Being Conscious of Consciousness?

I find Science absolutely fascinating and beautiful, and I enjoy how it challenges to make me think about my Faith.

I've found myself getting rather caught up in the study of consciousness lately. This seems a fascinating topic that does seem to upset some people because of the way it seems to reduce human beings to mere biological machines. There seem to be theories of consciousness that suggest that it is a by-product of the way our brains have evolved.

Some would suggest that the sense of self that we have is an illusion because of experiments that seem to be able to "transplant" the sensation of being oneself into another body.

Another fascinating experiment suggests that our brain actually makes a decision before we are consciously aware of it. Rather than having free-will, this experiment suggests we have free-won't in that the decision is made within other processes in the brain, but that the conscious self can veto that decision. This does rather go hand in hand with the old adage "you can't stop birds flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair".

Scientists, on the whole, reject the idea of duality, namely that a human being is comprised of two separate species - body and mind. If the mind were something completely separate from the body, then how can it be associated with the body? How can the will of the mind be enforced upon the body?

The atheists love this idea that we are just biological machinery: our consciousness is entirely explicable, that our social constructs are largely memetic in propagation and that all religion is anti-scientific to disagree with it.

Well, one thing that Science has yet to realise is that the constant reduction of humanity to the level of machinery renders itself entirely devoid of meaning. If we are just biological machines then rationality and irrationality are both processes of the same mechanical processes. Science becomes just as memetic as Religion. It's just there and of no greater significance than what it deems as Irrationality.

Of course memetics itself is not exactly the most convincing theory going. If the concept of memes were true, then they cannot help us know whether the content of memes are true. So if ideas and beliefs are propagated via memes, then so is the idea that Science can observe all that there is. Memetics essentially nullifies any attempt to find out what is true or false. Also, memes seem to be utterly unobservable. Rather like D-brane theory, it seems to be utterly untestable.

I am not convinced by the rejection of duality, principally because I am not convinced that everything that exists is necessarily scientifically observable. But then, I am not entirely bothered by the possibility that my mind is made up of processes in the brain - I am merely a human being after all.

However, I believe in God, and further I believe God. St Augustine paints a picture of the fragility of humanity as beings of infinitesimal existence sandwiched between the nonexistent Past and Future. Likewise, these scientific findings could inspire us to see ourselves as paltry lumps of flesh. It is in God that we live and move and have our being. Indeed our being is hidden with Christ in God as St Paul tells us. We are fragile beings on a fragile world with a fragile existence. It is from God, and from Him alone that we obtain any real substance and a real identity beyond that which we can appear to measure. Our consciousness, thoughts, emotions may indeed prove to be to our existence as the stormy weather over the mountain, but it is God who shows us that we aren't the weather, but rather the mountain.