barracuda wrote:It's also perfectly reasonable to accept a purely physical basis for consiousness. As Francis Crick says, "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." His thesis is that consiousness is basically an effect of the processes involving retention of short-term memory via visual stimulus of the brain, nothing more.
Understandably, this position is far more difficult to reconcile with the concept of the self than is a purely supernatural one. But is it really any less fantastic a proposition, that our lives in all their complexity and depth are the mere resonances of electro-chemistry? In many ways the idea adds a sense of urgency to our actions, which is diminished by an afterlife. However, the implication is that the soul is based upon the sum of it's amazing parts, and when these fall apart, there is nothing but dust.
There are several problems with this viewpoint, as common as it seems to be. The first is that it violates (what to me is) the simplest interpretation of quantum reality: an Observer (i.e. Consciousness) interacts with the physical to effect the physical phenomenon being observed. Einstein and colleagues were so committed to physical determinism (an interesting revelation of hidden ideology, if you read some his words from a different cultural perspective than is usual) that he proposed the "hidden variables" interpretation of quantum mechanics, deferring quantum phenomena to a finer level and making quantum mechanics seem to be a version of statistical mechanics. However, the last few decades of experimental evidence, in combination with Bell's Theorem, have negated the hidden variables interpretation, at least any version of it that would seem like classical Newtonian physics. Another interpretation, the so-called "many worlds" interpretation, ultimately implies a very high order of infinity (no, not all infinities are equal) to the structure of ultimate reality, thus negating the objective of denying anything supernatural. We are left with the most obvious interpretation, but the one that is most objectionable to the modern Western mind: the physical world is non-deterministic, and heavily influenced by something that is intricately linked with our own human consciousness, but is "non-physical" in the sense of classical Newtoninan physics. Of course, electricity was once thought to be "supernatural", but it is now accepted that the ordinary structure of our physical world has its properties solely on the basis of electric charge (i.e. the laws of chemistry flow from the properties of electrons in the electric field of the nucleus). So what is considered to be "physical" is ultimately culturally determined.
It is true that behaviors that are commonly associated with consciousness can be thought to emerge from the complex arrangements of neurons. That is hard to deny. In fact, it is possible to set up in silico experiments where cellular automata behave in ways that seem to imply conscious will. But that just implies that "consciousness" is a phase of physical matter, much like solid, liquid, gas or plasma. It is a fundamental property. Interestingly enough, the thermodynamic hallmarks of brain activity ("self-organized criticality") are present in other complex systems such as, for example, ecosystems. So ecosytems are potentially conscious as well. The problem here is not the physicality of consciousness, which would be difficult to deny, but the ubiquity of it (as Wombat has remarked above), as well as the interconnectedness of it. But, in my experience, many if not most proponents of the "emergent consciousness" position usually want to define consciousness as something preciously human, or else something completely without value, not something that is both remarkable and fundamental. It becomes a tool in an ideological attempt to explain away questions of uniqueness and value that are inconvenient to commercialism, global capitalism, and the march of progress. (Of course I show my own ideological hand in this last statement.) Emergent consciousness notwithstanding, it still difficult to explain qualia, the experience of consciousness from the inside as opposed to its apparent thermodynamic signature on the outside.
Of course, none of this tells us anything one way or the other about whether our human consciousness is preserved after the physical arrangement of our neurons perishes.
