Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [439]
Neither Plato nor the Greeks thought that consciousness per se was important-it was merely the experience of a soul caught in the prison-house of matter-but what Plato started was the valorization of the self because the experience of intellection was the key to demonstrating immortality of the soul. As we know Plato’s argument for the immortality of the soul depended on a priori arguments about space, time, and relation which no longer impress the modern mind, with its increased knowledge of physiological and developmental psychology. It did manage to allow humans to focus on the transcendent importance of our intellectual powers for the first time. That perception led to the notion of a “self,” eventually to a “transcendent self.” If intellection was so valuable that it demonstrated our immortality (actually both Plato and Aristotle maintained this in different ways), it was worth paying attention to it, even grooming and developing it-even if it does not literally demonstrate our immortality.
The Greeks did not speculate on consciousness as much as we do or even in the terms that we do. But it was their symbolic representation of the soul that prepared the groundwork for our notions. In ordinary speech, we distinguish between two different aspects of consciousness. We can speak of consciousness as our basic monitoring that we are alive and experiencing. This is a primitive feeling that follows us when we are conscious: We are up rather than sleeping or unconscious; the mental machinery has been turned on. That is a minimum characterization of consciousness. But there is also another, more complicated aspect of consciousness, which happens when we are introspective in some way. Sometimes this is called self-consciousness, or even critical self-consciousness.
Physiological studies have now shown that critical self-consciousness is not actually one simple and uncomposed quality in itself. We think it is a single phenomenon because we experience our own consciousness as continuous monitoring of our waking lives. It actually contains a variety of different processes, each varying according to its own cycle and level of capability. We now know that no single organ in the brain provides us with consciousness; rather many different organs contribute to it. Since the brain has many organs in it that contribute to consciousness, not a single organ that provides it, the concept of self should be considered multiple, additive, and emergent. It arises from the combination of all the various contributions that the centers in the brain and the nervous system provide.
Ironically, this is not so different from the perspective of the very ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Hebrews, though our notion of which organs provide these qualia of consciousness is very different from theirs. We no longer think that consciousness comes from the stomach or the blood or the heat of the body or the breath, though all of these are part of our normal proprioception. It was not that the primitive Greeks were wrong, it is just that they were not right enough. All those feelings are part of our consciousness but even more important to it are the monitoring functions of the various parts of our brain, a process that we do not fully understand, which still appears magical and enchanted.
Consciousness must also contain various aptitudes accessing motivations, emotions, memories, learned tasks, as well as dozens of reasoning abilities. It is hardly a tabula rasa, as Aristotle thought. It is not even a single tabula. Even what Kant called “the transcendental self” cannot be certified as unchangeable either in the history of culture.12 In traditional religious parlance, notions of the transcendent self are not universal. In many kinds of Buddhism the concept of the “self” is itself a fundamental mistake; for many Buddhist intellectuals there is,