Imagine a genie appears before you and makes you a simple offer: you can ask him any question you want, and he’ll answer it. No tricks—genie society has seen sweeping reforms and made great moral progress, and the days of the malicious trickster genies have been left long behind. No, this genie is entirely benevolent: if your question turns out to have been ill-formed, he’ll explain exactly why it was ill-formed, and then answer the question you intended to ask. No matter what question you pose to him, you’ll find yourself completely satisfied with the answer he gives.
However, genies being genies, he still feels the need to follow ancient tradition and impose some kind of a ternary restriction on his gift. So he stipulates that the question can only be three words long.
What question do you ask him?
Even with only three words, there seems no shortage of good options to pick from. You might, for instance, ask him: Why am I? That is, for what reason do I exist? What, if anything, is my purpose in life? Where can I find meaning, what ought I to do with my time?
Or perhaps: How am I? How, by what means, did I come to be, and do I persist in being? What are the mechanisms and operations of creation and existence?
Or maybe it’s wisest to ask: Who am I? How do I fit into the world, how does my life relate to the lives of others? What is the truest story I can tell about the person that I am?
All excellent nominations, and a case could be made for any of them. For myself, though, I find that I stumble long before I reach anything nearly so lofty. My confusions are more basic than that, my lack of understanding more fundamental. No, I’d be happy getting the answer to a much simpler question: What am I?
What, exactly, am I? If I can’t answer that then it’s hard to see how I can make much sense of the other questions, or really any question at all. And troublingly, I find that I can’t, in fact, answer it.
What do I mean by that? Is it not obvious what we are? I worry some of you might think I’m being deliberately obtuse here, in service of some ultimately irrelevant philosophical point I’m trying to make. Not my intention at all. I mean what I say: at a basic level, I really have no idea how to think about what kind of thing it is that I am. My confusion runs deep. And far from being an irrelevancy, it was confronting this mystery in full that forced me to rethink much of what I knew, and eventually led me down a completely different path in life.
So let’s talk about materialism, consciousness, and the self.
II.
My younger self would have had an answer at the ready, although he would have admitted it was not yet complete. It would have been a materialist answer through and through, rooted in biology, physics, and ultimately math.
He would have started by saying that whatever else we are, we are biological creatures: human beings, who are born, who live, and who die. We came to be as we are via evolution, that special process that allows replicators (and replicators alone) to amass and accumulate complexity in an entropic world, through the ratchet-like workings of random variation combined with non-random selection.
He would go on to say that through evolution we came to have certain values and desires, corresponding ultimately to preferred states of the universe. As agents in the world, we evolved to take actions to try to steer reality towards those states that we prefer, and away from those that we disprefer.
He would stress that our values need not be simple values, nor our desires necessarily selfish ones. As social creatures, it would be perfectly possible, he would insist, for us to evolve to exhibit genuine altruism. And there would be nothing to stop initially simple drives—say a desire to model the world, or a preference for symmetry over asymmetry—from exploding into vast and beautiful spandrels—say a need to do philosophy, or a love for creating art. He would also take care to emphasize that, though our drives may have come about because they once maximized genetic fitness, that does not mean they are about maximizing fitness—that our values, once created, are meaningful in and of themselves.
He would readily and calmly accept that we are best described as collections of atoms (or collections of subatomic particles, or collections of excitations of quantum fields, or collections of whatever more fundamental entities we might discover in the future). But he would bristle at any attempt to prefix such a description with the word “mere”. There is nothing mere about us, he would steadfastly maintain.
He would proclaim above all else our utter uniqueness as biological creatures: how we evolved to have a capacity for self-reflection, allowing us to model and reason about ourselves in a way that no other animal can. How this amounted to an unprecedented new light of comprehension dawning in the world. How we alone became, in the words of Carl Sagan, “a way for the universe to know itself”.
Finally, as to how it all came to be, he would note—speculatively—that reality didn’t just seem to be described by math, it seemed in some sense to be made of math. The laws of physics left little room, it appeared, for objects to have additional properties beyond the mathematical ones they detailed. So perhaps, he would venture tentatively (and only tentatively), we consist of nothing but math. We don’t follow equations, we are equations. And perhaps as math we therefore don’t need anything to make us exist—perhaps all mathematical structures (including our universe, and us within it) simply exist in some platonic sense.
