What is the Conscious Mind?

Materialists assume that consciousness will arise out of a certain level of material complexity. I maintain that the evidence is against this.

Let us begin with consideration of 'the Indefinables.' The most basic concepts or ideas are perceived by us directly, and recognised, but we cannot actually define them, because we build up our mental world based upon these primary data. We cannot define them because if we did, we would be using in the definition an even more fundamental concept and word, which itself would be indefinable.

I hold the position that the World (Universe, Reality) as we know it is composed of Mind and Matter, and that these two are qualitatively different.

The 'indefinables' of Matter/Energy (because, as Einstein showed, these are two aspects of the same reality) are: mass, length, time, electric charge, and the more recondite properties of the sub-atomic particles.

The primary data of our senses are also indefinable: the primary colours, taste, odour, sound, the sense of touch. But I would leave these to one side as they involve very deep questions of the nature of subjective impressions. The former Fundamentals are adduced by our faculty of Reason; the latter, via our senses.

The indefinables of Mind are: Truth, Beauty, Goodness: Consciousness and Free will.

To describe it differently, Matter is that which has mass, extension in space, time, and other physical properties such as electric charge. Spirit is that which can Know and Love.

Modern technology has progressed to an astonishing level. I remember the thrill of seeing the back of a CD, brilliant with the second-order effect of diffraction colours. Those brilliant rainbow colours are not 'in' the material of the CD, but are produced because the minute dots punched in the material are of a size comparable with the wavelength of light. I thought, 'To think that we can do that!' Likewise, micro-electronic technology has now reached a level of miniaturisation to the point where it can be interfaced into the human nervous system. A patient with an amputated arm is able to move and direct an artificial limb literally by thinking about it: the thought from the brain is translated, by the brain, into particular nerve impulses which travel along the first intact part of the nerve, then are continued into the micro-circuitry of the prosthetic limb.

My desktop computer has more than enough computing power to take an unmanned spacecraft to Mars, pick up a sample of rock, and return to Earth; it can carry out computations thousands or millions of times more rapidly than I can; certain computers have been programmed to assess situations and arrive at decisions for further action; and yet, with all this, no computer has shown the least tendency to emerge into consciousness. The supercomputers that run the worldwide web are no more self-aware than is my grandmother's typewriter.

Catholic theology teaches that our material bodies are made 'from the dust of the earth' but that our mind is directly created, after 'the image of God' and joined to our material body at conception. We are one rung in the Ladder of Creation: from inanimate matter, via plants and animals (which have sensation, and in the higher animals, some form of self-awareness, but not rationality) –all of which belong to the realm of physical matter, and bridging the gap to the sprit world of angels and devils. [God is not part of the chain: He is the Author and of a different level of reality, in the same way that Shakespeare is not one of the characters in his plays.] It is precisely our place to be the interface between spirit and matter. 'Originally' our task was to reform and reclaim the material world, which had been corrupted by sin (probably that of the evil spirits, but not necessarily) but we failed the test and are ourselves corrupted, although not irreparably. Our destiny was to be lifted out of our 'natural' potential to something much higher. An analogy is given by our domestic animals: horses, dogs and cats. These can never be better than very successful animals: although even then, we introduce them to realms they never attain to in the wild. But it is as though we could offer to make them talk and join in our human life. That is what we are promised with supernatural life. We cannot attain it by our own efforts, but God has promised to raise us to participate in the divine life of the Holy Trinity.

It seems to me that the world abounds with evidence that there is more at work than the Four Particles and Four Forces of the 'Standard Model' – that we have not, in fact, uncovered the entire story. The Inductive Method, promoted by Bacon, has a fatal flaw. It was pointed out over a century ago by Christian writers such a G.K.Chesterton and C.S.Lewis, but the objections were not taken seriously by the scientific community before a respected scientist-philosopher, Karl Popper, enunciated them in the mid-twentieth century. The basis of the Inductive Method is that we make controlled observations to deduce the underlying Laws. This works very well up to a point: it was discovered that falling objects travel at the same velocity no matter how heavy they are; that a thrown stone travels in a parabola, not a combination of straight lines and arcs of a circle; and so on. Bacon had an optimistic view that in a relatively short time the Laws of Nature would be revealed. The drawback was that it is never possible to prove a negative: we can predict with great accuracy how fast a stone will fall; but we have emphatically not proven that it ALWAYS falls at this velocity. The truth of this was demonstrated in the early twentieth century: by the laws of quantum mechanics, it is actually possible, although extremely unlikely, that the stone will rise before it falls. (The Brownian Motion of the atoms, which is due to their temperature, instead of cancelling out, might, purely through random chance, at one instant point all of the atoms in the same upward direction.) [Footnote – the concept of randomness itself requires consideration, but let that be left to another discussion.] The example has been given of chess. If an observer has not been given the Rule Book, but is deducing the Rules of Chess by watching actual games, he may well adduce most of the rules in a relatively short time. He might conclude that a pawn can move only one square in a forward direction, and 'take' a piece by moving one square diagonally forwards. But he might not be aware for a long time of the 'en passant' move which allows, in specific but rare circumstances, a move of two squares forward. There would be no warning of this move before he witnessed it. In the same way, we never will have absolute assurance that we have managed to read 'the whole rule book' of the Universe.

Now the world is full of stories that defy the explanations of what we might call Standard Textbook Science. Some are undoubtedly fabrications or wild exaggerations or distortions from constant re-telling; but others are reported from what appear to be reliable sources. I have noticed that entire sets of such data are rejected out of hand by those of a particular mindset, not by weighing the evidence on its own merits, but but dismissed out of hand because to accept them would entail the modification or complete scrapping of a pre-determined mind set. I would notice that Protestants tend to reject each and every account of a miracle, even including such places as Lourdes which are given scrutiny as careful as anywhere else in medicine; 'Silent witnesses' such as the Turin Shroud and the 'tilma' (cloak) bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadeloupe, and what happened when attempts were made to dynamite it; the list is practically endless. This is not to mention the happenings of Black Magic, Voodoo, séances, acupuncture; the radio message received during the 'Dam Busters' Raid, after the plane was seen to have blown up; the death of Rasputin; the 'Out-of-Body' experiences of many, some of which were subject to objective verification ... the list is even more endless (if one can abuse the language by saying that)...

From my own weighing of the evidence, it seems to me personally that (quite apart from the Christian Faith) there is very strong evidence for the existence of self-aware Mind as a separate thing from Matter, which has observable effects on the visible world, and which is not simply some kind of side-effect of the interactions of material Matter.

As for why I am a Catholic, I would refer you to the web page

https://sites.google.com/site/catholictopics/theological-issues/why-do-you-believe-in-god

for a personal viewpoint.