The First Law of Consciousness

It's interesting to speculate about the role of the structure of the body in the development of ideas about a separation between the mental and the physical (dualism). I think that a strong argument can be made that dualism is the natural result of organizational constraints related to perception in living systems.

For as long as human beings have conceptualized consciousness, we've certainly known that there is sometimes a correlation between mental events and physical events. We don't see this correlation for all mental events, but it is certainly evident for many. For example, when we interact with the physical objects of our environment, it is clear that these physical events form part of the whole experience.

Scientific experimentation has shown us that the correlation between the mental and the physical is deeper than once thought. It's not just that some mental events correlate with physical events. On the contrary, experiments (like those involving the artificial electrical stimulation of nerve cells in the brain) have suggested that even our most intangible thoughts and feelings can be elicited by the artificial stimulation of certain areas of the brain. As a result, we've become aware of a deeper relation between the mental and the physical. The formerly non-physical nature of feelings, ideas, dreams, etc. has now been shown to be false because these things are physically manifested in terms of activity within a biological system.

Nevertheless, there is a difference between knowing that every mental event is accompanied by a specific pattern of activity in a physical system, and being able to grasp the dynamics of this correspondence-fully knowing the mental in terms of the physical. The physical processes that underlie a given certain mental state cannot be exhaustively known by the organism that is having that mental state as it is having it because such knowledge would require a more advanced physical system, which would in turn require more brainpower-the increasing requirements would feed back on each other!

Even though we can't fully grasp the dynamics of the biological side of our conscious experience, it's very interesting to speculate what it would be like to have this activity fed back into the perceptual organs so that the nervous system activity that corresponded to our waking experience could be perceived in real time. If we could make any sense out of the activity that we perceived, I would guess that this would have a significant effect on what it's like to experience. Of course, our existence is already defined by the fact that we do have a certain amount of this: we perceive our selves in real time-just not every process that's occurring. I believe it's this incomplete perception that is to blame for dualistic ideas about mind and matter that have arisen over the ages.