This last he would have offered up only as a speculative guess. He would be the first to admit that here, he had reached the limits of his understanding—that this was as far as he had gotten, and that in truth he couldn’t say much about why there was something rather than nothing.
But as to the claim that we have “no idea” how to think about what we are? Ridiculous, he would say. We may not have figured everything out yet, and indeed, he would allow, we may never will. But we most certainly do not have “no idea”.
That, more or less, would have been my younger self’s answer to my question.
Is it a good answer? It’s certainly got some compellingness to it—even now I feel the tug of it. But however skillfully weaved it is, there are certain questions it simply cannot address, and behind those lie fatal flaws. So let’s pick at some of the loose threads it leaves hanging, and see to what extent the whole thing starts to unravel.
III.
As I said, my past self would have acknowledged that his answer was incomplete. He knew it had holes. But looking back now, it seems to me that he took pains to avoid thinking about just how big the holes were, and how intractable the problems they created really were.
The issue is consciousness, of course. Always consciousness. The trouble is, it’s an inescapable fact about the world that it somehow gives rise to subjective experiences. When we see something blue, we don’t just “process incoming light of a certain wavelength in such a way as to create a pattern of mental activity that causes us to report having seen blue”, or whatever materialist story you want to tell. We see blue. It’s right there, right in front of our eyes. We can just look at it. Consciousness is, you might say, “that which is undeniable”.
And this is a problem. It’s a big problem. Because it’s very, very difficult to fit this kind of subjective experience into the fundamentally materialist description of the world put forth above. If my past self’s view could reasonably be summed up as “physics is all there is” (or perhaps “math is all there is”), then we can ask: what, exactly, are these subjective experiences? Where do they come from? How can they exist when the equations that we claim describe everything seem to leave no room for them whatsoever? In consciousness we seem to have run into an entirely new kind of thing—something not just undescribed by physical laws, but indescribable by them.
Worse, consciousness does not, as we might hope, merely piggyback on the material world—it can’t be treated as some kind of idealized documentarian, silently recording experiences while leaving the proceedings of reality undisturbed. It talks back. When I have the experience of seeing the colour blue and I start waxing poetic about it, the atoms in my tongue undergo some very real, very physical movements. And unless I want to suppose that my talking about having experienced blue is completely unrelated to the fact that I did, in reality, experience blue, I have to conclude that the movement of those atoms is in some sense caused by my experience. So consciousness becomes part of the dance—plugged in, so to speak, to the web of causality. It must be included in the network of action and reaction that defines what exists.
In other words: we can’t explain it, and we can’t ignore it.
My younger self knew all this, of course. In philosophy it’s called the hard problem of consciousness, and far from ignoring it, he devoted unhealthy amounts of time to trying to make sense of it. Perhaps precisely because it seemed so fatal to materialism, he spent hours and hours reading and thinking about the problem, trying to see if there wasn’t some way of resolving the apparent contradictions.
I think he knew, deep down, that there was no such way. You can try, but it’s ultimately a futile quest. No matter what argument you make, no matter what sequence of words you string together to try to explain consciousness in materialist terms, at the end of the day they’ll still only be words. And to any words a skeptic can always give the same reply: “Yes, but just look.”
Quite literally, our arguments are refuted at a glance. Maybe through some emergent process, complex physical interactions give rise to—stop. Just look. Perhaps the Goedelian paradoxes of self-reference and self-reflection in some way—stop. Just look. Evolutionarily speaking, we can see how a belief in consciousness might be advantageous for—stop. Just look.
No, consciousness holds the ultimate trump card. And as far as I can tell, our only way forward is to make peace with that.
IV.
Here I imagine my younger self would be starting to feel uncomfortable, but I think he would soldier on.
I imagine he might say something like: Okay, yes. All that seems true. It really does appear to be impossible to reconcile consciousness and materialism.
