What Is Consciousness?

And: Islamo-Elephants; Somali Welfare Cheats; Taboo & The Groyper Trap

Here’s a weird, wonderful essay by the poet Christian Wiman, about consciousness and God. Here’s how it starts:

A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brain. Trees can anticipate, cooperate, and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms. Albert Einstein credited all his major discoveries to music. Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned. The term “species” is increasingly meaningless. Ninety-five percent of physicists who won the Nobel Prize in the twentieth century believed in a god. A group of hotel cleaning staff showed significant improvements in blood pressure, weight, and body mass index after being told their work counted as exercise, though their levels of activity were unchanged. Until the Eighties, it was common practice in the United States to operate on infants without anesthesia, as it was believed their brains were not formed enough to feel pain. The human brain is the most complicated thing we know of in the universe, and the development of AI will have no bearing on this. The writer Fanny Howe died on July 8, 2025, at the age of eighty-four. Form is prior to matter. The first place was a voice. There is no such thing as stillness.

Better to begin with a jolt. Lord knows we need it. But also I aim to call into question some of our most settled ideas, and lay a little depth charge under some of the dualisms that define and derange us: subjective/objective; mind/brain; belief/unbelief; reason/imagination; intellect/intuition. My goal is to solve the “hard problem”—What is consciousness?—and thereby save America from its death wish. Impossible, you say? But then your reaction to some of the statements above was the same. All but one of them are true, though the outlier will depend on who you are.

Wiman is exploring the thesis that consciousness is not something produced by the human brain, but is actually much more widely dispersed, perhaps even a field; the brain might be how we humans tap into that field.

Wiman brings up the famous account of St. Joseph of Cupertino, the 17th century Italian friar who would levitate often. This was widely witnessed. Wiman:

I learned about St. Joseph from Carlos Eire’s weird and wonderful They Flew: A History of the Impossible. Eire’s book raises the question of a culture’s epistemic reality and whether that affects the kinds of events that can occur. His scholarship is rigorous, concluding only that “the act of levitation is inseparable from belief in levitation, personally and communally.” What happens in a culture is partly dependent on what the collective consciousness of the culture allows. This has nothing to do with the truth of the events; it involves the specific form the miracles took. St. Joseph levitated because this was an act expected of the holiest friars and nuns—the physical expression of metaphysical experience, the raptured body suspended between gravity and grace. By most accounts, this was a trauma.

Let’s put aside whether St. Joseph actually flew or if everyone was caught up in a collective delusion. Either way, the phenomenon suggests some primary connection between our minds and physical reality, because thousands of people were convinced they witnessed something. This connection makes sense, as our minds are composed of the same atoms that make up the reality around us. Levitating saints, though, or housekeepers shedding pounds semantically, at least raise the possibility that we might live in a circumscribed version of reality, and that it’s circumscribed because we insist on it.

You see what he’s getting at? The idea that we don’t see things because we don’t expect to see them — that is, that our expectations bound our experience of reality. You’ll recall the story I tell in Living In Wonder, and have repeated here many times, about the American linguist Daniel Everett, who was deep in the Amazon living with a tribe when, one morning, the tribe ran down to the river bank in a great state of agitation. The jungle demon Xigaigai was standing on a sand bar in the river, threatening them — and they reacted. But neither Everett nor his daughter could see a thing. Everett was a Christian missionary at the time, and later became an atheist. But even today, he is not sure what exactly happened that morning. I even contacted him after I first read that story in his memoir, and he affirmed that though the emergence of a jungle god that he could not see violates his epistemic framework, he cannot bring himself to dismiss that the tribesmen actually saw something.

I personally know an accomplished scholar who has seen faeries. He doesn’t talk about it, because most people would think he’s crazy. But this has happened to him, and more than once. And then there is David Bentley Hart’s fantastic story of Reuben, whom Hart knew when he was a fellow graduate student of Reuben’s in the UK. Hart’s story begins:

Some years ago, when I was nineteen and living in the north of England, I knew a middle-aged man named Reuben who claimed to be visited by angels, to receive visions and auditions from God, to see and converse with the spirits of nature, and to be able to intuit the spiritual complaints of nearly everyone he met. He was a cheerful soul, with a vast and almost impossibly tangled beard of walnut brown through which he was forever running the fingers of his right hand, a few ghostly wisps of hair floating about the crown of his head, and eyes of positively gemlike blue. (Actually, his eyes were rather unsettling at times—they sometimes seemed to be lit from within—but there was never any menace in them.)

