Christian de Quincey
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Deep Spirit: Miracle of Existence
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Miracle of Existence?
Q: In Radical Nature you challenge the idea of consciousness emerging from a purely material world. You point out that such an emergence of something radically new from nothing would be a “miracle.” This makes sense to me, and my own lived experience is that the whole world is conscious somehow.
But, isn't the presence of consciousness as an inherent aspect of the universe just as miraculous? Why it is more difficult to accept the emergence of consciousness than to accept that some form of consciousness has always been present in the universe? After all, isn’t the sheer fact of existence (even mere matter) an awesome miracle?
Here’s my view: Something exists. That’s a given. We know this for certain because here we are, experiencing embodied beings. Given that there is “something rather than nothing” the next fundamental question is: What is the ontological nature of existence?
(You may not wish to skip over the seemingly “miraculous” fact that “something exists” because, after all, it could have been otherwise—it could have been that nothing exists or ever existed. But this is really an inconceivable idea because it takes an existing mind to even try to imagine such a possibility. We cannot really imagine true nothingness.)
I agree, experiencing the fact of being is awesome. And to the extent that it is beyond explanation, you could say it is “miraculous.” But, really, there is no other conceivable option (now that we know we are here, that being exists). Whatever is fundamentally “given” is not only beyond explanation—it doesn’t require explanation (which involves causal sequences, and nothing not could have caused something). So, in that sense, the fact of being is not a miracle.
We have the fact of being. Next question: What is its ontological nature? Well, we know it must include consciousness because here we are contemplating it. Any materialist ontology that claims consciousness “emerges” from wholly non-conscious matter/energy slams into the “hard problem” and tumbles into the “explanatory gap.” Ontologically, materialist emergence is a nonstarter.
Therefore, since (1) we know for certain that consciousness exists now, and (2) it could not have emerged from a state of reality that didn’t possess at least some trace consciousness, we can logically conclude that consciousness must have always existed. There really is no coherent alternative (at least as far as I can see).
This is not at all parallel to the materialist claim that consciousness emerged from mindless matter—which would involve a “miraculous” supernatural intervention (to fill in the “explanatory gap” and to help us make the “ontological jump” from a wholly mindless state of reality to a state of reality that now tingles with experience).
In short: There is nothing “miraculous” about the fact of being, and that being is intrinsically conscious or experiential.
In contrast, if being were to arise from true non-being—if something could come from nothing—that would be miraculous. In fact, it would be miraculously miraculous! Very clearly, there is something “miraculous” about the notion that consciousness could emerge from wholly non-experiential matter/energy.
This is why panpsychism appeals to me as the most coherent account (the most “likely story”) of consciousness and the physical world. I haven’t addressed, here, why I see panpsychism as more “likely” than idealism—but I give detailed reasons for that in Radical Nature.
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