A Few Thoughts on Consciousness

There has been much talk recently, including in this blog, about the role of consciousness in the universe.  Is it an emergent property that arises from the mind, or does the mind emerge from consciousness?  Is it the underlying substrate beneath all phenomena and existence, or is consciousness itself formed by phenomena?  Is it none of these things or all of these things, and are these even the right questions to be asking?

The first problem is of what we're even talking about.  The standard dictionary definition of consciousness - awareness, or perception of awareness - does not really capture the essence of consciousness.  There is, in fact, no consensus on a scientific definition of consciousness, and hence no way to measure or quantify it, since we haven't really defined what it is we're trying to measure or quantify, and limited means for rational discussion of it, as the lack of a consensus definition results in the subject constantly slipping away from us.

For our purposes now, we'll avoid a definition, but when I talk about consciousness, I'm specifically talking about the unique individual experience of awareness and the perception of awareness, what the actual experience of what it's like and how it feels being me, and what it's actually like to be you.

Studies of the definition of consciousness usually trace back to William James.  James defined consciousness as the "function of knowing," and considered it closely related to thought and awareness of oneself in the world during waking moments.  This awareness of oneself is the reason that, say, computers, although they can "think," are merely running programs and aren't themselves aware that they are thinking (at least as far as we know), and are therefore not considered conscious.

Cats, dogs, and higher primates appear to be able to think to various degrees and seem moderately self-aware, and are most likely conscious.  Possibly all other mammals as well.  But after that, it gets tricky.  Are fish conscious?  What about insects?   What about jellyfish and other invertebrates which don't have a brain, per se, or for that matter trees and grasses?  Is there consciousness, or a consciousness, there or not?

So back to my point.  Without a scientific definition and a way to measure it, any discussion of consciousness is meaningless.  Of course, it would be marvelous if there were a device that could detect the presence of consciousness and even quantify it - we would know if and exactly when a developing fetus developed consciousness and if a comatose patient had any remaining consciousness or not, and so many ethical decisions would be made so much easier.

In response to this problem of the definition of consciousness, William James suggested that for psychology to be a natural science along with and on par with other natural sciences like physics and biology, we need to carefully study and observe consciousness.  Just as Darwin's insights into the origin of species followed meticulous and painstaking observation of the natural world, and Galileo's discovery that the solar system was heliocentric followed precise tracking and measurement of the movements of stars, James suggested that psychologists carefully observe consciousness with the same exacting level of detail so that it could be  fully understood.

The problem is that consciousness can only be directly observed within the individual doing the observation.  We can study and observe others - people or animals - but what we're seeing is behavior and drawing inferences from that, but we're not directly observing consciousness itself.   In neurology, we study and observe the chemistry and functions of the brain, but this still doesn't equate to understanding what consciousness actually is - what it feels like, how it arises, and what, finally, it is.

Scientists, however, have by and large ignored James' proposal and have continued down the path of trying to observe in others second-order phenomena such as behaviors and the chemistry of neurotransmitters and so on, rather than looking within and observing consciousness itself.  There's something that seems suspect from a scientific viewpoint of studying one's own experience and drawing conclusions that cannot be replicated by an independent second party.  It seems to go against the scientific method.  So instead we have mechanistic descriptions of the function of mind, bio-chemical and bio-kinetic models of the brain, behavioral studies, and psychological palliatives for mental disorders, but a full century after William James' proposal, no scientific consensus of what we're even talking about when it comes to consciousness.

So I take anything Western scientists have to say about consciousness with a very big grain of salt, because without a working definition, they literally do not know what they're talking about, they don't know how to observe it, and they don't know how to describe it, measure it, or discuss it.

There is, however, another group of people who have been looking directly at consciousness, observing it, studying it, experimenting with it, and recording and sharing their insights, for over 2,500 years now.  These people, of course, are the Buddhists.  I suggest that to begin to arrive at an understanding of consciousness, we should first look at what the Buddha had to say about it.

As it turns out, he didn't discuss it all that much, and when he did, it was usually tangentially and in a matter-of-fact way.  Please correct me if I'm missing something, but I don't know of a sutra or discourse by the Buddha on the topic of consciousness itself.  It seems that from the Buddha's perspective, consciousness wasn't all that big a deal.

Whenever the Buddha talked about consciousness, it was always in connection with one of the six senses (the usual five senses plus the perception of thoughts).  So specifically, there is sight consciousness and hearing consciousness and taste consciousness and olfactory consciousness and touch consciousness and, finally mind consciousness.  And each of these six consciousnesses only arise when there is an object of perception - a sight, a sound, and so on to a thought.  With no objects of perception, there is no consciousness, and with no organs of perception, there is no consciousness.

The Buddha saw that everything arises from causes, and that what we call an ego-self arises from an aggregation of various impermanent phenomena.  He saw that the ego-self arises when form, feeling, thought, something called sanskara, and consciousness all come together.

