The Absolute Reality of Consciousness

THE ABSOLUTE REALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

When we observe the world, study it, use carbon-dating to see how old things are and how old the planet is and so forth, and look at the cosmic microwave background radiation that evidences the Big Bang, we realise that we live in an expanding Hubble bubble that is close to 14 billion years of age. Granted! And of course, at the early stages when stars and galaxies hadn't even formed, there was certainly no conscious life to observe the cosmic shenanigans that were unfolding. Granted! It did not require consciousness to exist. But that can only be said to have happened in hindsight, billions of years later when conscious and sufficiently intelligent creatures like us do the 'forensics'. Then the past can be said to have existed.

If we want to get epistemologically PEDANTIC, the only thing that isn't an illusion, the only thing that we cannot say 'it seems to exist' about it, is consciousness. Because if we make the mistake of saying that we 'only seem to be conscious', then we have to concede that the seeming IS the reality—that the 'seeming' is what we are talking about when we mean consciousness. Not to mention that to think of consciousness as an illusion would render the term 'unconscious' completely meaningless. So, again, we can only be sure that consciousness is real.

Think about it like this (and I am only providing an unfalsifiable scenario here for the sake of argument): we could be absolutely mistaken about reality; it SEEMS that we live in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe according to our observations, but we could be brains in a vat (similar to The Matrix) being fed all this information. It could still be a false reality!

You can't be sure that what you perceive is real and not just a very elaborate illusion. Of course, most of us behave as though this reality is, in fact, true because it is all we can go by and it is pragmatic to do so. Even if the world is an illusion, it is a consistent one that we can all rely on. But imagine that tomorrow you wake up in a gooey tank being freed by a machine Neo-style, and someone in the true real world told you that you really live in a 20 billion-year-old universe and that you and every other scientist in a vat were merely made to believe that you lived in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe. At that point, you would be pressed to consider that you could no longer trust your senses after learning that everything you thought you knew wasn't true after all.

But the one thing, the very thing that you could be 100% sure of. The one thing that you would know to be absolutely true, would be that you are having an experience of some sort. Experience is the only thing you can be sure of with 100% certainty. In other words, your own consciousness.

This goes back to the wisdom of Socrates and it is still true: 'One thing I know is that I know nothing.'