So you've got the idea by now: the outside world is a mystery we can never hope to completely penetrate, and for this purpose our own bodies, even our brains, are part of that "outside" world.
"I have only one universe to sample, so I have no point of comparison by which to judge this one 'strange'"
All our knowledge of this world, and of ourselves, comes through our senses in ways that both severely limit and distort it.
That primary sense input is meaningless to us, until we have, through a process of analogy, categorized it and made it meaningful. (More about the details of how we do that in a later post.)
Once we have categorized it, we can perceive it, and once we have done that, we build the world we experience out of the results.
There is only one piece of information we have which is not a result of this process, and that is the simple fact that we do, in fact, experience this world. It may be only a world we have created from tenuous clues, but we are conscious of it, and that fact, the fact of consciousness, is something we do know directly.
When you think of it, it's an odd kind of knowledge. All our other knowledge is about the thing perceived. But this knowledge is about the perceiver, about ourselves. And in the end the only thing it really tells us is that we do perceive. We are conscious.
This raw, unadorned fact of our consciousness is the only direct contact we have with mystery. In this one area, we know what it is like to be.
And it only tells you what it is like to be you. You have no direct evidence that I am conscious, and I have none that you are. We each assume that the other is, anyway, for a variety of reasons, but at bottom there is no Turing test for consciousness—intelligence, maybe; consciousness, no.
On the other hand, I am quite willing to believe that you are conscious, if only because it would be a very strange universe where everyone walked around appearing to be conscious, when only one person is. (On the third hand, I have only one universe to sample, so I have no point of comparison by which to judge this one "strange")
Still, I'm willing to go with it. And I find, when I go with that, that it's hard to stop. Why, if I am willing to extend consciousness to you, would I deny it to my cat? He certainly appears to be conscious—more conscious than some people I have met.
And if my cat, certainly a mouse. If a mouse, why not a spider, or an amoeba, or a virus? Obviously my cat is not conscious in the same exact way that I am, and obviously a mouse would not be conscious in the same way as my cat. But perhaps consciousness is simply there, as a part of the universe.
It's very interesting to me in this regard that the words translated "spirit" and "soul" in ancient Greek and Hebrew, in their most basic sense, meant something like "energy" and were closely connected to consciousness.
Our ancestors may have been on to something there. Perhaps, when we experience, we are simply seeing what energy, or being, is like from the inside. Perhaps that whole outside world is a world of consciousness, perhaps to be conscious, in some fundamental way, is what it means to be.
I (and you) have no way of knowing how far to generalize our own experiencing. Perhaps consciousness is just how everything looks from the inside, or perhaps I am the only conscious person in the world. What each of us (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here) does know is that that's what the inside is like for us.
The only place we can really experience mystery directly is at our center.
And somehow, even there, it manages to remain a mystery.
