The Problem of Consciousness

Carl H. Flygt

March 2006

The problem of consciousness is the gap between what we know about the physical reality that underlies consciousness, and the transcendental unity of experience, which doesn’t seem to involve any physics at all. That unity is remarkably seamless, and other than its location in or near the body, it betrays no sign of either the anatomy or the function of the brain, which reasonable people generally agree is its spring and the condition of its possibility. The problem is compounded by the actual fact of altered states of consciousness, wherein experience is profoundly modified but remains recognizable as homologous to that basic sense of self that serves as its source and ultimate resort. What accounts for the unity of consciousness? What accounts for its modifiability? What are the physical mechanisms in play in each of these apparently incommensurable dimensions of experience?

Occultism gives a very straightforward answer here. The unity of experience is a function of the ego, a spiritual body of cosmic dimension and scale. The unity of the ego is a consequence of its cosmic scale. Relative to the things that move around in the sense world, the ego simply doesn’t move at all. The modifiability of experience and affect, on the other hand, is given by the scale and structure of the human soul, the so-called astral body. The dimension and scale here is somewhat reduced, but relative to the scale of motions in the sense world, it is somewhat incommensurably large. Small motions in the astral body give rise to profound and high-pitched motions in the feelings and sense perceptions. The qualia of experience arise in the astral body, and these qualia can be inverted, reversed or otherwise enhanced by causing systematic changes in the astral body. One other cosmic scale is also part of the occult theory, having to do with the sixth sense in a social organism such as a flock of birds, for example, but for the problem of consciousness we need not consider it.

Ned Block’s famous essay “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness” may give us a way to reconcile these occult conceptions, which on their own terms give rise to no logical confusions in understanding how consciousness works (we set aside the practical difficulties of understanding them), with our contemporary understanding of brains and biologies, which on their own terms certainly do. In his paper, Block does little more (and nothing less) than suggest that intentionality is a form of consciousness, but this suggestion has some considerable methodological importance. If we grant that intentionality is a form of consciousness, then consciousness research becomes, or can become, intentionality research. And if we take on intentionality research, questions about the personal motivation of the researcher become legitimate. Presumably, if we are going to learn to study intentionality as a form of consciousness, we are altogether justified in introducing spiritual notions into our research program. And spiritual notions are just what are needed to render the problem of consciousness in tractable terms.

The fly in this ointment, of course, is in seeing what to do with the brain, which remains the touchstone of all aspiration to understand consciousness rationally. I have argued elsewhere, and I think with some force, that understanding the brain is really secondary to understanding and controlling brain states. If intentional states can be systematically controlled and objectively observed, then there is no great impediment to asking physiological questions about them. Indeed, control and observation of self-conscious states can be undertaken with just this physiological objective in mind. But as a research strategy on the problem of consciousness, it is consensus about how to asses our autonomously determined intentional states that should have priority, not consensus about how, for example, to fund the construction of elaborate biological assays or of elaborate computational exercises and objectives.

I believe the problem of consciousness is a spiritual and institutional problem. Materialist and computational attacks on the problem are interesting and worthwhile, but ultimately they cannot satisfy the ontological motivations of the self-conscious individual. The great questions of individual birth and death, moreover, which are likewise part of the problem of consciousness, can hardly be imagined to have a materialist solution that falls within the scope of our present biological science. Only clairvoyant knowledge of occult facts can provide that solution, and although that knowledge may have some basis in material nature, it is a nature incommensurate with the social adaptations of most of the institutions of the present epoch.