Can consciousness exist independent of an organic brain? -- A proof for the existence of "God"

[Aardwizz]

Recently, the ARF had a thread (since deleted by Mamazon), with a title soliciting opinions as to whether consciousness was merely the result of our organic brains, or whether consciousness was independent of matter.  Naturally, the opinions split along familiar lines, those who thought "scientifically" and argued that that changes to the brain (through trauma or chemicals, natural or otherwise) caused changes in consciousness and so could conclude that consciousness, like all other observable phenomena, was dependent on matter.  Others (who tend to believe in some sort of "soul" or a "higher power") argued that their own personal experiences, or reports of near-dead experiences by others, convinced them that there was more to consciousness, more to *us*, than merely the physical brain.  And naturally, neither side was swayed by (or even really listened to) the arguments of the other.

I took a look at the "scientific" argument, and discovered some interesting things, including a plausible "proof" -- one that an atheist might accept (if they didn't have so much emotionally invested in the opposite) -- that there is, indeed, a "God".

First, we need to explore the notion of "emergent behavior".  "Emergent behavior" is, per Wikipedia, "a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence).  

We observe this in things like anthills, where the colony acts as if it were a single organism, performing organizing functions -- digging specialized chambers, gathering food, defending the colony -- even though there is no one entity making plans and giving out orders, or even capable of seeing "the big picture".  The organization "just happens".  Each individual ant is an unsophisticated being, but the interactions between the simple parts produce complex results.  The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

This is thought how the brain, with its simple neurons, produce the complexity called "self-awareness".

Like "abiogenesis", "emergent behavior" is not actually a scientific theory, but is instead of scientific framework for a theory.  The concept espouses no mechanism, makes no predictions as to what critical mass of simple parts are needed to produce complexity, nor what patterns and behaviors will emerge given a set of simpler components.  So while it sounds oh-so-very-scientific, it actually isn't.  That isn't to say that the notion is wrong in any way, merely that even atheists are prone to "a leap of faith" from time to time.

So, let's assume for a moment that "emergent behavior" does completely, 100%, explain how consciousness exists, and that it is only the product of a complex brain.  It can't (yet) be proved, so we'll simply assume it as fact.  Our awareness of "self" is merely that of our brain talking to itself.  No immortal "soul"; no "spirits" or anything else that isn't rooted in matter.  So far, so good. (at least for the atheist).

However, like our ant colony, we also have complex human interactions in our "colony", our society.  With thousands, millions, billions of people, wouldn't that also lead to "emergent behavior"?  Of course it would.  And it does.  For simplicity's sake, I'm going to anthropomorphize that emergent behavior, and name it "Culture".

First, let's look at the emergent properties of Culture:

  

It has "memory": stories that occur in one generation get passed down to the next and the next.  The stories continue to exist, even though no member of the orginal generation who experienced the story exists.

This demonstrates a degree of "immortality", at least from a human lifetime perspective.  

Culture is also responsible for the morality of the members: a behavior is "correct" when Culture (the consensus) says it is, and only becomes "incorrect" when Culture changes its collective mind.  For proof, see "slavery", "civil rights", and so forth.  Witness how, now that Culture is changing Its opinion on the treatment of gays, how rapidly the individual members are following suit, even though the "reasons" that they ever used to justify their previous actions have not changed. Their simple programmed behavior -- survive to breed -- produces the complex "Do unto others....".

By the same token, it provides a framework -- a lens -- through which the world is viewed.  If Culture says that "people are evil and the devil is everywhere", then the individual people will see evil and "signs" of the devil, validating Culture's directive (see: Puritans, etc.).  If Culture says "the world is random", then people will see randomness.  Self-fulfilling world views.

It is tempting to try to argue that it is the self-aware individuals who are in charge, but that is merely an illusion.  It's an inflated ego talking.  Like the ant, the individuals are only aware of their own needs and desires.  Their personal emergent behavior is "awareness of self".  It is the emergent behavior of Culture that is doing the work for Humanity or Civilization or whatever name you want to give it.

But what happens when a brain that is aware of Self also becomes aware of Culture?  That is, it becomes aware of "a greater 'Something' outside of Oneself".  Gee, that sounds just like the arguments that theists use to explain their "knowing" that there is a God, doesn't it?  They don't quite know what it is, but they know it's "Something".  And if they use their awareness of Self to see how Culture affects them, they'll see that it is the source of morality -- just like "God"; they'll see that it is "Immortal" (living beyond everyone), just like "God".  While Culture might not exactly "create" the world in a physical sense, the context that it gives us in interpreting the world works out to about the same thing.

