicole Van Hoeck et al., Counterfactual Thinking: An fMRI Study..., Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience (2012). Retrieved May 12, 2012.
8. Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves, TED.com (2010). Retrieved May 12, 2012.