He once told me that as a very small child he had assumed that everyone was aware of the numinous presences that he saw everywhere, on a nearly daily basis. To him, a small anthropine figure dancing atop an open flower or a radiant angel standing beside a church door was as ordinary a sight as, well, an open flower or a church door. It was only when he was about seven, he said, after years of his parents’ anxiously admonishing him not to make up tales and to embarrass them with his nonsense, that he began to grasp that the world he saw about him was qualitatively different from that of most other persons; and when he was about twelve he began to appreciate how much more interesting and delightful than theirs his reality was.

I believe it.

Wiman goes on to talk about the weirdness of quantum physics, and then near-death experiences (how is it, if consciousness is bound to the brain, that many people near death report rising out of their bodies, and recall later observing details of the room that they could not possibly have known?). Then he gets to a part that had me almost howling with delight:

What if consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetic energy? “Mind is common to all things.” “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown.” “I don’t know who God is, godding inside of me.” What if all these statements reach toward one truth?

This is essentially the argument of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things, a candidate for the best book I’ve ever read. McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, and polymath who has focused for decades on the asymmetry of the hemispheres of the brain and what that means for how we perceive ourselves and the world. There are four long chapters with extensive footnotes on the subject in this immense book, but here’s the gist. The right brain sees in wholes (the gestalt), whereas the left brain loves systems. The right brain knows what it doesn’t know. It’s the source of intuition and transformative leaps in all disciplines, including math and science. For the left brain, anything outside its purview is irrelevant, wrong, or invisible. The right brain imagines; the left brain analyzes. The right brain produces (and understands) metaphor; the left brain is more rigidly literal. Poetry comes from the right brain but, interestingly, language comes largely from the left. And that right there is a key to understanding our divided brains: though we can speak of their different capacities, in fact the left and right are indissolubly linked and can’t function healthily without each other. But this health—individual and cultural—depends upon the right brain, which is larger, being the master, and the left brain being the emissary. We have reversed that order.

I’ll stop there — I do hope you’ll read the whole thing. Wiman agrees, with McGilchrist, that we in the modern Western world are destroying ourselves because of a decision our forebears collectively made at the dawn of the modern world 500 years ago to grant primacy to the left hemisphere. We subordinated and shut down our natural intuitive faculties, imprisoning ourselves in what the scholar Jeffrey Kripal calls “the iron cage of rationalism.”

(By the way, if you or someone you know is interested in this stuff, I cannot imagine a better Christmas gift that McGilchrist’s monumental The Matter With Things. I agree with Wiman that it’s a candidate for Best Book I’ve Ever Read. I need to re-read it. It’s the kind of book I will be re-reading for the rest of my life.)

Wiman ends by talking about how he is “pretty sure” that consciousness survives physical death, and mentions a novelist friend who died this year. In case you missed it in yesterday’s dispatch, my ailing mother texted over the weekend to say that she had awakened suddenly to see the shade of my sister Ruthie, who died in 2011, standing at her bedside. Ruthie leaned in to kiss her on the cheek, then disappeared. These things don’t happen to my Mom, but I believe this really did — and, knowing about how these things work, I take it as a sign that death is approaching for her. I bought a plane ticket to go to Louisiana over Christmas, because I suspect this will be the last time I will see my mother in this life.

We are Christians, my mom and me, and certainly believe that the soul survives physical death. But it is rare for God to allow those souls to visit us. As I said in Sunday’s newsletter, my late grandmother came to me in a weird dream and instructed me to go to my Aunt Julia, in the hospital dying of cancer, and tell her death is nothing to fear. I’d never had a dream like that, so I did as my granny instructed me. The next day, Julia died; her mom, my other granny, was sitting next to her, and said that Julia spent the morning calling out to people from our town who had already died, asking them what they were doing there in her hospital room.

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