Point after point, it fits:  Culture, the emergent behavior of individual human members, is "God".

• It is a personal God; like YHWH, is it the god of it's "chosen people".
  
• It is a jealous God; just as the people cling to their Culture, so too does the Culture cling to its people.
  
• It is God of War; when a Culture of one people ("YHWH") comes in contact with a Culture of another people ("Allah"), there is always trouble, explaining why even though YHWH, Jehovah and Allah are supposedly the same, they still fight each other.
  

Now, I know that most people, both theists and atheists and those in between will, even if they accept the existence of Culture as an emergent behavior of humanity, will yet reject calling Culture "God".  A "God", worthy of the name, should be omniscient, omnipotent, etc.  The counter argument is, of course, "On what stories are you basing this expectation on?".  Just because something doesn't match ones pre-concieved notions of what one expects that something to be doesn't mean that it isn't just what it is.  Such a rebuttal is, of course, a cheap rhetorical device, for it doesn't prove anything.  But it should make one question one's prejudices as to what a "god" actually is.

I'm convinced that I'm right (or as right as my limited abilities allow me to be), even if also know that I will convince few others to see the world the way that I am.  Those closest to seeing God in this way are those who believe "God is Love", which is essentially right.  Both "God" and "Love" are the connections between people, just as "gravity" and "magnetism" are connections between objects.

I also wonder just what other "emergent behaviors" there are out there.  With billions of stars in billions of galaxies, all emitting radiation and gravity, can there be some sort of behavior that emerges or has already emerged, one so vast and energetic, operating on a time scale that we can't even begin to grasp?  Might it have that power to create a cosmos?  It's wild speculation on my part, of course, but a natural consequence of the assumption that consciousness is an emergent behavior of an organic brain.

Remember that at the beginning of this that we had to assume that consciousness is solely the province of an organic brain, and yet I was able to derive "God".  It's possible that the assumption is wrong, of course.  But if so, then we are left with an immaterial consciousness, which will also lead to proof of "God".

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[Karen Wingoof]

Wow. Wow, wow, wow! 

Aardwizzzz, you write: "Now, I know that most people, both theists and atheists and those in between will, even if they accept the existence of Culture as an emergent behavior of humanity, will yet reject calling Culture "God".  A "God", worthy of the name, should be omniscient, omnipotent, etc.  The counter argument is, of course, "On what stories are you basing this expectation on?".  Just because something doesn't match ones pre-concieved notions of what one expects that something to be doesn't mean that it isn't just what it is.  Such a rebuttal is, of course, a cheap rhetorical device, for it doesn't prove anything.  But it should make one question one's prejudices as to what a "god" actually is."

I really like this. My most recent thought about God is that God is the collective consciousness of Love, Good - and that we all play a part in maintaining this consciousness. This seems really similar, to me, with the idea you present that Culture is God.  A collective consciousness. Yeah. I want to think about this some more. But thank you, Aardwizz for bringing this idea to our Religion Forum.

And it's really good to see you again, my friend!

Karen

[Aardwizz]

I agree with you about the collective conscious. 

One of the books on my "to be read" list are the works of Carl Jung.  He was also interested in the collective conscious, particularly the common symbols ("archtypes") found. (see my forthcoming essay: "I Believe in Magic" for my riffs on symbolism and symbology).

One aspect of this is found in dreams.  Dreams, on one hand, make no sense.  "I dreamed of my sister last night; only she was a fish.  And we were living on this island....".  What Jung (and Freud) noticed is that if you can decipher them, there can be important messages regarding your situation in dreams.  Even more interesting, is that the symbolic translations seem to be the same across cultures.

What I also find interesting is how often dreams show up in the Bible, particularly in the O.T.  Like you, I don't take the Bible literally, or even accurately.  It's closer to a series of multi-thousand year old blog posts than anything -- meant to edify and enlighten and entertain, not to be taken as "gospel" (pardon the pun).  The ancients recognized that there was something important in dreams.  The questions ares -- what?, and, were they right?

Now like anything important, there is a great deal of quackery around the subject of dream interpretation.  It makes it easy -- even tempting -- to dismiss it, just as some dismiss the Bible, conspiracy theories, Christian Science healing, evolution, UFOs, global warming, and emails from Nigerian princes.  It can be tough to sort out the wheat from the chaff, especially when there is little good data, and lots of bad opinions.  Some things deserve to be chucked; other's not.

