Consciousness, Evolution, and Religion: The Importance of the Content of Consciousness

Consciousness, Evolution, and Religion:
The Importance of the Content of Consciousness
 
The close and inextricable relationship between the evolution of consciousness, the emergence of the human capacity to perceive a spiritual dimension of reality, and the development of religions in their many and varied manifestations has become a common theme in the exploration of the evolution of religion and the broader field of consciousness studies. Fortunately, after decades of being consigned to the status of a taboo subject for serious investigation, since the mid-1990s the topic of consciousness – its nature, origin, and function - has produced an explosion of sophisticated and meaningful works, in books, scholarly publications, blogs, etc. The enormity and complexity of this body of work has recently been captured by Robert Lawrence Kuhn in his remarkable piece, A landscape of consciousness:Towardataxonomyofexplanationsandimplications (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610723001128via%3Dihub&fbclid=IwY2xjawEppAlleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHdinYJZ37AprVucT1BLJ9zmIvGNyixJarHvlAnH_1QpTpbrVVLleOrTgcg_aem_ZvpFMekpBMRXjWVOBYraGA).
 
And yet, despite finally acquiring the status of a fully legitimate area of study and the proliferation of work that has been produced as a result of that status, for both scholars and the general public, we would suggest that something is missing in much of contemporary consciousness studies, namely an exploration and appreciation of the actual content of consciousness. As a general phenomenon, much has been said about the nature of consciousness, but often in a manner that fails to recognize the extraordinary quality of the content of consciousness, particularly when viewed in an evolutionary context. Here we will present just a brief summary of this issue, with a fuller treatment to follow at a later date.
 
Consciousness as Qualia
Ever since the 1990s work of Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers, both of whom were instrumental in returning consciousness to the status of a legitimate subject of serious scientific and philosophical exploration, the focus of most of this work has been on the exploration of the general nature of consciousness as that which is understood in terms of qualia, or subjective experience, as perhaps best understood by Nagel’s characterization of consciousness as  “what it is like” to have an experience. Some might suggest that roughly five decades of extensive production in the fields of science and philosophy is perhaps a bit much to convincingly establish the reality of something that is always present to any waking human with an healthy operative brain. And yet, much of consciousness research has focused on the questions of whether consciousness even exists and whether consciousness can be reduced to and explained in strictly materialist terms. Much of this work has revolved around what Chalmers labeled the “hard problem” of consciousness: the “easy” problem is establishing various correlations between events in the brain and conscious experience, but the “hard” problem attempts (without success, many would argue) to grapple with the issue of what consciousness is, or its ontological status as something that cannot be explained, described, or categorized in strictly materialist terms. 
In the debate between materialists and non-materialists (who often, although certainly not always, also support belief in the reality of a (frequently non-traditional) spiritual dimension), this is of course a fundamental issue, and the enormous body of work derived from the arguments back and forth is understandable.
But this focus on the very existence and nature of consciousness, usually understood in terms of a defense of the reality of non-physical qualia, has been so intense that the actual content of consciousness often has been neglected. This is unfortunate, for we are suggesting that the evolution of consciousness has produced, in the human species at least (and perhaps in other species elsewhere in the Cosmos, but that sort of speculation is not our concern), awareness of non-material realities that are utterly remarkable (and that’s an understatement) and hardly the sort of thing that one might expect to emerge out of the rearrangement of particles of matter over roughly 14 billion years. By ignoring the content of consciousness, much of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and even spiritual thought about consciousness, thus presents a very diluted understanding of consciousness, where consciousness is defined in terms of only awareness, subjectivity, “what it’s like to be”. We are suggesting, in other words, that consciousness isn’t just about “qualia.”

