Man, apparently, has been thinking about the question of what the world around us is from the most ancient times. However, this world itself made sense only if it could be viewed from the point of view of consciousness, because even primitive man, apparently, understood: there is no conscious perception of the world around him, there is no this world either. Currently, there are at least three views on what consciousness is.
Materialism
According to materialists, consciousness is a product of the human brain, or of a more primitive animal, or even of some kind of "brain structures" of the plant world. Remove the brain from this "construction" - and consciousness will cease, which happens at the moment of death of any living organism.
However, even materialists are not quite sure that consciousness disappears after death, not to mention the fact that there are many people in the world who do not have a brain at all, and, nevertheless, live, and these are completely conscious individuals. In addition, scientists have long faced the limitations of materialism, say, with the inconsistency of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
The dualism of soul and body
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For a long time, this theory was the prerogative of only religious teachings, according to which the body (the physical shell of a living organism) and the soul (consciousness) are different things, united in our material world only for the passage of some divine task.
And although this point of view is mainly held by religious people or adherents of some kind of spiritual practice, dualism is increasingly of interest to scientists, who even measured the weight of the soul at the time of the death of a person, not to mention many other evidence of a purely scientific plan. For example, under hypnosis, a person can recall his past lives, which, on the one hand, proves the theory of reincarnation, and on the other hand, confirms the dualism of soul and body.
Panpsychism
In scientific circles, the theory of panpsychism is gaining more and more popularity, according to which the fundamental principle of our Universe is consciousness, starting from the World and ending with its manifestation in every particle of being. This is to some extent similar to the teachings of Buddhists, remember the Zen koan: who hears the sound of a falling tree if no one is around? That is, without consciousness, the surrounding world has no meaning, and therefore does not exist.
This is supported by quantum mechanics, which proves that particles have no shape or precise location until they are observed or measured. Thus, the famous American theoretical physicist John Wheeler is sure that it is protoconsciousness that plays the role of the main violin here, while all the particles of this world, even the smallest ones, are also endowed with consciousness, in contact with the Creator's field. According to this "anthropic principle of participation," nothing exists until consciousness appears to comprehend something (big or small, it does not matter).
But even among supporters of panpsychism, there is no complete agreement. Some scientists, even agreeing that consciousness is the primary cause of everything in the world, try to "tie" it to the material world. For example, neuroscientist Christoph Koch (Allen Institute) plans to connect the brains of experimental animals, and see what happens. And the English physicist and philosopher Roger Penrose is looking for consciousness in the synapses of the brain at the quantum level. At the same time, in recent years, he has been increasingly sliding towards materialism, trying to prove that consciousness is still a product of the physical world, but it only then generates mathematics itself, capable of coding the laws of physics that gave rise to this consciousness. It's tricky, isn't it?..
You can write a lot about all this, especially since it is almost impossible to prove or disprove the presence of protoconsciousness, as the root cause of everything in the Universe. But … comprehending this truth, scientists, presumably, rise one more step in explaining the world around us. This is progress anyway and is welcome!
Victoria Prime