The nature of consciousness

Although, in a broad sense, consciousness is an emergent property of matter, emergent properties don't preclude the existence of conscious intent at lower levels. It’s a question of dispersed agency--the property is not wholly latent at lower levels, but dispersed and hence less active. Remember that per the law of metaphysical potential, existence itself embodies every metaphysical property from the beginning, even before it manifests in a visible way. 

Aggregation simply intensifies the action of what is already there. If there were no consciousness or intention at the root of existence it would not "emerge" later. I'd say it isn't emerging... not per se. It is becoming more concentrated, as in de Salzmann's discussions of concentration of force in awareness.

My friend Paul asked me recently what I thought consciousness consisted of. I answered him as follows.  

A conscious subject is able in degree to manifest the following actions:

• Agency. The ability to undertake volitional action. Repair molecules in cells do this.

• Perception. The ability to perceive an environment external to the self. Repair molecules do this too, even though their perceptive tools are molecular orders rather than organs.

• Intention. The ability for said volitional action to have an aim. Again, molecules do this.

• Foresight. The ability to anticipate results of volition. Cellular molecules do this too.

• Memory. The ability to catalog sensory input for later comparative retrieval. Cellular molecules definitely have this, because they evaluate damaged molecules against remembered inner templates.

• Discrimination. The ability to make decisions and choose between alternatives. Cellular repair molecules? They do this too. Given the huge number of molecules found in a cell, there are by deduction an even wider range of damages that may be encountered, so evaluation of the nature of the damage must be essential to successful molecular recruitment and repair.

• Altruism. The ability to act on behalf of the interests of others, even at one’s own expense.

Readers note—I don't think the ability to replicate is de facto evidence of consciousness, except at the lowest of levels.

In my view, the repair molecules in cells are conscious. Ascribing the complex set of repair actions they undertake as mechanical seems to grossly underestimate the action. 

How do individual molecules without brains exhibit such complicated behaviors? If they don't have an awareness, exactly how is all the data that drives their inarguable form of independent agency encoded, and to what end? I think the point made about bees--that they appear to display complex conscious behaviors in the absence of any evidence for supportive neurological structures that ought to be there, per standard theoretical models--is one hundred, perhaps even a thousand, times more true for our nuclear repair molecules.

By taking a concise look at the behavior of cellular molecules, which by themselves and alone are not even considered as alive by scientists – they are merely "mechanical" agencies functioning inside a creature that is, by some interesting stretch of imagination, “alive” in a way that the individual molecules are not –we see that they undertake an extraordinary range of actions any one of which would ordinarily be assigned as a conscious action by a higher organism. When these same properties are documented not in intracellular molecules, but also in extraordinarily simple organisms such as dinoflagellates and various types of bacteria, they still aren’t considered as evidence of consciousness. 

Keep in mind that if a human being fails to exhibit some of these properties – such as intention or foresight – we still refer to them as conscious, even though, in this regard, bacteria can outperform them. If "lower" organisms display an entire range of behaviors that we associate with conscious behavior in higher organisms, how is it then possible to claim the lower organisms are not consciousness and the higher ones are? This implies a confirmation bias and an imperialism of scale. Those two actions, as it is well known, are all too human in every way – and we equally know that when engaged in, either one of them produces false results. 

The clear inference is that in regard to what consciousness consists of, modern science finds itself in the grip of a dogma of denial regarding things that are already—in its own eyes—well-established and more or less incontrovertible facts.

Once we reach higher organisms such as bees, the action of agency, intention, foresight, memory, discrimination, and altruism become so patently obvious that scientists are left scratching their heads. The evidence for conscious intelligence here it is so powerful that it can't be denied; and it exists in the absence of the complex physical structures that we suppose such conscious properties must have available to them in order to organize and manifest in the first place. The study of intelligence and bees has blurred so many lines in the question of consciousness that it is beginning to reframe the dialogue about its nature within various levels in the biological scale. Yet the law of metaphysical potential points us towards a perspective from which the bees are actually nearer the top of the ladder in a scale of conscious behavior, rather than a lower rung.

These things are well worth thinking on, I believe.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.