But I’m still not convinced that means I should totally abandon materialism. As far as I can tell, no matter what view of the world I settle on, it’s going to leave something unexplained. It’s simply inherent to the kind of endeavour that philosophy is that it admits no complete solutions. Perfection isn’t an option here. So given that I can’t eliminate all mystery, isn’t my best bet to try to find a worldview that at least minimizes it? And viewed in this light, doesn’t materialism still seem like a pretty good deal? Yes, we have to accept consciousness as a brute fact of the world, unexplained and unexplainable. But in return for that one small concession we get a framework with incredible explanatory power, one that seems able to answer almost any other question we could ask of it.
Moreover, the mystery that’s left over seems a relatively...contained kind of mystery. A tolerable one. Tongue-wagging about our blues aside, consciousness rarely intrudes into our lives and demands that we actively reason about it. For the most part, consciousness is simply there: it slips into the background (or perhaps rather the foreground), and can more often than not be forgotten about. It’s a constant. A baffling and inexplicable constant, yes—but still a constant.
So given all that, why shouldn’t I stick with materialism as my least bad option?
There are a number of things I’d say to him in response to this.
For starters I’d say: sure, the position you’ve settled on might be a defensible one. But see it for what it is: it’s not a materialist position anymore. Not even a little bit. You may have taken your non-materialist terms and put them in a very small box labelled “mystery” and shoved that box far under your bed, but they’re still there. There’s just no such thing as “mostly materialist”, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief and confusion in the coming years if you accept that.
I might also say: how can you possibly know that the concession you’re making is a small one? Contained within that “tolerable” mystery of yours is every experience that you’ve every had, along with all the joys and sorrows of every person that you’ve ever loved—in other words, pretty much everything in the world that you care about. That’s a heck of a constant.
But the problems really run deeper than either of those things.
My past self is making more assumptions than he realizes here. He knows he’s making one: he assumes that the external world we see around us exists. But without realizing it he’s also making a second: he assumes in addition that the external world is the primary thing that exists—the most fundamental.
It’s this second assumption that stops him from seeing any alternatives to materialism. Within the framework he’s adopted, consciousness is, and can only be, something that inexplicably gets “associated with” or “attached to” certain physical events. It is fundamentally secondary, something to be explained only after we’ve figured out what’s going on with the external world. And in fact I agree with him that, under this view, it’s hard not to arrive at something like materialism with a mystery box.
But we’re not forced to look at things that way. In fact, we have a natural alternative: why not take consciousness as our starting point, and look at the external world as something secondary?
If that sounds at all strange to you, take a second to play the same game as before: look out at the world around you, and become aware that you’re experiencing it. This time, though, notice how your consciousness extends not just to sight, but to all your sensations: touch and smell and sound, yes—but even more nebulous things, like thought and emotion. Anything that you could possibly feel, it would seem, is included as part of consciousness. In fact, when you really start to pay attention to it, consciousness seems to include...well, everything.
What isn’t consciousness? That’s a question that would have given my past self pause. Is there anything at all that we could say is not part of consciousness? When I try to come up with such a thing—an example of something that is other than my subjective experience—I find I can’t do it. In fact the idea seems almost ridiculous: how could it possibly have come into my awareness in order for me to talk about it, if I hadn’t experienced it? No, just as much as it is undeniable, consciousness seems to have an all-encompassing quality to it as well. Looked at in a certain way, there appears to be nothing but experiences.
And so we arrive at a second picture of reality—a second story we might tell about ourselves. In this story, consciousness becomes not merely something that we have, but something that we are. We switch from being biological things—collections of atoms—to, fundamentally, collections of experiences.
I ask again: what am I?
Worryingly, our answers—far from getting pruned down—appear to be multiplying.
V.
It seems we must confront two different ways of looking at the world.
In one, we put our trust in the reassuringly stable, law-like consistency of external reality. We look at the order we see around us and say: this must be real. Here lies truth. Whatever mysteries consciousness might entail, I have to consider them to be secondary ones. The material comes first, experience second.
In the other, the sheer undeniability of consciousness takes precedence. We say: it doesn’t matter how much order I see, the fact that I see it must be my first truth. I can do nothing but accept that, and then try to account for the regularities of the world in whatever way I can. Experience comes first, the material second.
