Could you imagine what it would be like to be without your body? I’ve pondered long about consciousness in earlier blogs, but I always did so in the self-reflection of mind never really stopping to consider that none of this would be possible without the essential mediator of the senses, the body itself.
What after all, would our experience of life be without the body? Even those who have experienced an ‘out of body experience’ have nevertheless reported been tied by some ectoplasmic string to their physical shell and in so doing, live to tell the tale that the dead are not afforded.
The reliability of such reports is questionable, but the common thread is of course a remote viewing, which presumably entails seeing (and how is that done without two eyeballs and a brain to process?) as well as auditory memory mediated without ears since the body at this point has ceased to function.
Greater minds than mine have dug into this idea but my small brain wonders if it is more a question of consciousness being inherent to matter or not i.e., does it arise as a kind of by-product or does it exist in and of itself?
Apparently, the question can be examined, at least according to one cognitive scientist and philosopher, David Chalmers according to the theory of the hard problem of consciousness.
The basic argument is binary insofar as the easy problem of consciousness is what you get when you look under the hood at neurons and neuronal processes, how sensory systems work and how that influences behaviour.
The hard problem is the why and the how of these processes and their related experiences and whether such experiences can exist without those processes i.e., can the experience of hunger exist without its physical manifestation?
I know this is a terribly simplified explanation of a vastly more complex topic, but it speaks much to the conundrum of the human experience in what is popularly termed ‘meat space’. And of course, we like to categorize our own experience above all others, but most every creature that has a body, a nervous system and a brain, no matter how rudimentary, experiences reality in some form in the same physical space we occupy.
Sentience belongs to all creatures, and in some cultures, even inanimate objects are said to possess some form of consciousness as per animism, aspects of which can be seen in such religions as Shinto and variously in shamanism where it is practiced. Once again, as a layman, I can only ascribe a personal evaluation of such an idea, but even as a child of the 21st century, I feel the natural world as a conscious completeness, to which I also belong. Even with the heavy conditioning of technology and sequestered living spaces, being in nature in all its ‘isness’ is very centering in its manifest physicality.
Coming back to the relation of consciousness to the body, I was also interested to read about the persistence of phantom limbs, which apparently isn’t limited to limbs but also other parts of the body (apparently men who have lost their ‘appendage’ to penile cancer can even experience phantom erections). I find this concept fascinating given that the brain, which itself cannot feel pain (hence the possibility for neurosurgeons to operate on conscious patients) retains the sense of body parts that are physically separated, also speaking to the very intrinsic nature of the physical to the non-physical manifestation of consciousness.
Added to this, when speaking of the brain, specifically the cerebral cortex, which in evolutionary terms, is the most recent layer of the brain has certain areas described as ‘eloquent brain’ which, when damaged, result in loss of sensory processing or linguistic ability, or paralysis — areas such as the left temporal and frontal lobes for speech and language, bilateral occipital lobes for vision, bilateral parietal lobes for sensation, and bilateral motor cortex for movement. One slip of a neurosurgeon’s knife (oops) results in irrevocable changes to the patient’s conscious perceptions and even their sense of personal history.
Clearly, the sense of self and consciousness is distributed and concentrated throughout the body — in more complex organisms like mammals in the brain but also elsewhere in creatures that took a more divergent evolutionary path. The limbs of the octopus for example, have their own intelligence independent of its central brain (and remarkably, can regrow following dismemberment).
Humans, of course also have distributed neurons in their gut called the enteric nervous system, (ENS), equivalent to a second brain, which not only communicates directly with the primary structure but also synthesizes neurotransmitters which govern our behavior.
In other far simpler organisms, slime molds in their pursuit of food have, for example, shown an organizational cellular intelligence that belies the absence of a nervous system.
And interestingly, when talking about life on this planet and its starting principles, none of this would have been possible without original fungi one billion years ago. These were the first organisms to dominate the land by breaking down rock for minerals thus creating soil, and the first organisms to conquer the soil and create symbiosis with original plants to cultivate the land onwards from the shoreline.
As they evolved, fungi have become the ultimate survivors of multiple extinction events in earth’s history and will undoubtedly continue to thrive when mammals too have reached their highwater mark.
Indeed, if complex organisms have been about dominating the planet’s surface, fungi silently continue to dominate the ground beneath our feet and the air with their invisible spores. The largest and probably oldest terrestrial organism yet discovered is Armillaria ostoyae a fungus estimated to be 2,400 years old but potentially as ancient as 8,650 years.
