Genesis by Experience, Part 2

In Genesis by Experience, Part 1, I began laying out a theory of the existence of the human self or soul that I am for now calling "genesis by experience." It is a theistic theory in that it holds our existence to be caused, created, and constituted by "experience" that takes place within one particular conscious mind — specifically, the uniquely great mind of God.

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop

My starting point in developing this theory is Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop, giving his explanation of how the human brain generates a sense of self or "I." Hofstadter believes that the mind is populated with high-level "symbols" that emerge from the lower-level workings of the physical brain constituents, taken to be at the level of neurons, or atoms, or signals, or whatever. The self or "I" is simply the most crucial and most central of these emergent symbols, and Hofstadter accordingly identifies the emergent "I" with the "consciousness" we each think we harbor as well as with the "soul" we typically imagine we have.

I think Hofstadter is arguably right about how the "I" symbol emerges in, and from, the activity of a brain. However, I dispute his implication that the self or soul which that emergent phenomenon symbolizes lacks independent existence. I say it does exist, independently of our brain's emergent symbolization of it.

For example, there are brain-damaged or psychotic individuals whose "I" symbol never forms. Or, for that matter, the brains of embryos, fetuses, and very young infants as yet lack their "I" symbols. These human individuals still have a self or soul, say I, simply because God's conscious mind sees them.

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

My theory of genesis by experience depends on the notion that consciousness is causative. To borrow words from David J. Chalmers, author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, it is possible that "experience itself is a kind of causal nexus." "Experience" is for Chalmers, a professional philosopher of mind, a synonym for "consciousness" — in the sense of, say, our knowing "what is is like to be red." Such knowledge arises via our experience of the "raw sensation" associated with the color red that comes whenever we see, say, a red tricycle.

That sensation of experiencing "what it is like" to be X is separate and apart from the brain's physical workings in response to our perception of X, says Chalmers. In an imaginable "zombie world" that is just like ours in terms of what goes on there, event-wise, our "zombie twins" would simply lack that raw sensation. That lack would, however, produce no outwardly distinguishable change with respect to the events taking place in the zombie world.

I would further characterize our conscious experience as not unlike a form of empathy. Whenever we see, say, a red object, and when we accordingly experience the raw sensation which we associate subjectively with redness, we once again are automatically clued into "what it is like to be red." Manifestly, my knowing "what it is like to be you" is what we would both ordinarily mean by "empathy." So, extending that notion, I'd say that conscious experience constitutes "empathy" ... with, say, the redness of a tricycle. What is missing in our hypothetical zombie twins is precisely such "empathy."


Chalmers does not absolutely commit himself to the notion that conscious experience, so defined, is causative — he tends to think it is not — but he opens the door to that possibility when he says

... the very nature of causation is quite mysterious, and it is possible that when causation is better understood [by philosophers] we will be in a better position to understand a subtle way in which conscious experience may be causally relevant. (p. 150)

For, he says, there are two sets of facts that do not automatically emerge from physical facts in our world — emerge, that is, in the way Hofstadter says the "I" ineluctably emerges from the physical facts of a normal, mature human brain. One of the two sets of facts Chalmers thus singles out is the set of facts about human consciousness qua consciousness. And the other one is the set of facts concerning natural causality: what does it really mean to say "A causes B"? Both sets of facts are deeply mysterious, says Chalmers, so perhaps those "two mysteries might be more neatly wrapped into one" (p. 152).

My genesis-by-experience theory is an attempt to "wrap them into one," by bringing God into the picture.


Also in the picture, as I said in my prior post, is the idea, first broached by quantum physicist John Archibald Wheeler, of "genesis by observation." A thought experiment of Wheeler's devising — it concerned the selective observation of one of two equally likely paths which a photon might take from a distant quasar to arrive at our planet — yielded, by the laws of quantum mechanics, the counterintuitive result that the act of observation itself fixes the path chosen by the photon at some time in the distant past, before the eventual observer had even come into existence!

Subsequent real-life experiments have confirmed that quantum-level facts can indeed acquire their "genesis" by virtue of post-facto, time-delayed observation. Cosmologist Andrei Linde has even postulated that the crucial act of observation must be performed by a conscious being, though Wheeler himself has it that a purely mechanical "observer" would do just as well. In that dispute, I side with Linde, for I think "genesis" as spoken of in the Bible is a creative, constitutive, causative act on the part of the conscious mind of God.


That puts me in accord with the 18th-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley, who became a bishop in the Church of Ireland. Berkeley's thesis was esse est percipi: to exist is to be perceived. This is true, he said, for everything that exists ... except for minds, which cannot be directly perceived. It is minds which do the perceiving that confers existence on everything else. To avoid tying himself in a logical knot, Berkeley posited that there is in fact an original, uncreated, unperceived mind at work in establishing the existence of the world: God's.

I think Berkeley was spot on. And I think Chalmers misses the boat when he treats consciousness as if it were, to a first approximation, an "epiphenomenon" with no "causal efficacy."

My hunch is that human consciousness may arise as an emergent phenomenon from physical brain activity in just the way Hofstadter says it does. Or, it may even do so with the help of "extra," psychophysical laws of nature, as Chalmers suggests. Either way, I think it plays a role in the raw causality of the world — in a deep, counterintuitive, even paradoxical manner which Chalmers seems to deny outright, and which Hofstadter (at least in the early chapters of his book) seems to be blissfully unaware of, but which Wheeler and Linde have nevertheless twigged to. In so having a deep causal efficacy in the natural world, at least at the quantum level, our consciousness echoes the fundamental role that God's consciousness plays in the genesis of the world.