Both seem compelling. But both can’t be true. So which should we believe?
My answer might disappoint, but shouldn’t surprise: as I said from the outset, I have no idea.
I really don’t. The second I start thinking one story might be true, the other comes along and upends it. Consciousness seems undeniable, yes—but then it too must bend the knee to certain truths. For surely there is no such thing as the experience of a logical contradiction—surely there can be nothing it feels like to perceive both P and not P at the same time. In this way logic holds its own trump card over consciousness, even as it can be trumped in turn. And so it goes, in endless loops—I find myself getting nowhere, lost in an ouroboreal forest.
No, the only honest thing I can say is that somehow, in some impossible way, the whole thing seems like a tie. Which makes no sense, of course—surely the Supreme Court of the Self can’t have an even number of sitting members. And yet that’s how it feels. As far as I can tell, neither consciousness nor the material world can lay claim to being more fundamental than the other. I have to accept both, somehow, as equal pillars of my reality.
Which makes us—what? Some kind of incomprehensible centaur? Both material and non-material at the same time?
I don’t know. Countless hours spent thinking about and debating the question, and that’s all I can really say: I just don’t know.
And as far as I can tell, no one knows. Not really. Many a philosopher and guru have claimed to know, but as my past self pointed out, it’s not really the kind of question that admits certainty. All any of us are really doing is guessing.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help but find that a little funny. It sometimes seems like the great joke of the world—like everyone is playing dress-up, and no one wants to admit it. We’re all just so damn sure of ourselves—unfailingly, alarmingly, endearingly sure. But none of us—not a single one among us—could answer the most basic question that we could be asked. Mountains of unquestioned and unquestionable truths, all of them built on guesses.
No, I’ll never tire of pointing it out: we don’t know what we are.
We don’t know what we are.
We don’t know what we are.
VI.
But maybe this still strikes you as useless philosophizing. What, really, is the point?
Well, in part it’s a call for humility: we could consider, perhaps, being slightly less sure that we are right and our opponents wrong, when such foundational questions are still up in the air.
But ultimately I’m telling this as part of the story of my religious awakening. I’m telling it because it was here that some of the first seeds of doubt were planted.
As an atheist I had built up a fortress against religion. The fortress went by many names: “priors”, or “occam’s razor”, or “this is just silly”. It was what I used to deflect all religious arguments so that I didn’t have to really consider them.
Consciousness was the first real crack in the fortress wall. It was the first thing that made me stop and say: I don’t know what’s going on here. I can’t know what’s going on here. With consciousness I knew I faced something I would never be able to explain.
It took me a long time to accept that. Though the problems with materialism were almost literally staring me in the face, I stubbornly ignored them. I boxed up the mystery, trying to contain it by giving it a name. “The hard problem of consciousness”—it sounds reassuringly official, no? Whenever consciousness started to seem a bit too unexplainable, I could invoke it in almost talismanic fashion: “Well yes, that’s just the Hard Problem,” I’d say. Known issue. No need to worry.
But the problems could only be ignored for so long, and worry I eventually did. There was no grand revelation, no single moment where all my beliefs came crashing down around me. It was much less dramatic than that. All I was aware of was a growing sense that I could be less and less sure I understood how things really worked at the deepest level. A creeping realization that my foundations might not be as solid as I had thought. Until one day I found, to my surprise, that I wasn’t a materialist anymore.
And just like that, the box was opened: mystery had been loosed upon the world again.
From there, the seeds sprouted quickly. I found myself pulled in a spiritual direction, and then soon a religious one. Not a necessary turn—from here one could head towards the lands of panpsychism, or dualism, or any of a number of non-materialist philosophies—but it was the only turn I found I could take.
And so the seeds grew, new cracks in the wall appeared, and the fortress started to crumble. Works of Christian apologetics appeared on my desk. Before I knew it I was a church-going man. A whole new world was opening up before me.
I still didn’t know what I was. I still couldn’t explain consciousness. But slowly and almost imperceptibly, it was starting to seem less like a mystery, and more like a miracle.
Cracks in the Wall, Part I: The Conscious
Link post
I.
