Philosophers have a name for the puzzle: the “hard problem” of consciousness, a term coined by David Chalmers to mark the gap between the “easy” problems, which concern how the brain performs its various functions, and the genuinely hard one, which is why all that functioning should be accompanied by an inner life at all—why the lights are on inside rather than the processing simply going on in the dark.
Consciousness exists on a continuum. It has plainly been sculpted by evolutionary forces, and it is subject to enormous variation: it is diminished or gradually altered by sleep, fatigue, anaesthesia, intoxicants, and neurological disease. None of that dissolves the mystery; it only maps its edges.
It is worth considering whether consciousness might be a property of nature itself, rather than only of a nervous system such as the brain. This is the view philosophers call panpsychism—that experience, in some rudimentary form, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world, out of which the rich consciousness of brains is composed. Religious traditions have their own versions of this intuition—the ancient “world-soul,” the Hindu Brahman, or, less precisely, the Christian Holy Spirit—though each points to something that wills and acts, where panpsychism claims only that experience pervades the world. But it is a minority position, and it faces hard objections. A cousin of the idea has entered neuroscience, in Giulio Tononi’s “integrated information theory,” which treats consciousness as a graded quantity present, in principle, wherever information is integrated.
Some scientists have gone further and proposed specific mechanisms. The great physicist Roger Penrose—working with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff—has argued that consciousness arises from quantum processes in the microtubules of neurons, in a theory they call orchestrated objective reduction. I find such theorizing genuinely interesting and worth following, but it is definitely a minority view. In any case, I am not sure the result would change my view of the matter. Even a precise and complete physical explanation would not lessen the miracle.
I find consciousness more miraculous than free will. Whether we possess genuine free will is contested, and may yet turn out to be an illusion; but the fact of having experience at all is the one thing that cannot be doubted—it is the rock Descartes was left standing on when everything else had been doubted away. So even if the universe were entirely deterministic—or superdeterministic, the more radical thesis, associated with the physicist Gerard ’t Hooft, that even our choices of what to measure are fixed in advance—there would still be human consciousness, and it would still deserve a feeling of wonder and awe.
Some would say that the phenomenon of consciousness is a manifestation of the divine. I can be at peace with that—perhaps even taking it as a definition of the word “divine.” It is close to what Spinoza meant by Deus sive Natura, “God, or Nature.” When Einstein was asked whether he believed in God, he answered that he believed in the God of Spinoza—the lawful harmony of what exists, rather than a deity who concerns himself with human affairs. If consciousness is what one chooses to call divine, then the divine is not a being standing above nature, but the astonishing fact that nature has come, in us, to experience itself.
References
Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Facing up to the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–219. http://consc.net/papers/facing.html
— The paper that named the “hard problem” of consciousness, distinguishing the “easy” problems—how the brain discriminates, integrates information, and controls behaviour, all amenable to mechanistic explanation—from the hard one: why such processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Chalmers argues that no functional account closes this gap.
Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s error: Foundations for a new science of consciousness. Pantheon Books.
— The leading contemporary defence of panpsychism for a general readership. Goff argues that physical science achieved its power precisely by bracketing consciousness out of its picture of matter—Galileo’s “error”—and that treating experience as a fundamental property of the physical world is the most parsimonious response to the hard problem.
Koch, C. (2019). The feeling of life itself: Why consciousness is widespread but can’t be computed. MIT Press.
— An accessible presentation of integrated information theory by one of its foremost proponents, defending the view that consciousness is a graded, intrinsic property of any system whose information is sufficiently integrated—a scientifically framed cousin of panpsychism, with the striking implication that consciousness is far more widespread in nature than we assume.
Penrose, R. (1994). Shadows of the mind: A search for the missing science of consciousness. Oxford University Press.
— Penrose’s argument, drawing on Gödel’s theorem, that human mathematical understanding is non-computable and that consciousness must therefore involve physics beyond present theory; later developed, with the anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, into the orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR) model, which locates the relevant quantum processes in neuronal microtubules. Ingenious, but a minority view, widely criticised on the ground that the brain is too warm and noisy to sustain the coherence it requires.
A note on primary and historical sources (handled as references rather than formal citations): the claim that one’s own consciousness is the single thing immune to doubt is from René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641); the identification of God with nature—Deus sive Natura—runs through Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (1677); and Einstein’s profession of belief in the God of Spinoza, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of nature rather than in the fates of human beings, was made in a 1929 reply to a New York rabbi.
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