[Zhihu question]
If we accept that the world is material, then how exactly did something like consciousness come into being in this material world?
This may be the deepest, most incomprehensible mystery in the universe.
Some people in the answers mocked the questioner, saying, “It’s the 21st century already. How can anyone still be asking such a naive idealist question?” They completely missed what the questioner was actually asking.
Those answers assumed the questioner was puzzled about how consciousness emerges from the nervous systems of humans or animals. If that were the question, then we could say that although this is already one of the hardest and most profound subjects in neuroscience and psychology, we have good reason to believe that as neuroscientific methods advance, neuroscientists may well be able to figure out the correspondence between the structure of the nervous system and conscious experience in the foreseeable future.
Future psychologists will be able to tell us what kind of structure or state the nervous system has to form for a person to experience a given conscious state.
The hard problem of consciousness
But that is not the level of consciousness-generation mechanism the questioner is concerned with at all.
What puzzles him is not how “I” emerges from the nervous system, but why there is a subjective point of view in this objective universe—why there is an “I” looking at and experiencing the world. How “I” emerges from the nervous system is, in the questioner’s confusion, merely a side issue. The key question is: if the universe is materialist and objective, why does a subjective point of view like “I” exist?
If the essence of the universe is objective matter, then even if sufficiently favorable conditions gave rise to complex organic beings like us, we should still be nothing more than “philosophical zombies.” Our nervous systems might become powerful and flexible enough to handle all kinds of environmental problems, but there should not be an “I” inside our brains, nor a “subjective world” observing the environment.
This is what some of the other answers referred to as the hard problem of consciousness (The hard problem of consciousness).
The hard problem of consciousness is not concerned with the neural mechanisms of consciousness, but with why there is a “subjective world” in a purely “objective world.”
Put bluntly, the hard problem of consciousness is the irreconcilable contradiction between the “objective world” and the “subjective world.”
So how do we resolve this seemingly impossible contradiction?
There are three ways of thinking about it.
1. Physicalism
The first accepts the “objective material world” as the essence of reality.
Then, at the other end, the conclusion we are logically forced to accept is that the “subjective world” does not exist at all, consciousness itself does not exist, and everything is merely an illusion. The philosophy-of-mind heavyweight Daniel Dennett is the leading representative of this view. In practically all his books, he “brainwashes the readers,” telling them: you do not exist. (Then who is he writing his books for? And who is reading them?~~~)
This is the thoroughgoing physicalism we are most familiar with.
I cannot accept thoroughgoing physicalism. If “I” is an illusion, then who is experiencing this illusion? No matter how much we analyze and deconstruct consciousness, or argue that it does not exist, it is still hard to convince me that there is no “subjective world” experiencing the world.
My beliefs, ideas, and feelings may all be illusions, but “I” am not an illusion.
2. Idealism
The second accepts the “subjective world” as the essence of reality—in other words, thoroughgoing idealism.
Then, at the other end, the conclusion we are logically forced to accept is that the “objective world” does not really exist. There is nothing outside the mind; everything we perceive is an illusion. But this is not the same kind of illusion as the one in physicalism: under physicalism, consciousness itself is the illusion, whereas here, everything outside consciousness is the illusion.
The fundamental difficulty with idealism is that our illusion is a little too impressive, isn’t it?!
I can barely manage two-digit addition and subtraction in daily life, but after reading even a little theoretical physics, you know that at its deepest level this universe conforms remarkably well to complex mathematical structures. Did my consciousness somehow produce an illusion far beyond my own understanding? How could that be possible?
But if we say that the universe, this “grand illusion,” was created by some other thing or person, haven’t we just slid right back toward physicalism?
Anyway, I don’t believe in idealism, and I don’t believe that nothing exists outside the mind.
After thinking it over and over, the only possibility that convinces me is the one that sounds, at first hearing, like a shamelessly slippery argument but becomes terrifyingly plausible the more you think about it: neutral monism.
3. Neutral monism
Neutral monism is also called the double-aspect theory (or the theory of reality as two sides of one whole).
Neutral monism asks: where is the contradiction?
Why must it be one or the other?
Couldn’t the essence of the world encompass both matter and consciousness at the same time?
It is not that we imagined this world into existence, nor that there was first some supposedly “objective” physical reality, and then life arose in that physical world, giving rise to “subjective” conscious experience.
Maybe, at its source, this world has always had both a “subjective” and an “objective” side.
The source of the world (whatever it actually is) gives rise to conscious experience and physical reality simultaneously. What we call the subjective and the objective are really two sides of one and the same source. Every “object” in the world has a side that is physical reality and a side that is subjective conscious experience.
Everything in this universe (everything!) includes both material properties and conscious properties. The basic constituents of reality could be called “neutral units”: they are neither matter nor consciousness in themselves, but possess both kinds of properties at once. On this view, matter and consciousness do not exist separately; they are two dimensions of properties made up by the same basic units.
It’s like how “a red ball” has the shape property of being round while also having the color property of being red. The two necessarily coexist in “a red ball.”
The universe is “a red ball.”
This “setup” leads inevitably to panpsychism—
Consciousness does not exist only in the nervous systems of advanced animals like us; it permeates the entire universe and is one of the universe’s most basic properties. From something as simple as an electron or a quark to something as complex as the human brain, every structure and every thing in the universe carries some degree of consciousness.
(Of course, this is not to say that electrons “think,” but that electrons, too, have a “subjective point of view.”)
And this naturally resolves the seemingly irreconcilable contradiction between the “objective world” and the “subjective world.”
There is no contradiction.
Subjective consciousness did not emerge inside an objective material world.
Rather, the subjective world came into being together with the objective world.
So perhaps consciousness has filled the universe ever since the moment of the Big Bang.
That’s all.
Written by: Zhichao Wei
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