Imagine a genie appears before you and makes you a simple offer: you can ask him any question you want, and he’ll answer it. No tricks—genie society has seen sweeping reforms and made great moral progress, and the days of the malicious trickster genies have been left long behind. No, this genie is entirely benevolent: if your question turns out to have been ill-formed, he’ll explain exactly why it was ill-formed, and then answer the question you intended to ask. No matter what question you pose to him, you’ll find yourself completely satisfied with the answer he gives.
However, genies being genies, he still feels the need to follow ancient tradition and impose some kind of a ternary restriction on his gift. So he stipulates that the question can only be three words long.
What question do you ask him?
Even with only three words, there seems no shortage of good options to pick from. You might, for instance, ask him: Why am I? That is, for what reason do I exist? What, if anything, is my purpose in life? Where can I find meaning, what ought I to do with my time?
Or perhaps: How am I? How, by what means, did I come to be, and do I persist in being? What are the mechanisms and operations of creation and existence?
Or maybe it’s wisest to ask: Who am I? How do I fit into the world, how does my life relate to the lives of others? What is the truest story I can tell about the person that I am?
All excellent nominations, and a case could be made for any of them. For myself, though, I find that I stumble long before I reach anything nearly so lofty. My confusions are more basic than that, my lack of understanding more fundamental. No, I’d be happy getting the answer to a much simpler question: What am I?
What, exactly, am I? If I can’t answer that then it’s hard to see how I can make much sense of the other questions, or really any question at all. And troublingly, I find that I can’t, in fact, answer it.
What do I mean by that? Is it not obvious what we are? I worry some of you might think I’m being deliberately obtuse here, in service of some ultimately irrelevant philosophical point I’m trying to make. Not my intention at all. I mean what I say: at a basic level, I really have no idea how to think about what kind of thing it is that I am. My confusion runs deep. And far from being an irrelevancy, it was confronting this mystery in full that forced me to rethink much of what I knew, and eventually led me down a completely different path in life.
So let’s talk about materialism, consciousness, and the self.
II.
My younger self would have had an answer at the ready, although he would have admitted it was not yet complete. It would have been a materialist answer through and through, rooted in biology, physics, and ultimately math.
He would have started by saying that whatever else we are, we are biological creatures: human beings, who are born, who live, and who die. We came to be as we are via evolution, that special process that allows replicators (and replicators alone) to amass and accumulate complexity in an entropic world, through the ratchet-like workings of random variation combined with non-random selection.
He would go on to say that through evolution we came to have certain values and desires, corresponding ultimately to preferred states of the universe. As agents in the world, we evolved to take actions to try to steer reality towards those states that we prefer, and away from those that we disprefer.
He would stress that our values need not be simple values, nor our desires necessarily selfish ones. As social creatures, it would be perfectly possible, he would insist, for us to evolve to exhibit genuine altruism. And there would be nothing to stop initially simple drives—say a desire to model the world, or a preference for symmetry over asymmetry—from exploding into vast and beautiful spandrels—say a need to do philosophy, or a love for creating art. He would also take care to emphasize that, though our drives may have come about because they once maximized genetic fitness, that does not mean they are about maximizing fitness—that our values, once created, are meaningful in and of themselves.
He would readily and calmly accept that we are best described as collections of atoms (or collections of subatomic particles, or collections of excitations of quantum fields, or collections of whatever more fundamental entities we might discover in the future). But he would bristle at any attempt to prefix such a description with the word “mere”. There is nothing mere about us, he would steadfastly maintain.
He would proclaim above all else our utter uniqueness as biological creatures: how we evolved to have a capacity for self-reflection, allowing us to model and reason about ourselves in a way that no other animal can. How this amounted to an unprecedented new light of comprehension dawning in the world. How we alone became, in the words of Carl Sagan, “a way for the universe to know itself”.
Finally, as to how it all came to be, he would note—speculatively—that reality didn’t just seem to be described by math, it seemed in some sense to be made of math. The laws of physics left little room, it appeared, for objects to have additional properties beyond the mathematical ones they detailed. So perhaps, he would venture tentatively (and only tentatively), we consist of nothing but math. We don’t follow equations, we are equations. And perhaps as math we therefore don’t need anything to make us exist—perhaps all mathematical structures (including our universe, and us within it) simply exist in some platonic sense.
