Is Consciousness a Question of Belief?

There has never been a smidgen or a scintilla or iota of evidence that human beings are made of anything other than material (mostly carbon), flesh and bone and biochemistry. Or that our thoughts and feelings are the product of anything other than material interactions. And yet many of us (possibly the majority?) persist in believing that there's something else to life. We used to call that something else, or tellingly that something more (ie. enduring, transcendent, eternal etc.) a soul, a spirit, an essence. One time I was talking about the soul and afterlife with an orthodox Jewish friend. When I told him I didn't see any evidence of it, his answer to me (in the form of a question, he was Jewish after all) was: So you think we live 75 or 80 years if we're lucky, most it with difficulty and suffering, and then die, and that's it? That's all there is to it? It felt weird to say yes, exactly - even though that pretty much sums up what I think - because the way he said that's all there is made it seem like it's nothing, which is not how I feel at all about the wonders and mystery of life. Life is indeed significant and meaningful, not in spite of its finiteness, but because of it. Seems to me that the notion that there needs to be something more to it,  actually comes down to one thing, and it's not belief (in God, the soul, the afterlife etc.), but rather it's disbelief that life might actually boil down to what is knowable.

This question of what is 'knowable' has intrigued us since the beginning of time. Scientists essentially have 'faith' that we can 'know' things about the world and it's their job to find it. Others, like philosophers and clergy, doubt that anything is knowable. For clergy it's presumptuous to think that we can know things about the world, because that would infringe on God's territory (and worse make us like God). It's summed up in the story of Job, namely, that we are meant to suffer in ignorance about God's plan, and it's the height of arrogance to think that we would deign to understand His reasoning. As God rebukes Job, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you know!" Of course, God intends this "surely you know" to put Job back in his place and shut him up.  

While the theologians tremble in fear that too much knowledge is a kind of sacrilege, the philosophers have made an intellectual game of it, pecking like crows over roadkill at the very question of whether anything is knowable, until nothing is left but the bones. Descartes famously posited dualism, the so-called mind-body 'problem' ie. that there's a gap between inner experience and outer reality that cannot be bridged. He came to the conclusion that there is only one thing we can know for sure and it's that each of us exists, because we think (read: we are conscious). As a result of the advancements in neuroscience, the same question has been reformatted into something philosophers have called the 'hard problem' of consciousness (Chalmers), a variation on the epistemological question of whether anything is knowable for certain. They say, even if we could map out the entire brain and correlate thoughts and emotions to our perceptions of the world, it doesn't get us any closer to understanding 'what it's like to be a bat' as one philosopher put it in the early 1970s (Nagel). In other words, ones individual experiences can't be explained by science (ie. they cannot be universalized). A lot of recent thinking takes Descartes' principle to an extreme in the opposite way. They argue that not only is individual existence the one sure thing, it's the only thing. They posit, with straight faces, that there is no external reality at all. What we are perceiving every day as reality is only a figment of our imagination, or put another way, a construct of our perceptions (Hoffman), which may only have a passing correspondence to reality. Others have similarly postulated that consciousness is so fundamental that it does not belong to us alone, but rather it's a fundamental principle of the universe, something that animates us, as oppposed to us animating it. This seems to me to be another kind of theology, God (universal consciousness) is 'ultimate' reality, an idea is as old as Plato.

Seems to me, as some great thinker might have said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating (read: experience = reality). In other words, the survival of each living organism depends on a capacity to perceive and experience the physical world with some degree of accuracy. If I am alive today (and it's not a big if) it is testament to the fact that all those creatures who came before me in the great chain of life, both human and subhuman species, that made my unlikely existence possible, had to reconcile their perception with external reality to the extent that it would ensure a lineage of survival. There's nothing too mysterious about consciousness in this sense if we understand it as a necessary mechanism for survival in animal species, and one that is the product of adaptation that has proven to be supremely suited for survival (thus far). It's a mechanism that has been continually finetuned over time, in exactly the same way all biological adaptations get finetuned. Since adaptation is such a critical part of the process, this idea that we are a product of our environment has always been literally true. Nowadays, the environment is literally becoming a product of us, which is a paradigmatic shift in reality. In this sense it's a reflection of our current state of consciousness that our world is ailing. Some of us seem to take some sort of comfort in thinking that reality is really just a hologram, a figment of imagination, or a question of belief. In other words, it's only a function of us. And in some respects I suppose it may be, to our peril.