The Argument from Consciousness

John Henry Newman was a Catholic cardinal. He was canonized in 2019. In a book published in 1870, he develops an argument that begins with our moral conscience.^[1] His starting point is very concrete: we can feel obliged to do what is right, even when we do not want to.

This obligation is not simply like a personal preference. Preferring one color to another does not commit us in the same way as recognizing an injustice. Our conscience can also go against our immediate interests. It can ask us to put right a wrong that nobody has noticed.

So it is not the same as the opinion of the majority. It can lead us to disapprove of what many people accept. It can even oppose a civil law. Newman is interested in this inner authority, which we do not feel we can change whenever we wish.

But he pays particular attention to the feelings that accompany our decisions. After doing wrong, we may feel shame and remorse. After making amends, we may find peace again. These feelings do more than tell us about what we have done: we feel personally involved.

A comparison helps us understand his idea. When we fall, we do not feel ashamed before gravity. A mistake in mathematics does not make us guilty before a mathematical rule. A moral fault, however, can make us feel that we must answer to someone for our actions.

To transgress the voice of conscience means to act against the good it helps us recognize. Newman puts his argument this way:

“If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.”

John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, chapter V, § 1.^[2]

So he is not simply looking for a rule that distinguishes right from wrong. He is asking about our relationship to that rule. Why does breaking it take the form of personal responsibility? Why does conscience seem to bring us before someone who sees us, rather than before an impersonal formula?

For Newman, the existence of a personal God sheds light on this experience. We would not simply be facing a list of things we must not do. We would be known by someone who calls us to do good. The peace we find again after making amends would then also mean that a relationship has been restored.

This argument is not a mathematical proof. It does not turn every feeling of shame into certain proof of God. It offers a way of understanding our moral experience as a whole. According to Newman, this experience makes more sense if we really are responsible before a person who can know us.

Catholic teaching echoes this idea. The Catechism describes a law that a person discovers deep within their conscience, without having given it to themselves. This voice calls them to love, to do good and to avoid evil.^[3] So it points toward the good to be done, not just toward a past fault.

This path connects with the moral argument. That argument asks what grounds an obligation that really holds, even when we would like to escape it. Newman, for his part, stresses the personal encounter suggested by this obligation. He seeks to understand why our conscience speaks to us as though we had to answer for our lives.

C. S. Lewis offers another path, close to the previous one. Reason is our ability to examine ideas to recognize what is true. We use it when we compare arguments or check a calculation. Lewis asks how this ability can be explained if our thinking is entirely produced by mechanisms without intelligence.

It is not enough to say that reasoning takes place in a brain. We still need to understand what makes it good reasoning. One thought may arise in our mind and be false. Another may be true because it matches reality and rests on good reasons.

Biochemistry studies chemical reactions in living things. Atoms are very small building blocks of matter. Their “meaningless flux” here means movements without intelligence or intention.

Lewis sums up his difficulty in a striking comparison:

“If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on bio-chemistry, and bio-chemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.”

C. S. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?”, reprinted in The Weight of Glory.^[4]

The important word here is “wholly”. Lewis does not deny that the brain and chemical reactions play a part in thinking. He asks whether this description is enough to explain its value. Describing how a belief arises does not yet show why it deserves to be accepted as true.

Imagine two people who disagree about a calculation. Measuring the electrical activity in their brains will not, by itself, settle their disagreement. We must examine their calculations and check their conclusions. What determines the right answer is the reasoning, not the mere presence of brain activity.

So this difficulty also affects the defense of materialism. Someone defending this position asks for their arguments to be recognized as valid. According to Lewis, they are therefore trusting a reason whose reliability their own explanation of the world calls into question. They must explain why a mechanism without intelligence produces thought capable of recognizing truth.

The objection does not claim that every thought with a physical history must be false. That would be too hasty. It distinguishes two questions: how did a thought arise, and why is it justified? Lewis maintains that a complete explanation must account for both.

