Consciousness creates reality. This makes it tough to know what creates consciousness.

Writing the title of this blog post just reminded me of an unexpected “A” I got on a high school English exam. The teacher asked me to explain what “vicious circle” meant. I must have been in a recalcitrant frame of mind, because even though I enjoyed writing essays of that sort, I simply drew a circle on my exam paper with a mean looking expression.  Somehow my paper came back with an “A” on it. Guess the teacher valued creativity over correctness in my case.

Vicious circles abound in life. Here’s how one definition explains it.

In Michael Pollan’s new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, he says in a next-to-final chapter that consciousness is really difficult to understand because everything we know requires consciousness. So how do we come to know that which enables us to know? Vicious circle! Pollan quotes what Kristof Koch, a noted investigator of consciousness, said in a Zoom call.

Real things are things that exist for themselves and not just for their observers. Right now, I’m looking at a tree outside my window. Without a mind to observe it, the tree doesn’t exist — as a thing with a certain form differentiated from the ground and the sky. Without that observer, it’s just ontological dust — particles and waves. What does exist for itself is consciousness. In fact, only consciousness exists for itself.

Pollan then says:

I couldn’t dismiss what I was hearing, but I also couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing. I tried to imagine Koch’s tree in a universe emptied of consciousness — that is, with no observer and therefore no perspective whatsoever, not human, not microscopic, not quantum, not from the sky, not from outer space.

Remember the sped-up beings that Stefano Mancuso described, the ones who moved so quickly that humans appeared to them as immobile slabs of meat? Perspective determines everything.

So if no one’s there to observe the tree, in what sense does it still exist? And does this mean that the world itself must be conscious in order for it to exist?

I wouldn’t go that far, though some physicists do, as I noted in a 2007 post, “Consider a cosmos with no consciousness.”  In that post I shared a quotation from a well-regarded physicist, Andrei Linde.

“The universe and the observer exist as a pair,” Linde says. “You can say that the universe is there only when there is an observer who can say, Yes, I see the universe there. These small words— it looks like it was here— for practical purposes it may not matter much, but for me as a human being, I do not know any sense in which I could claim that the universe is here in the absence of observers.

“We are together, the universe and us. The moment you say that the universe exists without any observers, I cannot make any sense out of that. I cannot imagine a consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness. A recording device cannot play the role of an observer, because who will read what is written on this recording device?

“In order for us to see that something happens, and say to one another that something happens, you need to have a universe, you need to have a recording device, and you need to have us. It’s not enough for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to anybody. It’s necessary for somebody to look at it. You need an observer who looks at the universe. In the absence of observers, our universe is dead.”

Perhaps.

But rather than calling the universe dead in the absence of observers, I prefer undefined. Something would be there. There just would be no way to describe that something, because describing requires a conscious observer. I wrestled with this question in that 2007 blog post in somewhat the same fashion Pollan did. Here’s an excerpt.

I consider a universe with no life, no awareness, no sentience. It’s easy to do. I think: “What a marvelously simple thought experiment!” The universe appears to me just as it does now, planets, stars and galaxies filling the fabric of space, yet with nobody conscious of it.

Obvious questions then crash the party of my thought experiment: Who is doing the considering of this cosmos with no consciousness? From what perspective is this entity contemplating the universe?

It dawns on me that this entity, namely me, is equipped with eyes that translate a certain wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation into perceptions of which I’m aware. Photographs of distant galaxies, for example, from which I derive some of the raw imaginative material for my thought experiment.

Yet what if I had the body of a bat and sensed with sonar? Or that of a snake with heat-sensing capabilities? The world would look entirely different.

So my envisioning of the cosmos as illuminated by light is terribly anthropomorphic, a fact I’m reminded of every time I walk the dog and watch her spending enthralled minutes sniffing a bush that my smell-impaired brain considers to be nothing special.

Still, my thought experiment has led me somewhere, though not to my intended destination of an imagined cosmos with no consciousness. I’ve understood that different sorts of consciousnesses are aware of the cosmos in different ways. We may not create reality, but our own unique perception of it is indeed created.

However, the question still remains: What is the “it” that any consciousness is aware of? Even if it isn’t possible for any of us to know whether “it” exists independent of awareness, isn’t there an answer that could be known, if it weren’t for that damn existential abyss?

Pollan says that after investigating the nature of consciousness from various perspectives, and writing a book about what he learned, he ended more mystified about consciousness than when he began his quest to understand it. I like how Pollan concludes his Self chapter.

Chalmers seems to believe he has spelled out the complete menu of metaphysical options [regarding consciousness; idealism, materialism, etc.]. But is that really the case? Couldn’t there be, somewhere out there in the space of all possibilities, some idea about the fundamental nature of reality and consciousness that the human mind hasn’t conceived of yet?

We can hope so. But how will we ever know if that new idea — which will itself be the product of consciousness — is true? Because consciousness is the only means we have of knowing anything, we can’t step outside it and take up a god-like perspective from which to render a final judgment.

So where does that leave us?

Exactly where we already were: wandering in the exitless labyrinth of consciousness.

Nearing the end of this journey, I find myself not at all sure what to believe, if anything. I’m abashed to say I know less now than I did when, naively, I set out to unravel the mystery of consciousness. But then, most of what I thought I knew or took for granted, like the assumption that consciousness is a product of our brains and materialism will eventually explain everything, turned out to be unproven or wrong.

When I confessed to Koch my fear — that after my five-year journey into the nature and workings of consciousness, I somehow knew less than I did when I started — he simply smiled.

“But that’s good,” he said. “That’s progress.”