I think that both you and I have "heard God's voice".  Except that (for me, at least), it wasn't a "voice", wasn't in any "language".  I just knew things that I had no business knowing otherwise.  With you, it was that you were healed.  For me, I use this "voice" at work regularly:  I watch as my hand clicks things on the computer program, without my really giving it much willful direction, while it zeroes in to find the settings that I need to change in order to get the result that i need.  People looking over my shoulder ask, "How did you know that was there?"  I didn't -- but the hand does.

Or I might be scrolling down past line after line of code, too fast to focus on a single instruction, when suddenly I go -- "what was that?"  I go back several pages, and see a line of code that "looks wrong".  It takes a few minutes to work through the logic -- "if this .. and that..., or not something.... Oh!  THAT isn't going to do what it's supposed to."  What guided me there?  Dunno.

Some may argue that it's merely my subconscious at work, that did the analysis, read everything that my conscious mind couldn't (problem:  my vision isn't that good to have been able to do that).  It's not like I'd seen that code before -- someone else had cobbled it together, off a a pattern that I DID set.  But the mistake wasn't glaring....

Shower fairies visit me often, bringing me gifts of insightful solutions or things that I had overlooked the first time.  I never see them, of course.  One cannot see shower fairies.  But I treasure their gifts.  

Just as I treasure the help of a muse who comes by from time to time as I post, turning awkward prose into poetry.

I dislike going to a movie too long after it opens; all the plot twists and surprises are "in the air", held in people's minds.  And while I try to avoid spoilers, their body language or their expressions, tones of voice when they say the movie title or a character name -- SOMETHING -- gives much away and lessens my enjoyment.  I don't claim to "read" people's minds, but even in college I found that it was much easier to do well on a test when surrounded by people who were all focused on the same test, than it was to take a test alone.  I could almost FEEL a giant computer, made up of minds working in parallel, and of which I was a part, and thus had access to.

These are not things I would confess on the ARF.  And I am thoroughly aware that I could be fooling myself into sensing "something else" -- call it "God" or "Collective Conscious" or what have you.  But I think that EVERYONE has experienced these sorts of things:

• At a play or concert, and you can FEEL the emotions in the entire audience, reacting as one;
  
• Or in a mob, where one acts completely outside of one's character, again "caught up in the moment";  If you read interviews with those who behaved badly, they often "don't know what came over them". One can create a "devil" character in order to displace blame, but I think what "came over" them is the collective conscious of those around them.
  
• Think tanks, especially those like the Manhattan project in the 40's, Bell Labs in the 50s, Rand Corp. in the 60s, where "the air was charged" with innovation and inventiveness.

I can tie this back to Bokononism, just for fun.  Belief in something -- even known foma -- is more important to success than any sort of "truth".  That was Vonnegut's point (maybe).  Knowing that someone believes in you, or believing in yourself, gives you an odd kind of strength to achieve more than you originally thought you could.  Exercising with a group gets you to push yourself further, and with less effort / weariness, than you ever would have done on your own.  It doesn't have to be "true", and you can even know that it isn't.  Yet the "placebo effect" still works.

Some can try to sweep all of this under the rug, with words like "psychology" and "unconscious mind".  It sounds  like it's based on science, but it's not.  Psychology has no theory of how the mind works.  Or rather, it has dozens of theories, most mutually exclusive.  The only "science" behind it is some observations of behavior.  But it isn't good at predicting individual behavior, and even weak on group statistics.  Hari Seldon is fiction.  Psychology has picked up some pharmacology, some biochemistry which is science, and thus has bolstered some of its reputation.  But the deeper questions -- fear, anxiety, depression -- it's pretty clueless about.

You and I have both witnessed INSTANTANEOUS and complete ending of depression.  **poof** - Gone.  Psychoanalysis takes years, to only "make progress".  Quackery in a lab coat.

Lots more ideas in me, all interconnected, but all point to the same thing:  that we are all bound together in/by a common "something".  Call it "God" for lack of a better term, or "One" or "humanity".  One can use metaphorical, symbolic, mystical language to describe it (ancient or create new "philosphical' terms, like "process theology" - bleah!), or pretend that it isn't there (because it isn't -- there's "no there there").  Whatever it is, it is unaffected by our beliefs.  But we are.

((Thank you, Erato.  That last sentence was nice.))

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