Does Consciousness Lead to God? | Susan Blackmore

Sue, the postulate of an immortal soul is very significant for those people who believe in God. Now, that's part of what we call the mind-body problem. I'm an old neurophysiologist, and so I'm very familiar with how the brain works. But help us understand the issue of that question. Is there an immortal soul in terms of the mind-body problem? I think we have to start from how it feels. It feels like there's an immortal soul. It feels as though what's important about me is that I'm conscious. There's things I'm conscious of, and there's me. And that me is something that feels as though it lives in the body and has free will and can make my arms move, that sort of thing. It just seems to feel that way. There are lots of reasons in the evolutionary theory why it should feel that way. But you then go and look in a brain, and what do you find? You know what you'll see in there, don't you? Actually, I've never looked in my own brain, but you will see a great kind of porridge-y mass in there of billions of neurons connected up in billions of ways. How can a soul be there? The more we understand about the brain, the further neurophysiology and neuroscience progresses, the less room there is for a soul, or even for a self. Because all of the jobs that were previously given to the soul, being conscious, causing actions, thinking, having insight, thinking up new ideas, being creative, all of those things, we are beginning to see how the brain does them. Also, there's no middle. The concept of the soul is very much related to the idea that stuff comes in to me, and I'm conscious of it, and then I decide what to do, as though there's a sort of middle or a top, you know, where I am. But the brain isn't organized that way, it's massive, parallel, lots and lots of different things all going on at once, with no middle. So there's this huge clash between neuroscience and how it feels. So that's the genesis of the problem. The genesis of the problem goes way, way back, long before people knew anything about neurophysiology and how the brain works. They still could see there was a mind-body problem, in the sense that there's all these physical things and hands and arms that move, a bit like machinery, and there's also experience. So the origin is long before neurophysiology. But interestingly, neurophysiology seems to make the problem worse, not better. It's as though it's kind of pushing us and pushing us and pushing us to realize that we've got a completely wrong view. We need a massive paradigm shift. You know, the old-fashioned view is absolutely, I'm a spirit or a soul, and I'm important, and I might even live forever. That's the kind of starting point for all human cultures. And then science is forcing us, forcing us and forcing us and forcing us, as it forced us to see that the Earth is not the center of the universe, and, you know, we're not the only reason for life on this planet. It's forcing us, I think, to come to that truth. We're not a spirit, we're not a soul, we're not even a little self inhabiting our brains. The more sophisticated arguments today start by saying, when I look at your beautiful coat, that I'm perceiving the colors and the reds, and yet if you look at my brain at that same time and had billions of electrodes into billions of neurons, you would see a lot of spikes and a lot of activity that would directly relate to it. But spikes and evoked potentials and electrical responses in that description is not in any way the same kind of description of what I'm seeing. The two are totally different. They may be 100% correlate, they may be cause and effect, but there is absolutely no similarity in the descriptor of each. That's where the argument starts today. That's how it seems, and that's a wonderful explanation of why it's a mystery. So how do we get out of that? It's an extraordinary position that we're forced into, isn't it? How can neuron firings be your experience of this red, and yours might be different from mine. How do we get out of those traps? I think we got into them by thinking about ourselves in completely the wrong way, and we've got to get out of that somehow. So is it possible to give up the idea that there's a little self in here, or that there's free will, the things that tie us endlessly round in that trap? And I think it is. I think there are two ways we have to do this. One is the science. The more the neurophysiology we do, the starker the problem comes. We just keep doing it and keep doing it until we really know exactly what's happening when you're looking at the red thing. The other thing I think we do is work with our own experience. So I've been meditating for nearly 25 years now. I do a lot of meditation as a way of training the mind to look. What is it like to look at red? It's easy enough to just go, oh, I know what it's like to see red, but actually, odd things start to happen. Take interesting drugs, try all kinds of mind-altering techniques, do all sorts of things to try and actually say, well, what is it like to see red, or to experience this amazing museum? How can we bring those two things together? Now, I think when you let go of the idea that there's a little self in here, and let go of the idea that there's free will, and that I am a free thing in here that's doing stuff, and actually just behave as though it's all just the universe doing its stuff, the problem begins to ease a little. Somehow that's the way we need to go. What does that mean, the universe doing its stuff? There's not separate souls and spirits. Okay, if there aren't, that's what the science seems to be telling us. Let's try and live that way. So right now, I'm not thinking, in here is not thinking going on, oh, I'm now doing a TV interview. Rather, it's all happening. This TV interview is happening. There's all just stuff pointlessly going on. You don't have to be unkind about TV, I mean, it's not that pointless, it has a little bit of a point. What I mean is, gosh, this is taking us a long way, in a sense, from the mind-body problem, but it's all tied up with it. I think from the science that I know, and all these years of studying this stuff, that this is a pointless universe. We are here for no reason at all. We evolved the way we did because of the happenstance of the way this planet is, and it's all just stuff happening. Everything happens because of what happened before, and it's that kind of a universe. And you're completely convinced that we can explain everything about our self-consciousness, our mental life, by what resides exclusively in our heads? Well, I think we will, but not as a materialist. I mean, that's the trouble. People so often, when they say that, I think they mean, oh, well, we'll get rid of consciousness, we'll explain it away, and it'll all be a matter. But that won't work. Somehow we have to see through the duality. I don't know how we're going to do it. But I know certain things won't work. Inventing spirits and souls that can't be found, for goodness sake, I spent 25 years as a parapsychologist looking for those things. And we loved you for it. Thank you. But I was hit again and again and again with the facts. And it's not like that. You know, I couldn't find any telepathy, I couldn't find any clairvoyance, I couldn't find any evidence of life after death. All the evidence again and again just disappeared the deeper I looked into it. So I think we are forced to try to understand it without recourse to all those kinds of things, without recourse to a soul or a spirit. We haven't done it. That's what makes science at the moment so absolutely, or neuroscience, absolutely gripping and wonderful. Because it's pushing us up against that most human of questions, you know, who am I? Why am I here? What is this? And we will sometime, I'm sure, come to some resolution. But it won't be by getting rid of consciousness or getting rid of matter. It will be somehow seeing how they're the same thing. But having no souls, no spirits, nothing non-physical as part of the picture. No, nothing non-physical in that sense of, you know, something in another dimension or some sort of waffly little spirits, not that sort of thing. But what quite we'll end up with meaning by physical and non-physical, fundamental changes are going to be needed to bring together mind and matter to see that they are the same thing. They've got to be somehow and I don't see how and I don't think anyone sees how yet. But that's the way we have to go.