He draws a challenging conclusion. If our reasoning amounts entirely to blind chains of events, its occurrence does not guarantee its truth. This applies both to a materialist belief and to the opposite belief. According to Lewis, this explanation therefore also weakens the arguments used to defend materialism. It gives no reason to trust them more than the opposing arguments.

The Christian answer sees more in our intelligence than a mechanism. An intelligent God can create beings capable of recognizing certain truths. Trust in reason then finds a foundation in the intelligence that created us. The argument does not replace the examination of reasoning: it seeks to explain why this examination makes sense.^[5]

This question also connects with the argument from free will, which concerns our ability to choose and to answer for our actions. In both cases, what is at stake is the place of the person. Are we simply the place where events happen, or can we really understand, judge and decide?

Let us now move from moral conscience to lived experience. Neuroscience is the study of the brain and nervous system. It can examine memory, perception or the effects of a brain injury. Its work is essential for understanding the bodily conditions of our inner life.

The philosophical question begins when we ask whether this description explains everything. Seeing which brain regions become active during pain is not the same as feeling that pain. Observing someone looking at red is not the same as seeing red in their place. There remains a difference between an experience observed and an experience lived.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel illustrates this with a bat. We can study its nervous system and the way it hunts. We can also study the sounds it uses, which are too high for our ears to hear. This knowledge describes the animal from outside. It does not directly give us what the animal experiences as it lives as a bat.^[6]

This does not make such knowledge useless. It simply answers a different question. Describing how a being works does not yet explain why that being experiences anything. The problem concerns this inner point of view, even when it is very different from our own.

The philosopher David Chalmers made this distinction well known in 1995. He speaks of the “easy” problems and the “hard” problem of consciousness.^[7] The first concern the brain’s operations: retaining information, directing attention or producing a response. Their name does not mean that they are easy to solve in practice.

The hard problem asks why these operations come with an experience. Why would perceiving a color not simply be a matter of processing information? Why is there also a color seen by someone? Even a very precise description of the operations leaves this question to be examined.

Our inner life also has several aspects. First, there is what we feel, such as pain or the taste of coffee. There is also the fact that our thoughts are about something. Thinking about Rome is not simply undergoing an event in our brain: that thought is about a city.

Finally, there is the one who has these experiences. We are not simply talking about a pain, a memory and a decision placed side by side. A person can recognize these experiences as their own. They remember, understand and decide within a single inner life.

The philosopher Frank Jackson offers another example. He imagines a scientist called Mary, who knows everything that can be known physically about color vision. Yet she has always lived in a black and white room. What happens when she sees red for the first time?

The question is whether she then learns something. If she learns something new about red, her complete physical knowledge did not give her all this knowledge. This is the possibility the example asks us to examine. The example does not describe an experiment that was actually carried out. It is an imagined situation used to test the limits of an explanation.^[8]

The force of this argument remains debated. It is not a proof against materialism that everyone accepts. It does, however, make the difficulty to be solved very clear. Knowing every detail of how something works and knowing an experience from within seem to be two different things.

The existence of close links between the brain and consciousness is not enough to erase this difference. Anesthesia is a medical treatment that can, among other things, put someone to sleep. It can suspend conscious experience. A lesion is an injury. A brain lesion can alter memory.

These facts show a real dependence. But showing that two things change together does not yet tell us whether one entirely explains the other. Lavagna uses a simple comparison: a painter depends on a brush to paint, without being that brush.^[9]

This image only illustrates a distinction between dependence and identity. On its own, it does not prove what the human mind is. The problem remains to explain the whole person and their experience.

Matthieu Lavagna presents this argument in Soyez rationnel, devenez catholique ! His starting point is our ability to be aware of ourselves.^[10] Events do not simply pass through us. We can also recognize them, understand them and ask what they mean.

A cause is what produces something. What is produced is called an effect. One aim of an explanation is to understand how a cause can produce the effect we observe. Here, the effect to be explained is the existence of conscious and intelligent persons.