This last he would have offered up only as a speculative guess. He would be the first to admit that here, he had reached the limits of his understanding—that this was as far as he had gotten, and that in truth he couldn’t say much about why there was something rather than nothing.
But as to the claim that we have “no idea” how to think about what we are? Ridiculous, he would say. We may not have figured everything out yet, and indeed, he would allow, we may never will. But we most certainly do not have “no idea”.
That, more or less, would have been my younger self’s answer to my question.
Is it a good answer? It’s certainly got some compellingness to it—even now I feel the tug of it. But however skillfully weaved it is, there are certain questions it simply cannot address, and behind those lie fatal flaws. So let’s pick at some of the loose threads it leaves hanging, and see to what extent the whole thing starts to unravel.
III.
As I said, my past self would have acknowledged that his answer was incomplete. He knew it had holes. But looking back now, it seems to me that he took pains to avoid thinking about just how big the holes were, and how intractable the problems they created really were.
The issue is consciousness, of course. Always consciousness. The trouble is, it’s an inescapable fact about the world that it somehow gives rise to subjective experiences. When we see something blue, we don’t just “process incoming light of a certain wavelength in such a way as to create a pattern of mental activity that causes us to report having seen blue”, or whatever materialist story you want to tell. We see blue. It’s right there, right in front of our eyes. We can just look at it. Consciousness is, you might say, “that which is undeniable”.
And this is a problem. It’s a big problem. Because it’s very, very difficult to fit this kind of subjective experience into the fundamentally materialist description of the world put forth above. If my past self’s view could reasonably be summed up as “physics is all there is” (or perhaps “math is all there is”), then we can ask: what, exactly, are these subjective experiences? Where do they come from? How can they exist when the equations that we claim describe everything seem to leave no room for them whatsoever? In consciousness we seem to have run into an entirely new kind of thing—something not just undescribed by physical laws, but indescribable by them.
Worse, consciousness does not, as we might hope, merely piggyback on the material world—it can’t be treated as some kind of idealized documentarian, silently recording experiences while leaving the proceedings of reality undisturbed. It talks back. When I have the experience of seeing the colour blue and I start waxing poetic about it, the atoms in my tongue undergo some very real, very physical movements. And unless I want to suppose that my talking about having experienced blue is completely unrelated to the fact that I did, in reality, experience blue, I have to conclude that the movement of those atoms is in some sense caused by my experience. So consciousness becomes part of the dance—plugged in, so to speak, to the web of causality. It must be included in the network of action and reaction that defines what exists.
In other words: we can’t explain it, and we can’t ignore it.
My younger self knew all this, of course. In philosophy it’s called the hard problem of consciousness, and far from ignoring it, he devoted unhealthy amounts of time to trying to make sense of it. Perhaps precisely because it seemed so fatal to materialism, he spent hours and hours reading and thinking about the problem, trying to see if there wasn’t some way of resolving the apparent contradictions.
I think he knew, deep down, that there was no such way. You can try, but it’s ultimately a futile quest. No matter what argument you make, no matter what sequence of words you string together to try to explain consciousness in materialist terms, at the end of the day they’ll still only be words. And to any words a skeptic can always give the same reply: “Yes, but just look.”
Quite literally, our arguments are refuted at a glance. Maybe through some emergent process, complex physical interactions give rise to—stop. Just look. Perhaps the Goedelian paradoxes of self-reference and self-reflection in some way—stop. Just look. Evolutionarily speaking, we can see how a belief in consciousness might be advantageous for—stop. Just look.
No, consciousness holds the ultimate trump card. And as far as I can tell, our only way forward is to make peace with that.
IV.
Here I imagine my younger self would be starting to feel uncomfortable, but I think he would soldier on.
I imagine he might say something like: Okay, yes. All that seems true. It really does appear to be impossible to reconcile consciousness and materialism.