Mapping the Content of Consciousness
In a sense, it’s easy to appreciate the existence of a certain reticence about offering any sort of authoritative map of the contents of consciousness, given that this would involve exploration of something that is entirely internal, hidden from the public view which is privileged in much of scientific thought, and subject to evolutionary change over the long span of human development. Various maps have been developed, many grounded in the earlier work of Jean Gebser and influenced by the non-mainstream work of Ken Wilber.
Here we have no intention to attempt the gargantuan task of articulating an exhaustive account of these various models of the content of consciousness, but for the sake of providing context for the larger point that we are trying to make, a generalized and admittedly incomplete model of the evolution of consciousness would likely include the following:
        1. Sensory awareness: The simplest form of perception, found in a rudimentary sense in pre-human life forms and reaching a fuller expression in the human capacity for awareness generated through the five senses of touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste.
        2. Spatial consciousness: Whereas sensory awareness is direct, spatial consciousness emerges only with the development of the capacity to engage (consciously or unconsciously) in the capacity to contextualize sensory perceptions, distinguishing between here and there.
        3. Temporal consciousness: Similar to spatial consciousness, temporal consciousness emerges only with the development of the capacity to engage (consciously or unconsciously) in the capacity to contextualize perceptions in a temporal sense, distinguishing between now, then, and not yet.
        4. Memory: In conjunction with the above referenced development of the capacity for spatial and temporal consciousness and presumably occurring as a co-development rather than as an isolated step, at some point the content of human consciousness evolved to the point of distinguishing between realities that are present and realities that 1) were once present, 2) are no longer so, but are 3) retained in consciousness with varying degrees of vividness, accuracy, etc.
        5. Self-other: Awareness of the sense of a separate self, which may include but is certainly not an immediately apparent corollary of perception of the body of another, at some point in our evolutionary development became an established component of the content of consciousness, subsequently leading to an even deeper sense of self as something which has the capacity to exist outside the body, whether in shamanic spirit flights or the many concepts of a post-mortem afterlife found in early religions and refined in Axial Age traditions.
        6. Abstract thought: The capacity to hold in one’s consciousness “ideas,” or non-material realities that are not immediately present in the “external” world and to manipulate these ideas (through reasoning, mathematics) marks a significant development in the evolution of human consciousness into areas that are only minimally present in other life forms.
        7. Will/intentionality: Many of the philosophers who choose to deny the existence of consciousness also choose to deny the reality of will, or intentionality, despite the fact that, like consciousness, it is immediately present to us and is reflected in the very acting of choosing to deny it. Our intent here isn’t to get into the debate about the degree to which human intentionality can be characterized as an exercise of free will, but rather to simply assert that at some point in the evolution of our species, the remarkable capacity to make intentional decisions emerged. As with consciousness, intentionality does not appear to be an exclusively human quality, but the extent to which humans have the capacity to make intentional choices based on conscious reflection is qualitatively different than that evidenced by any other species, and hence represents one of the hallmarks of human uniqueness.
        8. Emotions: The richness of the human internal affective content also reflects a progressive evolutionary development of consciousness, as evidenced in the range of human awareness of different emotional states and expressions. In the course of human consciousness evolution, higher affective qualities such as love, awe, and wonder have developed to further differentiate human from other forms of consciousness which include affective states of awareness but only of a more basic sort.

The above account of the evolution of the content of consciousness speaks to the need to recognize that consciousness is far more than a sense of “what it is like to be…”, or perhaps more precisely, it confirms that the human sense of “what it is like to be” has evolved over time, such that a full appreciation of the nature of human consciousness needs to take into consideration this steady expansion of the content of consciousness, which has led to a fuller and fuller awareness of reality. What early humans were capable of perceiving through their nascent consciousness was less than what contemporary humans are capable of perceiving through their currently-evolved mode of consciousness. Contemporary humans simply have a fuller experience of the totality of the real than did our predecessors, whether within the species or prior to it.
 
