Consciousness and Its Purpose
What are we?
Having detailed in the previous section the logical foundation for our reasoning where we not only realized the importance of thinking in probabilities but also assumed that we exist and are subjected to consistent patterns, it becomes imperative to continue our exploration by properly defining what do we exactly mean by existence. In other words, what are we? What is this feeling, this experience of being alive as we look out on the world and perceive it from our own center stage?
Scientists tend to describe this feeling as consciousness or experience, but naming it is perhaps the easiest part. Science has done great progress in teasing out the relationship of detailed neural activity to states of consciousness but there are still many unresolved questions around what is frequently called the hard problem of consciousness, which essentially seeks to explain how does a conscious experience emerge out of the inner workings of a physical brain.
Over the years, there have been many theories, some of which have since been debunked with modern understandings of neuroscience, others that are considered too far-fetched and exotic to be of merit without hard evidence. But there is one general school of thought that most scientists consider to be probable. An idea that is not only logically sound and fits our observations, but that can transform how we think about our lives even though its implications are thus far rarely discussed and explored. In fact, the following topics of this chapter may mark the first time all these logical conclusions are put together to bring into focus what science can really tell us about the nature of our who we are.
No center
The human brain is by far the most sophisticated phenomenon we have thus far been able to observe in the universe. Inside this mysterious structure, roughly 84 billion neurons fire in synchrony with each other to produce a myriad of incredibly complex functions such as movement, language, creativity, and emotions.
While the brain is very complex and processes within it can rarely be circumscribed to one specific area, throughout the years neuroscientists have been able to associate many of these functions and behaviors with predominant brain regions and patterns of neural activity. We know today that movement is mainly controlled by the cerebellum and emotions largely carried by the limbic system but what about our conscious experience? If science is able to pinpoint the neural areas that are responsible for some of our most important biological processes, can it also specify plausible brain regions that make up the core of what we are?
Interestingly enough, not only have scientists, despite their best efforts, not been able to locate such a region of the brain but all evidence even points towards this core not existing. With every new advancement in neuroscience, it has become more and more clear that in this miniature universe of the brain, roughly 84 billion neurons all act by themselves and communicate with each other as if the brain is an astoundingly complex vehicle with no driver.
Accounts of split-brain patients are perhaps what illustrates this the most perfectly. These are patients who have undergone a surgery where their brain hemispheres are disconnected from each other and two distinct personalities (and streams of neural activity) seem to form within the brain as a result. Split-patients often display behaviors where their hands act with totally different intentions and, depending on which hemisphere is queried, contradicting answers are given to very simple questions. The fact that their conscious experience is not arising from only one hemisphere (or any particular location) but rather from the entirety of the disconnected brain ultimately corroborates the idea that there is no specific center of consciousness - the appearance of a unity is, in fact, each of the separate brain circuits being enabled and expressed at one particular moment in time.
Emergent property
If our current scientific understanding of the brain indicates that there is no specific neural region that can account for the phenomenon of our consciousness, what do scientists think brings it about?
This may seem surprising at first but most scientists do theorize that consciousness is not simply inside our brain. Instead, consciousness is generally considered to be an emergent phenomenon of it. Meaning consciousness happens when enough activity takes place in the brain in a way that can be compared to how music emerges from a record player. The music is not anywhere to be found inside the record player. Intuitively, we tend to say the music is on the record, but even there we really only find a circular vinyl disk with peculiar grooves, it does not produce any sound or music at all. It is only when the mechanisms of the record player are activated in a certain way that all its activity produces an emergent phenomenon that we call music.
Consciousness is somewhat similar, we can't physically locate it at one point or in one area. And if we zoom in on the grey matter of our brain, we find as much evidence for consciousness as we find tiny marbles inside a molecule, which is none at all. Yet when billions of neurons fire and communicate with each other, the combination of this enormous amount of activity creates a phenomenon that is consciousness.
But it would seem that this is far from a complete summary of what brings it about. Because there is an inevitable consequence that complicates things to an incredible degree. The more this emergent feature evolved, the more it became a feedback loop of incredible complexity. Just like when we point a webcam at the screen that is showing what it is recording and we see a seemingly infinite pattern, the brain does something similar with the activity from its billions of firing neurons. Every moment of conscious experience that the brain produces has the ability to influence the activity of the brain itself (This may not always be a positive influence if we tend towards overthinking and forcing behavior and thinking patterns that are not natural), resulting in an unimaginable depth of iterations and permutations where every successive moment of conscious experience is being constantly redefined.
Using the record player example, it's as if the music coming out of the record player would suddenly gain the astounding ability to modify the grooves of the record and, as a result, produce a different kind of music with each and every interaction.
So while the phenomenon of consciousness can be described as an emergent property of the brain, this is still far from a complete picture of what brings it out. Consciousness is also an incredibly complex feedback loop that goes on and on and on, constantly reorganizing and reshaping the brain to produce a different - maybe inferior, maybe superior -, but always different kind of experience.
