How Consciousness Embodies All that Matters

The Ongoing Flow of Consciousness

In A New Science of Consciousness, Anil Seth, leading researcher in the field of consciousness science, states:

“Consciousness is first and foremost about subjective experience—it is about phenomenology.” (2021, p 12)

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For each one of us, consciousness is what matters the most, because it is all there is.

“Without it there is nothing at all: no world, no self, no interior and no exterior.” (Seth, 2021, p 3)

Despite the central importance of consciousness in our mental lives, psychology as a science has had a difficult relationship with it. Psychology as a science was officially born in the late nineteenth century. Psychology as an aspect of life accompanied humanity always and everywhere.

William James was a pioneer in the scientific foundation of psychology for whom introspection and awareness were important. The behaviourists after him banished consciousness from study and treated it as a black box in the stimulus-response relationship. Despite the neglect, subjective experience continued to play an important role in European phenomenology and American humanism (Merleau-Ponty, Frankl, Maslow, Rogers, and more). The cognitivists of the late twentieth century kept consciousness at a safe distance and, in t he early years, rarely touched it.

Consciousness only came onto psychology's "big" research agenda when great scientists such as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, and Roger Penrose, among others, brought the old problem of consciousness back to the forefront in full force. It never ceases to amaze me why this so central theme of psychology remained sidelined for so long in psychology. And even today introspection remains on a side path; the neural perspective dominates the scientific method.

A Balance Between Perspectives

Some crucial questions that we cannot ignore challenge the dominant scientific approach:

• Can consciousness itself be observed through the scientific method of brain observation?
• Do neural observations give us a direct and independent access to consciousness itself?

The answer given by Evan Thompson, co-researcher with Francisco Varela of the neurophenomenological perspective, is:

“Consciousness itself has not been and cannot be observed through the scientific method, because the scientific method gives us no direct and no independent access to consciousness itself.” (Thompson, 2015, p 97)

The conclusion he gives has a profound impact on what we know about consciousness:

“So the scientific method cannot have the final say on matters concerning consciousness.” (Thompson, 2015, p 97)

To understand the phenomenon of consciousness we need to develop our own consciousness. How could we understand subjective experience in terms of what is fundamentally nonexperiential? There is no possibility to step outside our consciousness or outside our embodiment.

To truly understand the phenomenon of consciousness, we cannot escape the cultivation of our own experience through forms of mental training, or we have to go into a dialogue and listen with open mind to people who cultivate their possibility for inner observation from within. Consciousness needs a balanced perspective from within and without. Psychology, it seems, is starting to take that step.

In The Feeling of Life Itself, neuroscientist Christof Koch embraces a straightforward definition of consciousness as any subjective experience (2019). He states:

“What we need is a quantitative theory that starts with experience and proceeds from there to the brain.”(2019, p xiii)

The introduction of mental training into the study of psychology to observe subjective experience directly might be the necessary ingredient to gain insight into what consciousness is, as a potential far beyond what we are used to thinking.

Many Unanswered Questions about the Evolution of Human Consciousness Remain

Despite the fact that consciousness plays a central role in human life; despite the fact that consciousness is expressed in humans as their highest possibility: consciousness hardly reaches the newspapers. It is undeniable that consciousness is fundamental for the regulation of our life and for the regulation of our emotions. (Damasio, 2021; LeDoux, 2019; Seth, 2021)

Our future depends on the future of our consciousness both short-term and long-term. The natural intelligence of consciousness is already under pressure and will be much more challenged by the rise of a new type of technological intelligence, artificial intelligence. Citing fears of the profound risks to society and humanity, more than 1,000 technology leaders recently signed an open letter calling on researchers to pause development of certain large-scale AI systems for at least six months worldwide. (Future of Life Institute, 2023, Open Letter)

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The future of humanity depends on the balance of how much we invest in developing AI or how much we invest in our own consciousness to understand its potential. (Harari, 2015, 2023) The debate between psychology and technology is ongoing: No technology without psychology first?

Also the relation between our own consciousness and our own life is crucial. Consciousness is a natural potential of humans that is so much more than we think it is.

Will the evolution of our consciousness become our highest possibility as humanity or our deepest tragedy if we fail? How much are education systems worldwide investing in mental training? If it’s not enough, will people do it to themselves? The development of collective mental training could become a political issue. Are there any politicians worldwide putting consciousness on their agenda?

As Joseph LeDoux puts it: “Can we survive our self-conscious selves?” (2019, p 373)

We cannot underestimate the double importance of our consciousness:

• Consciousness plays a crucial role in the construction of our emotions.
• Consciousness plays a defining role in the composition of our selves.

Viewed this way, consciousness embodies all there is: our life, our world, our future. Psychology plays a leading role in the possible evolution of our consciousness.