We'll talk about that sanskara first.  Sanskara is a Sanskrit word that has been variously translated as mental formations, volition, impulse, predisposition, and even memory - in other words, the products of the mind in all their myriad forms.  It should be thought of as each of these things and all of these things together.  To discuss it only in terms of any one of these translations is to miss the meaning, which is why I prefer to use the Sanskrit term.

So the ego-self, then, arises when form, in this case a human body, encounters sensations (feelings), and the brain portion of that form thinks about the sensation and creates a mental model of it.  For example, a person is sitting outside in the Sun, which pleasantly warms the body.  The skin feels the warmth, the pleasantness of the sensation registers with the mind, which thinks about what is happening and decides that a thing called the "Sun" is warming a thing called the "body."  This dividing of the phenomenal universe into a  "Sun" separate from the "body" is an example of the kind of mental formation or model that constitutes sanskara. As soon as we are conscious of some supposed external thing, in this case the "Sun," by contrast, we logically conclude that an internal thing must also exist, and by gosh, we're that internal thing, and thus the individual ego-self arises.  

This process is not as mechanistic as described here, but is constantly and fluidly going on, with the ego-self continually re-inventing itself from moment to moment.  But if we were to take away one of the five aggregates of existence, the perception of an ego-self would also disappear.  When the body's gone, the self is gone, and when there is no thought or no perception of thought in that body, then there is no concept of anything, including that of a self.

Sorry if that seems like a long walk around the block and a digression away from the topic of consciousness,  but it's necessary to understand that to the Buddha, consciousness did not arise from the mind or the self, but that the self arises from consciousness, which exists separately from and prior to the self.  In other words, the self does not give rise to consciousness, but consciousness can form a self.

But from where does this consciousness come?  The Buddha explained this in a somewhat complicated teaching on the chain of dependent origination.  As stated before, the Buddha saw that everything arose from conditions, just as the self arose from the coming together of the five aggregates.  But these conditions don't necessarily cause a thing to come into existence, they're just the necessary ingredients, if you will, for the thing.

Consider a dandelion.  For a dandelion to exist, certain conditions have to come together, including soil, sunlight, water, and some dandelion DNA in the form of a seed.  But no one of these things causes the dandelion to come into existence, and it would be wrong to conclude, say, that soil creates dandelions. But when all of the necessary conditions come together, a dandelion is manifested.  Looking deeper, we can also see that there are necessary conditions for the existence of soil, including a mountain for soil to erode from and a place for the soil to come to rest.  Without a mountain, then, there can be no dandelion, as a dandelion is ultimately dependent on soil, a mountain for the soil to erode from, a place for the soil to come to a rest, and even gravity to get the soil from the mountain to the resting place.

In his discourse on dependent origination, the Buddha taught that a necessary condition for the arising of consciousness was sanskara.  Without sanskara, there can be no consciousness, any more than there could be a dandelion without soil.  Consciousness, then, arises from mental formations, memory, impulse.  But from where does sanskara arise?  The Buddha taught that a necessary condition for the arising of sanskara was ignorance.  Ultimately, then, consciousness arises from ignorance, just as our dandelion ultimately depends of the presence of a mountain for its existence.

It took me a long time to get my head around this teaching, mostly because I kept thinking of the basal condition, ignorance, as absolute and utter ignorance, a black hole devoid of any and all  intelligence, reason, and understanding.  I now see it as more mundane and more specific than that.  The necessary condition for the creation of a mental model of a self separate from others is ignorance of the interconnectedness of all things.  But in our misunderstanding, in our ignorance, the sanskara of separation arises.  The sanskara of separation could not exist without our first being ignorant to the actual lack of any real separation.

In order to be conscious, there has to be a vessel for consciousness to arise in, so a necessary ingredient for the existence of consciousness, then, is this particular sanskara, this mental model of an internal self separate from an external world, which in turn is based on ignorance, a misunderstanding of the interconnectedness of everything.  And the arising of consciousness, in turn, is a necessary precondition for the arising of other phenomena, such as an ego-self, and all the forms of suffering, including sickness, old age, and death, require an ego-self to experience the forms of suffering.

If all that's difficult to follow or to accept, don't worry about it.  The take away, the Cliff notes version, is that consciousness  itself wasn't all that unique or all that special to the Buddha.  It was just one of many links in a long chain of origination leading to sickness, old age, and death, it was but one of five necessary conditions for the appearance of an ego-self, and it was always associated with a sensory perception, including the perception of thought.

But in order to understand and experience what it was that he was teaching, the Buddha practiced meditation, direct observation of the mind, how it functioned, and our awareness (consciousness) of that function, and encouraged his followers to do the same.

And so they have been for 2,500 years now, and confirming and re-affirming the Buddha's teaching and inviting others to see for themselves, yet their experience and the lessons learned are largely dismissed by Western science as suspect metaphysics, mysticism, or religion.