When reflecting on the nature of our conscious experience, an increasingly large number of scholars have come to claim that there is no specific requirement for consciousness. Meaning having a conscious experience is merely a random side-effect of evolution and humans would work perfectly fine (as a sort of biological machine) if we were to remove it from the equation. While this line of reasoning might seem plausible in theory, it is, however, assuming something it cannot. Scholars are basing themselves on the idea that the sum of the parts (consciousness) is exactly the same as the interaction between each individual part (the physical processes of the brain) and that if we were to remove the sum, everything would stay exactly the same. Yet, we don't have to go so far as to realize that that's not the case. The entire universe, as an example, is made of subatomic particles and the sum of all those particles creates a reality that we could not anticipate if we were to study each particle on its own. The same is true for consciousness. What emerges out of the sum of all the physical neurological processes is a feedback loop, an experience that interacts with the brain in a way that has allowed life to evolve at a much more rapid pace than if this feedback loop did not exist. So we cannot logically sustain the argument that life would be the same if experience were not to exist because it has been this exact interaction between the sum and the individual parts that has brought about our ability to be self-aware in the first place.
Evolutionary tool
It can be quite fascinating to realize that consciousness is merely a biological property that emerges out of the synchronized activity of billions of neurons. But even more fascinating are the questions that this observation tends to lead to. Why were physical neurochemical processes ever accompanied by an experience? Why haven't humans remained conscious but not self-aware? Why did consciousness come along, for what purpose?
As complex as these questions might seem, to approach this scientifically we cannot allow consciousness' elusive nature to be a reason for giving up on trying to understand them. Because if consciousness - just like any other aspect of life - was the result of an intricate and prolonged evolutionary process, the approach to find these answers is clear. We must head back to the past and, guided by our current understandings of evolutionary biology, uncover the reason why a conscious experience would eventually emerge out of the inner workings of a human brain.
If we look at evolution, it's not so hard to roughly imagine how life started here on earth. 4 billion years ago, a unique series of coincidental probabilities occurred that led to the existence of very simple biological cells that could replicate. These were the first forms of life. And as they replicated, subtle differences between the old cells and the new cells would crop up, mutations would take place.
Over billions of years of replicating and mutating, organisms with the most favorable traits were more likely to survive and reproduce. This is, as taught in biology classes, one of the most basic mechanisms of evolution. Natural selection entails that organisms that are best suited to their environment survive and pass on their genetic traits which, in turn, allows upcoming generations to become better and better adapted to those environments.
As a matter of fact, virtually everything that makes up the human body went through a similar evolutionary process. Hands, legs, eyes - these are all physical traits and tools that, at some point in evolution, gave an advantage to the organism and because they did, they have persisted as an integral part of human physiology.
With this knowledge in hand, we can now better understand why in the process of evolution there emerged this phenomenon of consciousness. Because if, as we've seen before, consciousness is not a magical exception but is rather a direct or indirect consequence of evolution, the scientific conclusion is straightforward: just like every other feature of the human brain and body, experience or consciousness is a tool that evolution has engineered through billions of years of mutations.
Conscious forms of life likely showed a richer capacity for learning from and adapting to their environment so evolution favored this development and nurtured it to a point where the experience coming out of the brain became conscious of itself. In other words, evolution put us in charge (Based on our vulnerability to emotional and mental manipulation, we are, in fact, not in charge.). It greatly favored this extraordinary capacity for reasoning and intuition and gave rise to sentient beings, tasked with making the right decisions for themselves and for their species.
As humans, we are not any special or different from other products of evolution. We are simply the most complex and advanced outcome (known to date) of an evolutionary process that randomly selected the biological phenomena that proved to be the most efficient in adapting to the consistent patterns of reality. This is the true nature of what we are - the ultimate tool that evolution has engineered to allow life to move forward.
Purpose
Understanding the reason why a conscious experience eventually emerged throughout evolution already gives us a much better appreciation of what our purpose ultimately is. We cannot disconnect it from the past. There is a clear line to be drawn from stardust evolving to us and we need to follow up on that to understand our design. It explains why we are here and is wired into every single cell.
In the end, it comes down to understanding what we are. And most of these answers can be induced from our biology. But the problem is that we've never been taught to think scientifically about what we are and moreso, have also grown up in a society that conditioned us to think of ourselves as singular individuals, disconnected from our environment and our past. Thus, when reflecting on some of our most existential questions (among them the meaning of life) we tend to do so through our subjective lens and come up with personalized answers that fit our emotional drives.
Yet, it is only by gaining perspective and looking at ourselves from a bigger picture, a grander scheme, that we can give a proper answer to the purpose of life. Evolution doesn't lie. When we observe the evolutionary process of which we have arisen from, particularly how our conscious experience has been engineered as a tool to move life forward, our purpose becomes very clear: we exist as a means to evolve. Humans are just the most advanced creation of a succession of creations whose ultimate purpose has always been to bring life to its next evolutionary stage.