How the Fear of Death Adds to the Mystery of Consciousness
And how to begin to deflate that metaphysical mystery
By consent across the centuries, one of the greatest mysteries is the nature of consciousness. How could the most subjective thing there is be in a universe of objective, material things?
Granted, those physical things are all energized and thus animated in that they react to what happens to them, according to laws of cause and effect. But physical energy is quantifiable and not automatically subjective, contrary to panpsychists or neo-animists who see mentality around every corner.
For thousands of years, we attributed the alienness of consciousness to our inner nature itself. We surmised that consciousness seems so out of place, metaphysically speaking, because conscious states are inherently weird. Consciousness is a spirit, a ghost, an immaterial, immortal, divine fragment of a higher realm that doesn’t belong in nature. Consciousness is a sliver of the Supreme Being, of the source of all created things and is thus foreign to their mere objective, settled nature.
As the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre would put it, the existence of a conscious thing “precedes its essence” or its planned potential, whereas the essence of any physical object logically precedes its existence. A…
