Ur kapitel 2:
The History of Consciousness
The most important historical figure for our line of reasoning is not to be found in ancient Greece but in France, some 400 years ago. As mentioned in the previous chapter René Descartes, or Cartesius in the more fashionable Latin, came to a rather significant conclusion regarding consciousness. Descartes realised, much like Socrates, that there was no sure knowledge in the world. No contemporary philosophies, religious or secular, could offer a scrap of evidence in support of their own validity. So Descartes decided to mull over the subject of philosophy in order to find one true, undeniable statement, thought or fact, on which to build an entirely new and reliable (and god-fearing) philosophy. What he came up with were the famed words cogito, ergo sum, Latin meaning consciousness, thus existence. More simply put: I think, therefore I am. The only argument to be made against this was: you only think you are thinking, which could easily be countered with, who then is thinking? It seems that the "I" can and usually is brought under suspicion, but that is about it.
Descartes further divided the world into two different parts, res cogitans and res extensa. The former refers to our 'inner' world or the realm of cognition, whereas the latter means "that which is extended in space" or the material world. In a sense: the spiritual and the material. Where the material was confined to time and space, the spiritual, argued Descartes, was not. This has later become known in philosophical circles as Cartesian duality, and the link between these two worlds was one Descartes unfortunately failed to address to his own or anyone else's satisfaction. Though few people at the time questioned the reality of the spiritual, the failure to come up with a clear connection between this and the equally believable material world, would prove to have dire consequences.
Operating at the same time in the neighbouring country England was Isaac Newton, an equally brilliant thinker. Though Newton himself was a firm believer in the divine, his greatest accomplishments were in explaining the workings of the material world through mathematical laws. Though his laws of motion and gravity failed account for the exact paths of the heavenly bodies, they were a very good approximation that would not be improved upon until centuries later by Albert Einstein. The slight discrepancies between his mathematical equations and the actual behaviour of the planets Newton instead explained through Divine Intervention. God apparently nudged the planets once in a while, just to keep them on track. Newton was not without his critics, of course, who felt that the "invisible arm" or gravity seemed a little too esoteric an explanation of why planets circled the sun and people did not simply spin off the earth due to centrifugal force. Still, whatever it was, gravity seemed to work, and nowadays few scientists would seem to have any trouble accepting this invisible force.
Ironically, when combining the insights of Descartes and Newton, both believers in God and spirit, the notion of spirit (and God) seems to fare all the worse. If spirit, according to Descartes a non-material force, was to influence the material world, non-material forces must be able to influence material forces. Yet the laws of Newton clearly stated that only material forces could influence material forces. The logical conclusion would be that spirit cannot influence our body (or the actions of our body, or the way electric charges behave within the neurones of our brain), let alone any other physical object or process. And if spirit cannot influence, what could possibly be the purpose of its existence? To observe, one might argue, but the more science developed along the path of reductionism, the less credibility this argument received.
Though the discovery of energy fields, such as magnetism, compelled many an animist to argue that everything was alive and infused with spirit, the path of science seemed selected. Along that path consciousness became less an expression of spirit and more an expression of a natural process, an expression of brain activity. Humanity's spiritual nature received another blow from Darwin's theory of natural selection, stipulating that we were no more than advanced animals who had basically reached this level due to the beneficial qualities of random mutation. The laws of chance and circumstance came to explain the creation of man, not the laws or interventions of God. Later on, Freud dived into the human mind, the last bastion of spirituality, and demonstrated that it too operated under certain laws. Consciousness became in the eyes of many scientists little more than a delusion. Research into computers and other information processing systems further seemed to come up with similarities with the human brain, leading many a researcher to claim that the mind was no more than a highly advanced biological computer. So within a matter of a century or two, the learned view of consciousness went from something divine to something mechanical.
But as always with the progresses and refinement of scientific method and its accompanying deeper insight into the material world, a new view emerges. Looking inside cells, a complexity is revealed that goes far beyond anything that random mutation could explain, some biologists argue. And peering inside atoms a world is revealed that is impossible to understand in Newtonian terms, a world where time and distance do not exist as we recognise them, yet a world which 'our' world consists of.
The speculation in the wake of quantum physics is fascinating, particularly when concerning consciousness, and though many dignified physicists have argued for a mystical view of the world , this is nothing we can lean upon. We have little use of speculation as we must rely on empirically arrived at fact. Fact, fortunately, exists in ample degree, as we shall see later, but for now let us acquaint ourselves with the two competing views of consciousness.