But I’m still not convinced that means I should totally abandon materialism. As far as I can tell, no matter what view of the world I settle on, it’s going to leave something unexplained. It’s simply inherent to the kind of endeavour that philosophy is that it admits no complete solutions. Perfection isn’t an option here. So given that I can’t eliminate all mystery, isn’t my best bet to try to find a worldview that at least minimizes it? And viewed in this light, doesn’t materialism still seem like a pretty good deal? Yes, we have to accept consciousness as a brute fact of the world, unexplained and unexplainable. But in return for that one small concession we get a framework with incredible explanatory power, one that seems able to answer almost any other question we could ask of it.
Moreover, the mystery that’s left over seems a relatively...contained kind of mystery. A tolerable one. Tongue-wagging about our blues aside, consciousness rarely intrudes into our lives and demands that we actively reason about it. For the most part, consciousness is simply there: it slips into the background (or perhaps rather the foreground), and can more often than not be forgotten about. It’s a constant. A baffling and inexplicable constant, yes—but still a constant.
So given all that, why shouldn’t I stick with materialism as my least bad option?
There are a number of things I’d say to him in response to this.
For starters I’d say: sure, the position you’ve settled on might be a defensible one. But see it for what it is: it’s not a materialist position anymore. Not even a little bit. You may have taken your non-materialist terms and put them in a very small box labelled “mystery” and shoved that box far under your bed, but they’re still there. There’s just no such thing as “mostly materialist”, and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief and confusion in the coming years if you accept that.
I might also say: how can you possibly know that the concession you’re making is a small one? Contained within that “tolerable” mystery of yours is every experience that you’ve every had, along with all the joys and sorrows of every person that you’ve ever loved—in other words, pretty much everything in the world that you care about. That’s a heck of a constant.
But the problems really run deeper than either of those things.
My past self is making more assumptions than he realizes here. He knows he’s making one: he assumes that the external world we see around us exists. But without realizing it he’s also making a second: he assumes in addition that the external world is the primary thing that exists—the most fundamental.
It’s this second assumption that stops him from seeing any alternatives to materialism. Within the framework he’s adopted, consciousness is, and can only be, something that inexplicably gets “associated with” or “attached to” certain physical events. It is fundamentally secondary, something to be explained only after we’ve figured out what’s going on with the external world. And in fact I agree with him that, under this view, it’s hard not to arrive at something like materialism with a mystery box.
But we’re not forced to look at things that way. In fact, we have a natural alternative: why not take consciousness as our starting point, and look at the external world as something secondary?
If that sounds at all strange to you, take a second to play the same game as before: look out at the world around you, and become aware that you’re experiencing it. This time, though, notice how your consciousness extends not just to sight, but to all your sensations: touch and smell and sound, yes—but even more nebulous things, like thought and emotion. Anything that you could possibly feel, it would seem, is included as part of consciousness. In fact, when you really start to pay attention to it, consciousness seems to include...well, everything.
What isn’t consciousness? That’s a question that would have given my past self pause. Is there anything at all that we could say is not part of consciousness? When I try to come up with such a thing—an example of something that is other than my subjective experience—I find I can’t do it. In fact the idea seems almost ridiculous: how could it possibly have come into my awareness in order for me to talk about it, if I hadn’t experienced it? No, just as much as it is undeniable, consciousness seems to have an all-encompassing quality to it as well. Looked at in a certain way, there appears to be nothing but experiences.
And so we arrive at a second picture of reality—a second story we might tell about ourselves. In this story, consciousness becomes not merely something that we have, but something that we are. We switch from being biological things—collections of atoms—to, fundamentally, collections of experiences.
I ask again: what am I?
Worryingly, our answers—far from getting pruned down—appear to be multiplying.
V.
It seems we must confront two different ways of looking at the world.
In one, we put our trust in the reassuringly stable, law-like consistency of external reality. We look at the order we see around us and say: this must be real. Here lies truth. Whatever mysteries consciousness might entail, I have to consider them to be secondary ones. The material comes first, experience second.
In the other, the sheer undeniability of consciousness takes precedence. We say: it doesn’t matter how much order I see, the fact that I see it must be my first truth. I can do nothing but accept that, and then try to account for the regularities of the world in whatever way I can. Experience comes first, the material second.