The Supersensory or Transcendental Content of Consciousness
And yet, the above account of the evolution of consciousness, however remarkable it might be, only brings us to the doorstep of the truly unique nature of evolved human consciousness, for, in addition to the various sensory and abstract contents of consciousness as described above, consciousness provides access to an awareness (however dim) of what we can variously describe as supersensory, transcendental, or spiritual dimensions of reality.
In the human form, there has emerged a consciousness through which there is the recognition that reality consists of Something More than the totality of the sensory realm of matter, energy, space, and time. Through human consciousness, we find an awareness of a spiritual or transcendent dimension that reveals the presence of meaning and value in the Cosmos. The sense of spiritual qualities such as moral goodness, love, meaning, and the many other transcendental dimensions of existence are not available through the sensory perception of the material dimension of the world. But through consciousness as it has evolved in the human species, we gain (admittedly in what is often a sporadic, ambiguous, and ineffable sense), an awareness of a qualitative, spiritual, meaning-laden dimension of the Cosmos which is not otherwise apparent.
This supersensory or transcendental aspect of consciousness has, of course, been accessed through the contemplative practices of prolonged meditation and other spiritual techniques in various religious traditions for centuries, but we would suggest that it is also part of the everyday awareness of modern humans, and that such supersensory or spiritual awareness is not dependent on a connection to any particular religious tradition. Just as human consciousness evolved over time to slowly provide all humans with the capacity to perceive time, abstract ideas, number, and other mundane qualities of reality, so consciousness has continued to evolve to the point where the perception of the transcendental spiritual qualities such as meaning and moral goodness have similarly become a standard dimension of consciousness in most humans.
But returning to the topic of this essay, our larger point here is that in the contemporary study of consciousness which tends to explore the mere existence of consciousness but not its content, the utterly remarkable nature of the content of consciousness is overlooked.
Granted, there occasionally is a recognition – almost passing in nature – of the content of consciousness, as in Phillip Goff’s recent Why, where he states, “But there is more to human consciousness than these raw sensations. Human consciousness is also permeated with meaning and understanding.” (Why, 50) But such an observation is made without sufficient recognition of what an astounding assertion it is! Yes, the very existence of a non-material, irreducible something such as consciousness is remarkable, but even more remarkable is what consciousness has allowed us to gain access to, producing a content that needs to be acknowledged in a spirit of sufficient wonder and awe. Appreciating the remarkable nature of consciousness is not just a matter of “what it’s like to be” something, but rather what it’s like to be something which senses dimensions of reality that nothing else in the (known) Cosmos has access to! How remarkable that over the course of 14 billion years, ever-changing constellations of energy and particles have evolved with sufficient complexity that in at least one complex organism (the human) there has emerged awareness of a dimension of the Cosmos, characterized by moral value and meaning, that is otherwise invisible and unknown. In ordinary everyday language, this is a really big deal! – and yet it is commonly treated in a casual manner or simply overlooked.
 
Of course, skeptical reductionists will diminish the uniqueness of the content of consciousness by essentially passing it off as nothing more than human inventiveness responding to the need for psychological defense mechanisms (religious concepts such as meaning and an afterlife were invented to protect against the terror of loss, suffering, and death) and the need for social order (religion, meaning, and value were invented to help maintain social control - people fearful of eternal punishment and hopeful of eternal reward are more likely to act in a way that is conducive to the perpetuation of orderly society).
This is not the place to engage in a complicated analysis of the flaws of such simplistic reductionism. Rather, we shall simply point out that reductionism, which argues (often on rather weak grounds) that humans create value and meaning, is being increasingly challenged by the position that consciousness is the vehicle that allows us to discover value and meaning, which are already “out there” as ontological realities that exist independent of human perception.
Phillip Goff (far from being a defender of traditional theism) nicely articulates this position in his description of Value Fundamentalism in the opening chapter of Why?, where he refers to value as “primitive facts in their own right”(11) that cannot be passed off as mere human creations.
Similarly, in his recent Notes on Complexity, Neil Theise argues that just as mathematical Platonism posits mathematics as something that “awaits human discovery, not human invention,” (131), the same can be said about meaning, value, and transcendental qualities such as Goodness and Truth: they exist as aspects of reality which, at a certain point in the evolution of consciousness, humans acquired the capacity to discover or perceive, however imperfectly at this rather early stage of human development.
 
The Point
To summarize, then, the point of all of the above: On the one hand, we should recognize the remarkable developments in the field of consciousness studies that have emerged since the 1990s, during which time consciousness has gone from a taboo, derided topic to a widely accepted subject of mainstream philosophical and scientific inquiry. This development has included, at least among non-reductionists, a recognition of what a remarkable and  mysterious phenomenon consciousness appears to be.
But that recognition in itself is insufficient: in addition to acknowledging the remarkable nature of consciousness as “what it is like to be” a subject capable of experiencing qualia, we should be even more astounded by the content of consciousness, or that which consciousness makes it possible for us to perceive, namely the non-material but ontologically real aspects of the Cosmos. As a result of human consciousness in its present state of evolutionary development, we know that the Cosmos is more than stuff: it is also a reality saturated with meaning and value, including qualities of Goodness and Truth that, in the absence of consciousness in its present state of development, would not be known. In the human form in its current state of evolutionary development, a being composed of particles of matter/energy has developed a degree of complexity that results in the (still unexplained) emergence of an immaterial reality (consciousness) that allows us to achieve the perception of aspects of the Cosmos that are utterly immaterial and transcendent. In essence, through consciousness we are granted confirmation that we exist in a Cosmos infused with meaning and value, and as such, we should always view consciousness with reverence and awe.