Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

222 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
this unity; to diminish consciousness is to reduce them. If one imagines a
series of such reductions, it becomes clear how they shrink awareness.
Eliminate everything from consciousness except your visual field: all
thoughts, physical sensations, all perceptions except the visual. You can
merely see and cannot even think about what you are seeing. You are still
conscious, but it is a reduced sort of consciousness. Reduce that consciousness
even further to only the couch in the center of the field of vision, and
then further still, shrinking it finally to a single pixel of visual information.
Consciousness, at that point, would seem to have disappeared entirely,
for without something to contrast it with a single bit of information
is meaningless.
This “connectedness” of the contents of our conscious minds is not the
only unique aspect of our mental lives. There is the whole array of atomic
mental elements psychologists sometimes call “qualia”: the various distinct
sensation of consciousness, like the color blue and the sound of a
single note of a flute. We know these things are attributes of our minds,
not of the physical world, which has been deprived by modern science of
all but mathematical characteristics. But there is no reason why the atomic
(that is, irreducible) elements of the physical world might not have a oneto-one
correspondence with the atomic elements of the mind. That is an
unfamiliar concept, but it is not unreasonable—unless, that is, you assume
that the material world can have no qualities that are invisible to us.
Something like that would have to be true if the materialist view of
mind is even partly correct. On the materialist view, in a perfect neurological
science a living brain could be examined (using some technology presently
unimaginable), and scientists could say with perfect confidence,
“This patient is thinking about a green two-story house.” Not only that,
the scientists would have to be able to identify the source of all of the
various elements of that patient’s conscious experience: each “pixel” (as it
were) of information in the subject’s mind. Yet even if they could achieve
such an amazing feat, they would not be able to understand the peculiar
structure of consciousness because it is a structure alien to the conceptual
world of materialist science. The structures of the physical world—like the
crystalline lattice of molecules in a solid—are all defined in time and space.
The relationship of each molecule to the others, or of the atoms within the
molecules, is strictly a matter of having a constant distance through time
from the others. The elements of awareness are related in an entirely different
way, a way that is unique and thus cannot be described by comparison
to anything. All we can say is that the molecules do not have—or at