there are questions that organize our lives whether we ever ask them or not
and here's one how is it possible that matter gives rise to consciousness?
you may never have thought about this and if you have you may go years without
thinking about it again, but this question lies at the heart of everything
you care about. consciousness is all you have. it's all you are as a matter of
experience. it's what makes the people you love worth loving and it's what makes
your failures to love so tragic. it's what puts the sting in every missed
opportunity. it is the substance of every joy and every sorrow. it is the wind that
blows towards sanity or away toward madness and whatever the state of our
body's consciousness is the real boundary between life and death. to lose
consciousness permanently, as in a vegetative state, is to leave the world
before you leave it and it is possible to have a body without consciousness is
it possible to have consciousness without a body? well yes in a way there's
a condition called locked-in syndrome where I perfectly intact conscious mind
can become the prisoner of a body that can't move but can bodies and minds
separate even further for instance is something like the matrix possible?
it seems possible but of course things could go wrong even there a glitch in
your code and it would be possible to suffer locked-in syndrome even in the matrix.
if consciousness is the result of some immaterial process some immortal
soul that is integrated with the clockwork of the brain then death really
would be an illusion and then there would be nothing to fear from it except
for everything that could happen to a conscious mind after death
now many of us have learned to doubt the picture of consciousness given to us by
religion we've come to believe that if the universe is stranger than we suppose
or even stranger than we can suppose it's not the corny place of provincial
wish fulfillment and superstition and taboo that we find in Scripture whatever
the explanation for consciousness is it might always seem like a miracle and for
what it's worth I think it probably will always seem like a miracle but we may
learn to ignore this miracle and to produce conscious machines that no
longer seem strange to us many of us will wonder whether this is the right
thing to do and worry about what our ethical obligations are to machines that
can suffer or be deprived of happiness the phrase robot rights will no longer
be confined to science fiction and what will human rights be in a world
populated by sentient machines especially ones that demonstrate
superhuman intelligence and creativity and even moral clarity I think we will
one day need to face these questions and will our children ever be given a choice
to back up their conscious Minds in the cloud and how would this be different
from duplicating their minds and their experiences and therefore creating other
beings who can suffer. questions of this kind entirely depend on the question we
started with. how is it possible that matter gives rise to consciousness?
what was it like to be a dinosaur as a giant asteroid came crashing down in the Gulf
of Mexico 65 million years ago? how bad is life for a pig or a cow on one of our
factory farms? not how bad does it seem from the outside how bad is it on the
inside for those who live it. how happy would you be in a new
relationship? or in a new job? or if you had children? these are questions about
consciousness and its contents everything we care about or can care
about and everyone who can care and turn this entire reality is given its
substance by the fact of consciousness consciousness is the most important
thing in the universe I would even say it's the only important thing in the
universe because it's the carrier of all value actual and possible and whatever
its relationship is to the physics of things it's the one thing that cannot be
an illusion however confused you are right now whatever you know or don't
know whether or not you're already in the matrix or in a dream or in some
other way distant from the base layer of reality
the fact that it's like something to be you is the fact of consciousness and
it's the one thing that can never be in doubt and it's this reality in each
moment that awaits your attention you can either notice the nature of your
experience clearly really clearly or you can be lost in thought in each moment
the thought will tend to capture you and lo you to sleep and the practice of
meditation is to notice this more and more and then to wake up wake up
you