What is consciousness? I’ve been
thinking about this a lot lately. To be conscious is, according to the
dictionary, “to be aware of and responsive to one’s environment.”
A large contingent of scientists
and atheists insist that consciousness is strictly a product of the brain, and
by that they mean neuronal activity. For example, in Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness
Explained, which I read recently, he suggests there is no such thing as
consciousness in the way most people think of it. There is no witness, no I. Dennett
postulates that our sense of self is just a narrative that we use as a survival
tool, similar to the shell a hermit crab inhabits. The narrative creates mental
models of the world around us, as well as a mental model of our self.
Each normal individual of this species [humans] makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn’t have to know what it’s doing; it just does it. This web protects it, just like the snail’s shell, and provides it a livelihood, just like the spider’s web, and advances its prospects for sex, just like the bowerbird’s bower.
Dennett’s conclusion is that
consciousness is analogous to software running on the hardware of the brain.
Neurons fire in patterns and this produces activity that we call the mind.
But what if organisms without
brains and neurons possess consciousness? What would this mean about
consciousness in general? Would it mean that consciousness is not a function of
brains and neurons?
We don’t have to leave our own
bodies to question the proposition that consciousness/intelligence is in the
brain. We have a “gut reaction,” a “sinking feeling in our stomach,” or a
“heart throb” that often is more accurate a response to our situation than the
thoughts in our minds.
Michael Pollan has a fascinating
article in The New Yorker about
intelligent plants. In it I learned of a controversial new field: “plant
neurobiology.” The authors of a 2006 Trends
in Plant Science article presented evidence that plants have extremely
sophisticated behaviors that (in Pollan’s words)
