Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet)

Why Science Hasn’t Solved Consciousness (Yet)

Adam Frank

To understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code.

...Physicists like me are trained to think of the world in terms of its physical representations: matter, energy, space and time. So it’s no surprise that we physicists tend to start off as physicalists, who approach the question of consciousness by inquiring about the physical mechanics that give rise to it, beginning with subatomic particles and then ascending the chain of sciences — chemistry, biology, neuroscience — to eventually focus in on the physical mechanics occurring in the neurons that must generate consciousness (or so the story goes).

This kind of “bottom-up” scientific approach has contributed to modern science’s success, and it is also why physicalism has become so compelling for most scientists and philosophers.  This approach, however, has not worked for consciousness. Trying to account for how our lived experience emerges from matter has proven so difficult that philosopher David Chalmers famously referred to it as “the hard problem of consciousness.”

We use the term consciousness to describe our vividly intimate lives — “what it is like” to exist. But experience, which encapsulates our consciousness, thereby cuts more effectively to the core of our reality. An achingly beautiful red sunset, a crisp bite of an autumn Honeycrisp apple; according to the dominant scientific way of thinking, these are phantoms... 

To understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code.

Indeed... Materialism took one half of Descartes' Dualism, and discarded the other, leaving us in a dead universe where only the machine exists. Yet, ignored is the obvious reality of the observed, whom is creating such belief systems, and losing itself in that mental model, entirely identifying with it. That is the true irony ~ identifying with what we believe we are, reducing ourselves to those beliefs, limiting ourselves and our potential.

The more focused my energy work becomes, the more I realize that organisms exist because the mind is the field that encompasses and organizes the body. DNA is a code, yes... but that naturally leads to the logical next step ~ who is reading, deciphering, using that code? The unconscious intelligence of our psyche that has the instructions on how to read the cipher. Yet, that only accounts for the production of proteins. And that's where a combination of Jung's Collective Unconscious of a species and Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance come into play, by which that first cell divides into all of the cells needed, structured by the knowledge our unconscious psyche has.

For a structure as complex as a human, the human unconscious appears to have layers at which that complexity is mirrored mentally. This I learned through the shamanic entities I work with, who showed me their view of the energies at those layers, which they found immensely confusing in their sheer complexity. There was too much dense information there to decipher. It's a wonder that our human psyche knows what to do, but it does, somehow.