First, “What makes you?”
How can we be sure others are others? Is the mind separate from the body? What about the soul? Or, is the sense of self simply an illusion — an evolutionary gift that gave rise to the role of philosophers and theologians to hypothesize this existential question?
Consciousness is often refers to a sense of self-awareness. You’re able to distinguish yourself as being distinct from others. Perhaps, this distinction occurs as one distinguishes ones thoughts as their own — a notion popularized through Descartes’ famous, “I think, therefore I am.”
However, reductionists argue that the sense of mind can be boiled down to specific neural structures, and nothing more. For instance, when you see the colour red, specific neurons are activated in the brain. Therefore, the colour red can be reduced to a specific brain state. This isn’t unlike a computer. The colour red on a computer at a fundamental level is just binary code — ones and zeros aligned in a linear fashion which communicates the colour to the computer monitor. Of course, red is defined on the electromagnetic spectrum, meaning it can be measured on the spectrum as well (within our/the visual field of the spectrum). But here too, this can be reduced to information — binary information that results from a collapse in the quantum wave function (more on this later).
But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Most philosophy students start with Rene Descartes when it comes to question of the mind, who once famously declared, “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes essentially concluded that the only thing he could absolutely sure of was that he existed because he was thinking. His senses, on the other hand, could deceive him:
Descartes’ thoughts are in line with dualist philosophy — the concept that the mind is separate from the body, or that there are two foundational or fundamental aspects to our reality — physical and mental. For more on this problem, watch this video from Crash Course:
To clarify, dualists believe the mind is independent of the body, however, it’s still connected. The biggest flaw in this argument is the mechanism in which it’s connected cannot be explained.
Physicalists, on the other hand, believe that the mind is the result of all of the physical parts of the body. Our thoughts, and our thinking, are the result of the sophisticated nature of our physical selves
If we’re to really dig into reality, we must start at the quantum level of reality. It’s here where we can start to discuss what makes “stuff” stuff.
The simplest explanation as to how “stuff” happens. Before there is something, there’s a wave of potential. That’s not to say there’s a point of “nothing”, it means that “something” has yet to be defined.
While theories differ how this “something” becomes a “thing”, one hypothesis is that an observer needs to be involved to quantify the “thing”.
Having said that — the best way to dive into this is through the double slit experiment .
There’s a lot of debate on how the wave function collapses. Some believe without conscious beings there is no universe, only a potential universe. Therefore, consciousness creates the universe. However, definitions of consciousness vary — some believe that any material thing has some degree of consciousness, an idea known as panpsychism. If panpsychism is indeed how the universe works, one can posit that an interaction between matter and quantum field will collapse the wave function of the field.
As in philosophy, here we find disagreements within science as to the fundamental nature of our reality. There’s a bridge between science and philosophy here, and this bridge is often referred to as “metaphysics”.
