One of the unsolved mysteries of our time is why and how we are conscious. How do we come by this powerful sense of self? How is it we can enjoy the smell of roses, the dazzling colours of a sunset, or the sensual touch of a lover? These experiences are part of our inner world — the world where we are truly human and truly alive. They used to call it our ‘soul’, but that word carries religious connotations and has fallen into disuse by those who seek a scientific understanding of something we know in common with one another but cannot describe.
There are many theories of consciousness, ranging from it is ‘an illusion’ — at one extreme, a figment of a hugely powerful brain with its countless billions of neurons and trillions of possible connections. At the other: an underlying property of all matter.
The idea that consciousness is an illusory, emergent phenomenon of the material complexity of the brain has some big problems. There is no question that there is no plausible physical mechanism that can be observed in the material world that could conjure the experience of the colour red out of neural connections, nor the emotional response that the colour red can induce. It is also true that emergence as a phenomenon always depends upon an interaction with a field. Magnetism is an unexpected property of some metals, but its emergence depends upon interaction with the electromagnetic field surrounding the Earth. Physical things possess mass, an unexpected property due to the interaction of electrons with the Higgs field. So, the presence of simple or complex physical reality does not lead to the unexpected emergence of higher-order properties. That comes through interaction with a field, so if consciousness is an emergent property, what is the field involved?
Panpsychists argue that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of all matter — whether it be a grain of sand to a human brain. Panpsychists face what is called the ‘combination problem’. Presumably, human consciousness is some aggregation of the consciousness in all the simpler bits that make up the physical structure of our brain. It is the mirror problem of that faced by the materialist view. At what point in the reduction of brain size as we step down the levels of the living world does consciousness disappear? What about people whose brains are split into two as a surgical procedure. The evidence is that a dual sense of being emerges. Is half a brain big enough for the emergent property to remain?
Where does Ria stand in all of this? She is a conscious being. How does that work? Out of all the theories, there is one standout winner that complies with much of the evidence. Consciousness is a field effect. The brain gains consciousness at the point that it can connect with a universal consciousness field. Because scientists find this idea unpalatable little has been done to investigate its nature. But it is a domain in which the existence of field phenomena can lead to fairies, angels and indeed the eternal one. I suggest it has one clear property, and that is love. Love, as Fogarty tells us is the cohesive binding force that unites all, collapses wave functions and gives us the unique ability to make moral and ethical judgements.