But a funny thing happened as humanity grew up. Earth, fire, water, and air were found to all be made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Even the stars and the planets were found to be made of the same chemical elements as earth. And what about life? Again, its all chemistry, no ethereal spirits required. Enter mind/brain dualism, and the final bastion of Platonic thinking: okay, we will grant you the physical reality of stars and brains all made of quarks and all driven by a few fundamental forces, but nothing in that world view can account for subjective experiences, for consciousness, for my God-given eternal soul!
Assuming the idea that "consciousness is an implicit aspect of existence" is an implicit aspect of being human. As humans, we experience consciousness our entire lives. We recognize nothing but our conscious experiences as ourselves. Even if we become aware of altered states of consciousness, our natural tendency is to associate such altered states with an invading spirit, not just a permutation of the operation of the mechanisms by which our brains construct our minds.
Within this debate about the nature of mind, consciousness and souls, there has been a special type of proposal put forth by physicists which is usually labeled "quantum consciousness". We hear from c. topping that he sees "no reason why individual immortality could not be a function of quantum events in our brains." This is an interesting idea that appeals to many physical scientists (I point to Alwyn Scott's book as the most level-headed statement of the quantum consciousness argument), but biologists are nearly unanimous in rejecting "quantum consciousness" (here, Crick serves as a representative spokesman for the position of most biologists). If even biologists and physicists cannot agree about how to deal with consciousness, what hope is there for any kind of sensible interactions between even broader segments of human society?
This is where we find ourselves, different tribes taking our separate paths into the future. One tribe sure that human consciousness cannot be understood in terms of brain chemistry, the other tribe sure that it can. What is of interest to me is relations between these different tribes. How do we find common ground and work together?
All human societies have developed within a set of assumptions that includes the idea that everything is conscious. As social primates, our survival strategies have all been built around what Dan Dennett calls the "intentional stance". We successfully negotiate our social environment by assuming that our fellow humans think in the same way we do. Of course, this only works because it is true: normally socialized humans behave like humans. Given the plasticity of the human mind, it usually works best just for our own local social group. Outsiders are likely to have strange customs, but who cares? They might not share our genes, so just kill them.
The intentional stance works so well for dealing with human social interactions that it is natural for people to try to construct a similar strategy for dealing with other parts of our environment. Maybe the wind and the grass do not have the same overt behaviors as people do, but why not assume that they are conscious? Why not assume everything is conscious?
The other aspect of human consciousness that pervades our existence is that not only are we equipped to survive, we are driven to survive. The idea that we could end repulses us. Surely it is a beautiful idea that we could have a link to the eternal. Why live life knowing that you will die when you can just as easily believe that your essence is eternal?
Beauty. Truth. In Western thought we have the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder while it is the truth that sets us free. Of course, there are other traditions, other ideals that some men hold to be sacred. These days we even hear the claim that we can select what we want to be true. But does faith in pleasing ideas such as an eternal soul make them reality? Drug addicts seldom like to have their habits publicly discussed, and even if religious faith is an opiate for the masses, it has served the development of human societies to protect people from the pain of their insulation from the truth.
However, the issue has now become: since science has given us the tools to reveal the truth of our existence, can we find a way to wean ourselves from reliance on faith and build a stable society on the truth? Many scientists have tried to explain that the truth is more beautiful than any of the visions that unify the great religions, but the subjective scales of beauty are programmed into young human minds. The stable religious traditions are stable because they include mechanisms for indoctrination of the young.
It is a slow process by which existing memetic systems are replaced by newly assembled ones. During such social transitions it is natural for the derogatory labels such as "elitists!" to be flung. Traditionalists can cling to the idea that faith reveals truths that science is blind to, but such wishes do not impress the hard headed scientist who sees in them self-deception.
I have never seen anyone claim that consciousness is an illusion, but the claim can be made that Free Will is an illusion. For many, that possibility is more terrifying than the possibility of death. Why would we want to live if we were "just" mechanical constructs, following the mindless laws of physics in the same way as a lifeless moon trapped in an orbit? Some have suggested that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, that the sensation of our conscious thoughts as involved in the control of our bodies is an illusion. Thus we have the philosophical favorite: the unconscious zombie that can do anything a conscious human can do.
This bizarre idea has also been thrown at the field of artificial intelligence. It is often claimed that "functionalists" propose that all we need to do is make a machine that duplicates a few overt human behaviors and it will automatically have human consciousness. This absurd idea comes only from outside of AI research as an attempt to "disprove" the possibility that an machine with human-like intelligence and some form of consciousness might one day be built by men.
In his book, "Elbow Room", Dan Dennett explains why people need not feel threatened and repulsed by the idea that people are mechanical systems and that people will be able to construct artifacts that will have human-like intelligence and consciousness. Mind/brain dualists who wish to defend their belief that mind, spirit, consciousness or soul is essentially different from the crass physical realities of mechanical systems always argue in the following way: our understanding of the physical mechanics of the brain fails to explain how our subjective consciousness can be what it is and all attempts to produce artifacts with human-like consciousness have failed, therefor, consciousness transcends the physical and must be viewed as a separate fundamental "essence", irreducible to known physical systems and their functions.
Such arguments from positions of ignorance do not impress scientists.
It was once argued that men would never know what a star was made of. It
was once argued that men could never really know what held the Moon in
its place in the sky. It was once claimed that there was no way that chemistry
could explain "the life force" that animates living things. Given the way
science has cleared such claims from the field of human discourse, it is
easy for many scientists (biologists and AI researchers) to simply go to
the lab each day and get on with the task of showing how mechanical systems
of molecules can account for mind and how mindless algorithms can produce
intelligent behavior in robots.
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