Both seem compelling. But both can’t be true. So which should we believe?
My answer might disappoint, but shouldn’t surprise: as I said from the outset, I have no idea.
I really don’t. The second I start thinking one story might be true, the other comes along and upends it. Consciousness seems undeniable, yes—but then it too must bend the knee to certain truths. For surely there is no such thing as the experience of a logical contradiction—surely there can be nothing it feels like to perceive both P and not P at the same time. In this way logic holds its own trump card over consciousness, even as it can be trumped in turn. And so it goes, in endless loops—I find myself getting nowhere, lost in an ouroboreal forest.
No, the only honest thing I can say is that somehow, in some impossible way, the whole thing seems like a tie. Which makes no sense, of course—surely the Supreme Court of the Self can’t have an even number of sitting members. And yet that’s how it feels. As far as I can tell, neither consciousness nor the material world can lay claim to being more fundamental than the other. I have to accept both, somehow, as equal pillars of my reality.
Which makes us—what? Some kind of incomprehensible centaur? Both material and non-material at the same time?
I don’t know. Countless hours spent thinking about and debating the question, and that’s all I can really say: I just don’t know.
And as far as I can tell, no one knows. Not really. Many a philosopher and guru have claimed to know, but as my past self pointed out, it’s not really the kind of question that admits certainty. All any of us are really doing is guessing.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t help but find that a little funny. It sometimes seems like the great joke of the world—like everyone is playing dress-up, and no one wants to admit it. We’re all just so damn sure of ourselves—unfailingly, alarmingly, endearingly sure. But none of us—not a single one among us—could answer the most basic question that we could be asked. Mountains of unquestioned and unquestionable truths, all of them built on guesses.
No, I’ll never tire of pointing it out: we don’t know what we are.
We don’t know what we are.
We don’t know what we are.
VI.
But maybe this still strikes you as useless philosophizing. What, really, is the point?
Well, in part it’s a call for humility: we could consider, perhaps, being slightly less sure that we are right and our opponents wrong, when such foundational questions are still up in the air.
But ultimately I’m telling this as part of the story of my religious awakening. I’m telling it because it was here that some of the first seeds of doubt were planted.
As an atheist I had built up a fortress against religion. The fortress went by many names: “priors”, or “occam’s razor”, or “this is just silly”. It was what I used to deflect all religious arguments so that I didn’t have to really consider them.
Consciousness was the first real crack in the fortress wall. It was the first thing that made me stop and say: I don’t know what’s going on here. I can’t know what’s going on here. With consciousness I knew I faced something I would never be able to explain.
It took me a long time to accept that. Though the problems with materialism were almost literally staring me in the face, I stubbornly ignored them. I boxed up the mystery, trying to contain it by giving it a name. “The hard problem of consciousness”—it sounds reassuringly official, no? Whenever consciousness started to seem a bit too unexplainable, I could invoke it in almost talismanic fashion: “Well yes, that’s just the Hard Problem,” I’d say. Known issue. No need to worry.
But the problems could only be ignored for so long, and worry I eventually did. There was no grand revelation, no single moment where all my beliefs came crashing down around me. It was much less dramatic than that. All I was aware of was a growing sense that I could be less and less sure I understood how things really worked at the deepest level. A creeping realization that my foundations might not be as solid as I had thought. Until one day I found, to my surprise, that I wasn’t a materialist anymore.
And just like that, the box was opened: mystery had been loosed upon the world again.
From there, the seeds sprouted quickly. I found myself pulled in a spiritual direction, and then soon a religious one. Not a necessary turn—from here one could head towards the lands of panpsychism, or dualism, or any of a number of non-materialist philosophies—but it was the only turn I found I could take.
And so the seeds grew, new cracks in the wall appeared, and the fortress started to crumble. Works of Christian apologetics appeared on my desk. Before I knew it I was a church-going man. A whole new world was opening up before me.
I still didn’t know what I was. I still couldn’t explain consciousness. But slowly and almost imperceptibly, it was starting to seem less like a mystery, and more like a miracle.