Consciousness Considerations—Part 3

This is the third of a trilogy on consciousness. This one takes a little deeper look at how consciousness may have emerged, here on earth, and where it might be going. (First, I wish to recognize that some people would argue that consciousness never “first appeared” at all. They would suggest that consciousness may have been present from the very beginning of the Universe, and that it's really been a process of life progressing to a point that consciousness is recognized or is fully manifested in some creatures, like humans. It's similar to the concept of panpsychism in part 1 of the trilogy. But that's a topic for another blog.)

One of the understandings that neuroscientists have come to is that intelligence and consciousness are not so much a function of the number of neurons in a “brain”, but of the complexity of their connections—that is, the number of synapses and the intricacy of their attachments. A simile for a computer is that it may contain in its memory billions or trillions of bits of information, but if they all are in isolation from one another, of what use is it all? Or consider a book: in its totality, it has meaning, but only because all those words are connected together by sentences, paragraphs, chapters. Cut the book up into individual words—and dump them into a huge pile on the floor—and it has no meaning, no message.

Is it possible that there were aspects of some kind of “pre-conscious presence,” floating around the Universe, before any “fully-developed” consciousness could be detected here on Earth? That notion fits the concept of emergence: all the elements were there and at some point consciousness popped out... became manifest in some critter.

Consciousness, if it were to come about as an emergent phenomenon, probably did not suddenly “pop out”, but gradually emanated. Nonetheless, the degree of consciousness embodied in creatures was once very low and has slowly risen over time. The level of human consciousness today is certainly greater than anything that may have been present 100 million years ago. You could argue that Earth was simply not ready for something as complex as human consciousness, at the time of the dinosaurs.

This raises an obvious question: If this emergent-and-growing consciousness hypothesis is approximately true, where might consciousness on this planet be headed? (Note: I'm not even considering consciousness existing elsewhere in this blog entry. Limiting it to Earth—where we know it exists—is knotty enough.) Consider people who are spiritual adepts. They possess a consciousness level well beyond the average person. Some are even considered to be enlightened, to have insights well beyond us common folk. And what does enlightenment mean? Is it a destination? Is there an end point? Is God the end of the line? I'm afraid I've begun this blog with a list of currently unanswerable questions and concluded it with even more, and also tougher ones. Better stop.