Is Human Consciousness Complete or Still Developing?

 By Nicholas Low, Postdoctoral Fellow. Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.

Depressingly, modern science explains consciousness by reducing it to mechanism. This dour reduction relies on a tacit consensus that mechanistic materialism offers a reliable “theory of everything.” Existence, we are told, began when the big bang set particles in motion. Some of those particles formed the Earth, providing the conditions for life to emerge and evolve. The human central nervous system arose from millions of accidental mutations. “Consciousness” is simply an epiphenomenal result of this chain of chance events. This explanatory framework delivers astonishing scientific insights, but it leads to a dreadful conclusion: all meaning, emotion, and experience is reducible to random configurations of matter. So the story goes.

But is this really the whole picture? Some philosophers claim that we shouldn’t be satisfied with such theories, arguing for the irreducibility of consciousness to mechanism, of mind to matter. But this doesn’t imply that we should reject the idea that consciousness is fully “natural.” Philosophers Thomas Nagel (b. 1927) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) each propose non-reductive yet naturalistic accounts of consciousness. Comparing these accounts raises an important question: are human forms of consciousness complete, or are they still developing? 

In Mind and Cosmos (2012), Nagel questions the unexamined dominance of mechanistic materialism among scientists and philosophers, a paradigm he calls the “Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature.” He argues convincingly that we need a better theory of everything, but finds traditional alternatives like dualism and theism unpersuasive given their departure from naturalistic explanation. He therefore speculates toward a theory of everything that could explain the development of consciousness as immanent to natural history. Just as physics, chemistry, and biology explain human bodies as conditioned by the motion of particles, Nagel’s proposed theory would explain the emergence of consciousness in similarly elegant terms. Acknowledging that we currently lack the empirical basis for such a theory, Nagel nevertheless anticipates that a scientific paradigm shift will reveal how natural processes produce consciousness over time.

However, Nagel admits that such a paradigm shift may simply be impossible for humans. “It is perfectly possible that the truth is beyond our reach, in virtue of our intrinsic cognitive limitations, and not merely beyond our grasp in humanity’s present stage of intellectual development.” If we accept Nagel’s argument that mechanistic materialism is “almost certainly false,” this would then imply that though humans are aware that science alone can’t explain consciousness, we’ll never know its true origin. Nagel reassures us that we can’t be sure whether we’re stuck in such a predicament and remains optimistic that a higher stage of “intellectual development” is around the corner. But for Nagel, it might be our destiny to await a paradigm shift that never comes. 

Remarkably, in the 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche diagnosed a very similar problem. He foresaw that science would reveal its own inadequacy as a theory of everything, leaving modern humanity without answers to our most important questions. Nietzsche’s response to this problem differs radically from Nagel’s shaky, agnostic optimism. While Nagel hopes that consciousness in its current form will eventually produce true knowledge about its own origins, Nietzsche intimated that because consciousness is a part of nature, we should expect it to continue developing and transforming.

As an objectivist and value realist, Nagel presumes that the nature of consciousness is fixed and therefore reflects unimpeachable (though incomplete) truths about reality. Nagel writes that humans are part of a marvelous unfolding of cosmic awareness in which “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.” But our forms of consciousness, especially our capacities for reasoning and making value judgments, are stable and fixed. The universe is “waking up” through us, but its consciousness emerged fully formed in humanity.

Nietzsche severely questions the stability and permanence of human forms of consciousness, arguing that our capacities for reasoning and judgement represent primitive experiments rather than permanent, objective structures. For Nietzsche, human knowledge has been conditioned by values that shape experience according to metaphysical oppositions: true/false, rational/irrational, good/evil. These oppositional values have been essential to humanity and make scientific knowledge possible. But Nietzsche saw this metaphysical regime as provisional and temporary. Metaphysical oppositions have shaped consciousness as a chrysalis shapes a butterfly: These values form us, but we will soon outgrow them and take flight. 

Nagel argues persuasively that scientific “theories of everything” are reductive and almost certainly wrong, and gestures toward a panpsychist view of humanity as part of the “universe gradually waking up.” But Nietzsche helps us to pose a question that disrupts Nagel’s theory at precisely this point: If human consciousness is indeed reflective of the universe “waking up,” then shouldn’t we expect consciousness to be more like the groping gestures of a newborn reaching out to the world than the stable certainties of cosmic middle-age?