One Hand Clapping (Q2Q II)

This is the second in my "Quickening to Qualia" series of posts. In Quickening to Qualia, or Taking Consciousness Seriously (Q2Q I) I said something about consciousness. Specifically, I said that it quintessentially amounts to our experience of phenomena.

Those phenomena, with their qualia or "qualitative feels," accompany the merely physical things that appear in our abstract "field of view." Our cognition of those physical things in themselves underlies our consciousness, but cognition and consciousness are not the same phenomena at all. This dualistic view of mind and matter, I said, links up with my own religious worldview and belief in God, but I didn't say why.

Richard P. McBrien's's Catholicism

In Of the Self and the Soul, the post which led up to this Q2Q series, I suggested that the human soul is itself a phenomenal reality: God "first casts his eye" on a child-to-be in the womb, and a soul is born. This theological image, I think, goes along with the basic idea of phenomenology, as expressed by Richard P. McBrien in Catholicism:

Consciousness is never closed in upon itself ... . It has an intentionality, i.e., it is always conscious of something, of phenomena.

Phenomenology studies such phenomena, not as things in themselves (as other sciences do) but as objects of intentionality. ... [It] maintains that there is a fundamental and irreducible duality between consciousness and the world. The two are correlated as the eye is correlated with the field of vision. There can be no field of vision without the eye, and yet the two remain distinct. For the same reason there can be no reality without consciousness. The task of phenomenology is to describe the various regions of reality in the way they appear to consciousness, and to show what activity consciousness must carry out to allow such regions of reality to appear. (p. 118)

God's "eye" falls upon the seed of an embryo, an egg from a woman just fertilized by a sperm from a man, and a new region of reality appears in his divine consciousness. It creates the phenomenon that we would call a soul. As a theological explanation of the immortal soul, how elegant this view seems, how right (though I hasten to add that I do not know whether my Church would agree with me). The zygote is the physical "thing." The soul is the phennomenal "region of reality" which, appearing in the field of vision of the Lord God on High, accompanies it and, thereby, becomes real.


It puts me in mind of the Zen Buddhist koan, What is the sound of one hand clapping? One possible answer: the soul.

The soul is a phenomenal reality that, from our materialistic point of view, is imperceptible. We can perceive the fertilized egg, at least in principle, using a microscope. But we cannot detect the soul, any more than we can be conscious of the sound of one hand clapping. The "hand" is there for us, i.e., the zygote is the "hand." The "sound" is not, i.e., the soul equates to the "sound."

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

There are "spiritual" moments when I feel God is in his heaven and all is right with the world. I think these are the moments when the only judgments I am concerned with making are what David J. Chalmers, philosopher of mind and author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, calls in that book "phenomenal judgments." Without yet having read his exact definition of such judgments, I am assuming he refers to the judgments by which consciousness discerns the qualia or "qualitative feels" that are experienced by us sentient beings when we bring something physical into our phenomenal field of vision: this tricycle is red, that spoon feels cool to the touch.

That seems to me to be what heaven will be like for us. We will simply take in the qualia of everyone and everything around us. There will be no necessity to make any further judgments about them at all — particularly, any moral judgments. Anything that is in heaven will have passed muster with God, and will be unassailably good.


I am therefore interested in seeing how far the phenomenological view of consciousness can be pushed in a spiritual, or at least a theological, direction. My guide to the phenomenological view of consciousness is The Conscious Mind, by Chalmers, a philosopher who personally has no religious ax to grind and who only reluctantly drew his conclusions to the effect that consciousness must be accounted for with reference to more than a reductive, materialistic worldview.

C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity

I myself begin with a belief in God and a (fairly liberal) Catholic outlook on Christian theology. I am not trying to prove the existence of God or the truth of the notion that the point of Christian faith is, as C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity, "to drawn men into Christ, to make them little Christs."

Lewis, in his chapter on "Is Christianity Hard or Easy?", makes the point that we are not drawn into Christ by half measures, but by suffering the death of the "natural self." Christ in effect says, "I have not come to torment your natural self" — i.e., by letting it go on being "starved and hampered and worried at every turn." No, that isn't it at all. Christ has come, says Lewis, to kill the natural self.

This difference between

• the ongoing torment of trying to be "good" while only becoming "angrier and angrier" at one's own inability to both measure up and still keep one's natural self intact, and
• a (nonphysical) death of the natural self

lies at the heart of Christ's call upon us, says Lewis. What I'm wondering is whether there isn't a strong kinship between "killing" the natural self and coming to see that our true self, our soul, is a phenomenon which accompanies or arises from our mere psychological sense of self. The phenomenal self or soul is not an ordinary thing that can be explained with reference to the workings of material reality alone.

Our phenomenal sense of self is more real, in other words, than our psychological "self" ever is — that's what I'm going for here. Our "self-consciousness," our "self-awareness," when it becomes perfectly complete, finally and fully trumps the natural "self" that psychology studies, which itself is blind to the reality of the phenomenal world and stuck in the illusion that the physical and psychological worlds are all there is to know.


I'm saying there is a kinship between the mystery of consciousness, and particularly that of self-consciousness, and the mystery of what Christ asks of us. Yet I don't know how far that kinship can be pushed without distorting either Christianity or phenomenology. I wouldn't want anyone to feel that I am saying heaven is no more than a state of mind, or anything like that. Rather, I start from the point of view that heaven is real and wonder what phenomenology can tell us about it.

The starting point to my inquiry, seemingly, is to figure out what Chalmers means by consciousness as being "the most vivid of phenomena; nothing is more real to us" (p. 3). He shows that the notion of consciousness is quite diffuse and hard to pin down, even among psychologists. "What is central to consciousness" (see pp. 3-5) is not perception, which can be subliminal, or thought, which can take place entirely in the "unconscious" mind. It is not feeling, at least not of the emotional sort. Rather, what is central to consciousness is experience.

Conscious experience is the "something it is like" for us to perform "a whir of causation and information processing" in our brains. It is not the cognitive whir in itself; it is its accompaniment or "internal aspect," the "something it feels like to be a cognitive agent."


There is a "deep philosophical mystery" about why there should be conscious experience at all. The surprisingness of consciousness, says Chalmers, is far and away more shocking than anything we might consider startling about "the facts of physics, and even the facts about dynamics and information processing in complex systems."

Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe

That last bit hurts. For years I have engaged in a somewhat esoteric inquiry (not unlike this one) into the "mysteries" of so-called nonlinear dynamical systems, a.k.a. complex adaptive systems. These are natural, physical systems that live at the "edge of chaos," a previously unsuspected physical regime of fecund evolutionary growth. The earth's biosphere is just one such system. Human technology, for example, may be another. (The best book on this topic is, I think, Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe, in which the author finds our species to be "we the expected," evolutionarily speaking.)

These complex systems are information processors. They are canonically made up of entities that trade information back and forth along networks of intercommunication that have just the right amount of connectivity among the individual entities. Out of this manifold of information interchange mysteriously emerges behavior at the system level that looks like graceful but innovative evolutionary change. I saw the sciences of complexity and self-organization as an embroidery on standard Darwinian evolution theory that, by offsetting creationism, would harmonize it with my more liberal religious faith.

It still may be that, but Chalmers is saying that all the mysteries of information processing and complexity in the material world can't hold a candle to the mysteries of the "utterly unexpected" consciousness which that complex information processing apparently gives rise to. It is the latter which is "metaphysically baffling." It is something we could not have predicted from the features of our usually materialistic worldview of science — even of the sciences of complexity — all by itself.

Perhaps the perfection of our consciousness is the utterly unexpected sound of one hand clapping.