Is Consciousness Natural?

And why you should care about the answer.

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One of my readers responded to my article Why Consciousness is Such a Big Deal. They were surprised I would argue consciousness is fatal to the philosophy of naturalism and therefore it must be supernatural.

The first thing to note is, I didn’t use the word supernatural anywhere in my article. Supernatural is a word I try to avoid. It obscures the issues because it hides all the naturalist assumptions people are making and reinforces an unhelpful way of thinking about the topic.

Splitting the world into two categories

The modern way of thinking splits the world into the categories of natural and supernatural. Natural refers to the things studied by science, supernatural is whatever’s left over.

With this way of thinking, the supernatural isn’t a category in its own right with particular qualities that define it. It’s understood in the negative as not-natural. Supernatural becomes anything that science is yet to explain.

This is why theism and non-materialist worldviews are constantly accused of making god of the gaps arguments. Because the naturalist presumption is already there, unspoken and unjustified.

The naturalist presumption is that “reality” is what science has discovered. If we accept that reality = natural, it logically follows that suggesting something is not-natural is an appeal to ignorance. It takes the gaps in our knowledge that science hasn’t yet filled, and places them in the category of not-natural. And not-natural is then understood as not-real.

My reader seems to have a similar idea in mind when he says, “I define natural to include consciousness and other things that are real.” He also says, “If [the supernatural] exists, it has to exist outside reality.” and “The supernatural is thus indistinguishable from the non-existent.”

But nature isn’t synonymous with reality. Reality means the totality of everything that exists. If we’re defining natural as whatever exists, it goes without saying nothing supernatural exists.

But we’re not saying there is nothing supernatural because we have reasons to think it’s true and the world really is like that, instead it’s because we’ve stipulated that the word nature means “everything that exists.”

Defining everything as natural isn’t helpful if we want to know what consciousness is and its place in the world.

Another problem is that the meaning of the word supernatural depends on the meaning of the word natural, but we don’t have a clear definition of the world natural. The only real option is to say that natural means physical, or the things studied by physics.

Is consciousness physical?

No one denies the brain is physical. It has mass, dimension, charge, all the usual properties we think of as physical.

But consciousness isn’t the same thing as the physical brain, consciousness is an inner feel, an experience. And experience doesn’t have physical properties. It doesn’t have mass or dimension and it can’t be measured or observed by our senses.

We could study the entire physical body and not find evidence that consciousness exists. If our only method of gaining knowledge was science, we’d have to conclude consciousness doesn’t exist.

The only reason any of us know consciousness exists is because we experience it. And on the basis of our knowledge of our own consciousness and the reasons for our behaviour, we infer that other things are conscious too.

When neuroscience correlates brain states with states of consciousnesses, they observe and measure the brain states, but the states of consciousness are documented by someone reporting what they experience when that brain state lights up. Neuroscience then correlates those physical states with the particular mental states someone reports.

Which is all just to say, consciousness isn’t physical.

The observations we need to explain

It’s important to understand this isn’t an argument that consciousness isn’t physical. It’s not a conclusion we can reject as arising from invalid or unsound logic.

Consciousness isn’t physical is a description of the observed facts.

We observe that consciousness has no physical properties. This observation isn’t an explanation, it’s the data any theory needs to explain.

The observed properties of consciousness don’t fit in the category of the physical. Consciousness isn’t part of the external objective world, it’s a subjective point of view. Consciousness is a self who observes that external world of objects. It’s a point of view that stands beyond that world of objects.

This is why consciousness is such a hard problem for naturalism. Because if consciousness doesn’t have any physical properties, the metaphysical claim that everything is natural, or physical, is false.

The only way to save the naturalist theory is to find some physical thing to identify with consciousness. They might identify consciousness with the brain, or neurons, or integrated information. There are many possibilities.

But the next step, explaining why consciousness emerges from their chosen physical structures, is where we find an unbridgeable explanatory gap.

This is the hard problem of consciousness. Why are those physical structures or functions accompanied by an inner feel? No appeal to mechanism can answer that question.

The argument against naturalism

The argument against naturalism is not – we don’t know how consciousness works, therefore it’s supernatural.

The argument is – we observe that consciousness has no physical properties, therefore it’s not physical.

And that’s only a hard problem for the naturalist because they’re the only ones saying everything is physical. The hard problem for the naturalist is explaining how despite having no physical properties, consciousness is, in fact, physical, or supervenes on the physical.

A naturalist explanation needs to tell us how consciousness emerges from whatever physical thing they’ve identified it with. But emergence isn’t an explanation, it’s a placeholder word where the explanation should be.

The placeholder word doesn’t tell us how or why that emergence happens, it only tells us what any naturalist explanation must consist of.

And it’s only naturalism that has to explain what that emergence consists of, because it’s only naturalism that says consciousness emerges from the physical.

The idealist explanation

My reader raised the objection that idealism is on equal footing because it can’t explain how matter emerges from consciousness. Here we find the usual naturalist assumptions. There’s an expectation that any explanation must provide a mechanism.

But the idealist rejects those assumptions. According to the idealist, consciousness is the substance of reality. Which means reality isn’t an insentient machine, there is a conscious person at its foundation. And if reality isn’t a machine, an explanation won’t be about mechanisms.

Of course there are many versions of the spiritual world view, but they generally explain how matter emerges from consciousness in theological terms.

Christianity tells us God created the world from nothing. Hinduism tells us this material world is created by us, God merely facilitates our material desires.

Both of them explain that spiritual practices are the method of liberation and mysticism is the correct method to find the ultimate truth of consciousness. Other religions tell a slightly different story, but they all have similar plot lines.

These spiritual worldviews aren’t focused on mechanisms as explanations because they don’t agree reality is a machine. They focus on explaining how eternal conscious souls find themselves in a material world, and how they can liberate themselves from suffering and death.

Why do questions about consciousness matter?

If consciousness emerges from the brain, that means its existence depends on the brain. Which means when the brain dies, the conscious self ceases to exist. There can be no afterlife.

This is the strong claim naturalists make when they tell you consciousness emerges from the brain. It’s a claim that effects your eternal destiny. And they make this claim with no rational justification, they give no reason to think it’s true.

To say consciousness emerges from the brain isn’t a reason to think it’s true. It’s merely stating what must be true ifff naturalism is true. And it ignores the fact that the hard problem of consciousness highlights that it can’t be true.

If the idealist or spiritual worldview is true, the conscious self doesn’t depend on the body. The reverse is true, the existence of the body depends on the soul. The soul is the animating force, and when it leaves, the body reverts to its inert physical components and rots away.

The soul is destined for some kind of afterlife, what you do in this life effects your destiny after the death of your body.

This isn’t a question we have the luxury of waiting around for neuroscience to answer, since that already assumes naturalism is true. It also gives no response to the hard problem which tells us that’s never going to happen.

The question of consciousness is vitally important to each of us personally in knowing how we should live right now.