Lavagna organizes his argument into three steps.^[11] First, we really do have consciousness and intelligence. Next, according to him, an entirely material, unconscious reality without intelligence is not enough to explain these abilities. We must therefore seek their foundation in a conscious and intelligent reality, which he calls God.

The second step is where most of the debate lies. Why could a reality without consciousness not produce conscious beings? Lavagna answers by drawing on the principle of proportionate causality. This principle states that a cause must have what is needed to explain what it produces.^[12]

It does not require the cause to look outwardly like its result. An architect does not have bricks in their mind. They have the plan that allows the bricks to be arranged. What they contribute to the building exists in them in a different way from the way it exists in the finished building.

The philosophical tradition therefore distinguishes several ways of possessing what one produces. A cause can have the same characteristic as its effect. It can also have the power to produce it, without resembling it. Finally, what exists in a limited way in us can be present in God without our limitations.

God is not one conscious person among others. He is the source capable of bringing conscious persons into existence.

Applied to our subject, this principle leads to a precise question. What would allow a totally unconscious reality to produce an inner point of view? Does adding details about the organization of matter answer this question? Or are we still only describing what happens, without explaining why someone experiences it?

Supporters of the argument maintain that a conscious source answers the problem better. An intelligent God can create beings capable of understanding. A personal God can create persons capable of entering into relationships. The mind would therefore not be foreign to what grounds the world’s existence.

This does not mean that God would be a brain larger than ours. God would be the creator of persons, rather than a material element added to the world.

Lavagna also stresses how this creation makes sense. If God exists, it is understandable that he would want to create beings capable of knowing and loving him.^[13] Our inner life would then not be a surprise unrelated to the world’s origin. It would reflect a creative intention. This connects with Christian teaching about human beings created in God’s image.

The steps of the argument still need to be defended. Recognizing our consciousness does not allow us to jump straight to every claim of the Catholic faith. The argument first examines the best explanation of this consciousness. Its strength depends in part on the difficulties faced by competing answers.

The materialist has a serious objection. Our mental life depends deeply on the brain. Sleep, fatigue, illness, an injury or certain substances can change our experience. Why look beyond the workings of the nervous system to explain what changes along with it?

This position therefore rests on real observations. It should not be presented as a refusal to think. It seeks a unified explanation in which thoughts and sensations are states of the brain. Supporters of the argument recognize these observations, but dispute that they are enough to establish this identity.

Their response distinguishes the conditions of an experience from the experience itself. Describing the circuits involved in pain explains part of what happens in the body. It remains to explain why their activity is painful for someone. The question does not simply disappear as the description becomes more detailed.

Another answer uses the word emergence. It means the appearance of a characteristic linked to the way a whole is organized. In our case, the idea is that consciousness would appear when the brain reaches a sufficiently complex level of organization. This proposal deserves examination, but the word covers several different explanations.

Weak emergence refers to a characteristic that can, in principle, be fully explained by the physical workings of the whole. The classic example is the liquidity of water. Molecules are small groups of atoms joined together. This liquidity concerns the way molecules behave together. It remains a physical characteristic that we can observe from outside.

The comparison with consciousness therefore raises a difficulty. Pain does not appear only as observable collective behavior. It is also felt. For the comparison to explain consciousness, we would need to show how physical organization accounts for this lived aspect, rather than only for behavior.

Strong emergence, by contrast, claims that a genuinely new characteristic appears, which cannot be fully explained by the original physical characteristics. It therefore recognizes a mental reality that physical description alone is not enough to explain. It takes consciousness seriously, but moves away from the strict materialism described at the beginning.

This answer then shifts the question. Why does this new characteristic appear? How is it linked to the brain’s organization? Saying that it exists is a step forward, but that step does not yet explain its origin. Supporters of the argument therefore ask for more than the claim that something appears.

Finally, there is a much vaguer use of the word. We can say that consciousness emerges, and stop the explanation there. In that case, the term gives the phenomenon a name. It does not show how an organization without a point of view becomes a lived experience.