Does it have a sense of itself, some form of consciousness? Does it need one or is the distributed cellular intelligence of a living fungus a quieter more successful model for sustained life on this planet? If longevity, vibrance and balance with all other aspects of the biosphere are the qualifying principles, we pale in comparison.
Mammals have flourished since the last great extinction event 66 million years ago because being warm blooded, their core temperature offers little to no foothold for fungi to colonize living cells. When we like other mammals die, however, our bodies are reassimilated to the earth by these same undertakers that existed already one billion years ago. Fungi for the most part live in balance with us (on us and even in us) and the planet doing the essential work of recycling the biomass in the same manner that the processes of subduction and erosion does to the earth’s crust upon which we live.
Returning to the quandary of consciousness within a body, a new theory has been posited by researchers at Tel Aviv University and the Open University of Israel. Called Unlimited Associative Learning, its subject is any organism capable of forming associations between events and building flexible behaviors to thrive in changing environments. Necessary ingredients include rudimentary emotions, i.e., responses to pleasure and pain, paying attention to sensory stimuli and having a sense of self.
According to the researchers, consciousness as we understand it, is not a new phenomenon having first evolved in our earliest sea-dwelling ancestors three times — in fish-like vertebrates 500 000 000, and common arthropods, among the ancestors of insects, spiders, and crustaceans and most recently, cephalods, which is to say, octopuses and cuttlefish, some 300 million years ago.
The theory as it goes suggests that these eruptions led to a global arms race of consciousness resulting in a profusion of novel species, a kind of big bang of evolution seen in what geologists call the Cambrian explosion. And it is this event led the inevitable march from the sea to the land (and back again).
The other interesting point made is that with the evolution of consciousness across multiple species, the earth became observable, a sea change that itself led to further complexity and for example, the evolution of flowers, the function of which was to attract and involve animals in their reproduction and propagation process.
As higher animals, our consciousness continued to evolve into levels of abstraction that enabled a sense of beauty, the sublime, and the evolution of culture. Culture interwoven with religion gives us the sense, if not the reality of something beyond this physical realm. But if consciousness has evolved to such a point of complexity in humans, why has it not done so, in for instance, cephalopods or indeed, cetaceans, the dolphins and whales or indeed other self-aware creatures like the crow family or parrots, all of which demonstrate remarkable problem-solving and intellectual capacities?
Could it be the case, that humans are solely privy to such abstractions as a sense of an afterlife, for example?
Taken from a purely science-based view of the world, animate life in the universe is a rare, almost unique manifestation, and that if life exists in any form elsewhere, it is for the most part, rudimentary in nature. And should more technologically advanced civilizations exist across the vastness of the universe, their discovery, and our ability to interface with them are near to impossible, so it’s likely that we will live out our lives in splendid isolation on this planet.
Yet we are not alone — we are surrounded by various and diverse forms of animate life, each as wondrous and complex as we are simply by dint of the fact that they too are alive. All are testimony to the singular conditions on earth that gave rise to life and continue to support it.
Without knowing anything more than what my senses tell me, consciousness is a complex abstraction of life. It enables us to sense ourselves, others and to generate levels of abstraction that incorporate imagined worlds, not constrained to those other two constructs, the past and the future. But that level of abstraction is most likely a byproduct of a function that plays with itself as much as the collective byproduct of creatures that exist within complex interactive social structures.
Does consciousness exist without physical form? Certainly, every night when our bodies are arrested by sleep, we may experience fantastical visions that defy natural laws when awake or even portend events in the conscious waking world. And dreaming is not exclusive to humans as any dog owner will testify, among other animals. And yet the veil between consciousness and dreaming is largely robust and intact and dreams remain stubbornly dreams.
If one were to remove the heavy chains of culture and religion from the lived experience, it’s very tempting to conclude that consciousness is like the flame is to the burning log. It flickers, dances, warms, and illuminates as it consumes, burns bright and burns down. All energy spent, all that remains is ashes to replenish the soil from which we come.
What are we, after all but carbon-based lifeforms? We metabolize and grow but are finite in nature genetically encoding ourselves into the next generation to ensure our ‘immortality’. The one consistent fact is the body and all else is but smoke and mirrors, an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
