The How & Why Of Consciousness

Raymond Tallis says the mysteries haven't been solved.

- Raymond Tallis

Of the many mysteries in which our existence is wrapped, three seem especially resistant to being transformed into soluble problems: why there is something rather than nothing (the origin of stuff); how the material world gave rise to organisms (the origin of living stuff); and how organic life came to be aware of itself and its surroundings (the origin of conscious stuff).

Physicists, who routinely go, even dance, where others fear to tread, sometimes imagine they have an answer to the first mystery. According to Lawrence Krauss in A Universe from Nothing (2012), the universe may have arisen out of nothing in virtue of an instability in the quantum vacuum that somehow delivers a preponderance of stuff over antistuff. This seems closer to creative accounting than a plausible creation story.

As for the second mystery – the emergence of living stuff in a dead world – a succession of theories, and numerous experiments replicating the conditions prevailing when life is thought to have begun, have brought us no closer to a coherent story of the origin of organisms. Yes, we can propose plausible mechanisms as to how molecules associated with life, such as carbohydrates, nucleic acids, and proteins, might have arisen. What is not at all clear is how these could have generated the dialectic between relatively stable structures and the interactions necessary to maintain those structures seen in the most elementary organisms. (For a discussion of this, see my piece ‘The Soup and the Scaffolding’, Philosophy Now, Issue 83.)