So the criticism does not concern the brain’s complexity. Nobody needs to deny this complexity to raise the problem. It concerns what we expect that complexity to explain. According to Lavagna, a more precise description does not, by itself, show why this organization should necessarily come with feeling.^[14]

The decisive question remains open to examination: do we only need to know more about the mechanisms? Or must we also recognize an aspect that their description leaves out? The argument from consciousness defends this second answer. It rests on the difference between observable functioning and the presence of someone who experiences it.

Panpsychism proposes that matter, at its most basic level, has a very elementary form of mental life. It therefore does not make all consciousness arise from a reality entirely lacking anything mental. This position seeks to take the previous difficulty seriously. It does not amount to claiming that every material element thinks like a person.

Its appeal is that it no longer treats the mental as entirely foreign to the foundations of reality. But it faces a new difficulty. How would basic, scattered experiences form a single person? Having many points of view does not yet show how the one who says “I” appears.

This is called the combination problem. It involves explaining how separate experiences could become one unified experience. Adding elements together does not automatically explain the unity of the one who remembers, promises or loves. Panpsychism must therefore account for this personal unity.

The explanation through God proposes a different starting point. A conscious person would not come from basic experiences that need to be brought together. They would be created by a Mind capable of bringing persons into existence. According to supporters of the argument, this explanation more directly addresses the presence of a single subject.

Illusionism is another position: it disputes that our inner experience really exists in the strong sense we give it. We would have the impression of possessing an inner life made up of sensations, without that impression correctly describing reality. This answer aims to maintain an entirely material explanation.

Supporters of the argument raise an immediate objection. How can we understand this impression without recognizing something that is experienced? An illusion already seems to require that it appear to someone. If the theory removes all feeling, it also seems to remove the fact it was meant to explain.

The disagreement therefore concerns a very deep question. Can an explanation lead us to deny the experience that serves as its starting point? The argument from consciousness answers that we must preserve this basic fact. Even when I doubt what I feel, something is experienced in that doubt.

Artificial intelligences raise yet another objection. They produce sentences, answer questions and carry out tasks that seem to require thought. Do their achievements not show that thought can be mechanical? It would be unfair to dismiss the question without examining what these systems accomplish.

But performance does not, by itself, prove inner experience. A machine can describe pain without that description establishing that it suffers. It can answer a question about red without showing that it sees red. We return to the difference between a successful operation and a lived experience.

This does not allow us to settle every question about possible artificial consciousness with a simple answer. If we claim that a machine could become conscious, we still need to explain what would make it conscious. Why would its functioning come with feeling? Its complexity or ability to speak does not automatically answer this question.

Both possibilities therefore bring us back to the same problem. If the machine succeeds without experiencing anything, succeeding at a task is not enough to explain consciousness. If it experiences something, that experience needs to be explained. Artificial intelligence thus makes the distinction clearer, without providing its solution on its own.

One objection remains: if the mind goes beyond matter, its relationship with the body still needs to be explained. How can we understand the fact that a bodily injury changes mental life?

The objection is legitimate. Recognizing a difficulty with materialism does not automatically solve every question about the mind. Explanations must be compared along with their respective difficulties. One must explain conscious experience in terms of what is unconscious; the other must understand the link between mind and body.

However, the Catholic position does not describe the soul as a pilot trapped in a machine. The soul is what gives life to the human body. It is spiritual: it cannot be reduced to matter. It is not a second person living inside our body. A human being is a unity of body and soul.

The Catechism uses the word form for this. Here, it means that by which matter constitutes a living human being, rather than its outward shape. So this is not a matter of adding an invisible object to an already complete body. Body and soul belong to the unity of one and the same person.

“The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the 'form' of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.”

Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 365.^[15]

This unity explains why Christians take the brain seriously. Memory, perceptions and the expression of our inner life are rooted in our body. Bodily damage can really change them. Recognizing a spiritual soul therefore does not allow us to ignore discoveries about the nervous system.

The Church also teaches that each spiritual soul is created directly by God. It is not produced by the parents.^[16] This teaching does not diminish their role in their child’s birth. It makes clear that the spiritual dimension of the person cannot be understood as a simple biological product.

Nor is the body a prison that we must get rid of. The whole person is called to the resurrection of the body. This means that the dead will return to bodily life. The Catholic faith thus holds together the reality of the body, the spiritual dimension and personal unity.^[17] It refuses to sacrifice one to preserve the others.

Brain researchers have also challenged the entirely material explanation of the mind. These researchers include John Eccles, Wilder Penfield and Roger Sperry. Their positions do not constitute proofs of God. They show that studying the brain in a laboratory does not necessarily lead to reducing the person to its workings.

Eccles strongly criticized this reduction. After his work on brain stimulation, Penfield considered an explanation that distinguished mind and body more reasonable. Sperry also challenged the materialist view of the mind.^[18][19][20] Their testimony supports an essential distinction: scientific observations matter, but their philosophical interpretation still needs to be examined.

The most important criticism can now be stated. We have often failed to understand how a phenomenon works before coming to understand it better. Why would consciousness be an exception? Would invoking God simply replace difficult research with a religious answer?

This objection would be right if the argument amounted to saying: we do not know, therefore God. But supporters of the argument propose something else. They are not simply pointing to missing information about the brain. They maintain that describing operations and explaining a lived experience are two different tasks.

Mary’s example makes this difference concrete. The imagined situation already gives her all the relevant physical knowledge. So the problem does not simply come from a scientific discovery we are still waiting for. It concerns whether this knowledge contains everything there is to know about the experience.

This difficulty is not confined to religious debate. Naturalism, in this quotation, means an understanding of the world that seeks to rely on physical resources alone. Nagel himself does not believe in God. Yet he writes:

“Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.”

Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, 2012, p. 35.^[21]

Nagel does not conclude from this that Christianity has been proved. His observation concerns the limits of this explanation. That is enough to show that the question does not arise only from religious commitment.

The argument therefore keeps a precise scope. It compares explanations of our consciousness, our reason and our personal life. It maintains that an intelligent God makes them more understandable than an entirely blind reality does. It does not claim to provide a calculation that would force every reader to reach the same conclusion.

It also benefits from being considered alongside other arguments. The cosmological argument asks why beings that depend on something else exist. It seeks a source whose own existence does not depend on something else. The argument from consciousness adds a question about what this source must be able to explain.

The fine-tuning of the universe examines the mathematical order of the world and its relationship to a creative intelligence. The moral argument examines the real obligation to do good. The argument from free will examines choice and responsibility. None replaces the others: each starts from a different aspect of our experience.

The value of bringing them together lies in seeking a common explanation. Why does a world exist, why can it be understood, and why does it contain persons capable of truth and love? The hypothesis of a creator God brings these questions together. Consciousness then becomes one part of a wider set of arguments for the existence of God.

• Our moral conscience makes us recognize a responsibility that goes beyond our wishes.
• Newman sees this as a sign of a relationship with a personal God.
• Describing brain activity does not yet explain why it is experienced.
• Our reasoning also requires an explanation of its ability to reach the truth.
• Materialist answers and their alternatives must address these difficulties.
• The explanation through God places a conscious intelligence at the origin of conscious persons.
• For the Church, body and soul form a single person.

The argument from consciousness starts from what is closest to us: the fact of experiencing something. It asks us to take this experience seriously, without separating it from the body. The brain really does play a part in our inner life. The question is whether it provides the whole explanation on its own.

The Christian answer proposes an origin that can account for this life. We can know and love because our existence comes from an intelligent and personal God. Our consciousness is no longer foreign to the foundations of the world. It finds its place in a creation where persons can encounter their creator.

Saint Augustine expresses this movement as a search for rest in God:

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Saint Augustine, Confessions, I, 1, 1.^[22]