Consciousness and the Natural Universe

Robert Hanna

You, the reader of this very sentence, are consciously reading this very sentence from
left to right here and now.

Dear Reader, please now read the first sentence of this essay again, this time (even)
more slowly and carefully. Obviously, insofar as you read it, it’s true. Moreover, your
belief in its truth is sufficiently justified by the intrinsically compelling evidence yielded
by the phenomenology—i.e., the subjectively experienced intentional performance,
intentional content, and specific qualitative characters—of your conscious act or process
of reading it. The sentence cannot read itself, because it’s not conscious; and nobody else
but you consciously read that very sentence in the same way, at the same time, and in the
same place, that you did. On the contrary to both of those, because the sentence is in
English you consciously read it from left to right, and you also consciously read it right
here and now, just as the sentence says. Even if nothing else in the world had existed but
that sentence and your consciously reading it from left to right here and now; even if you
had consciously read that sentence in a dream; or even if an evil scientist had somehow
produced in you a hallucination of your consciously reading that sentence: it would still
be true, and your belief in its truth would still be sufficiently justified by the intrinsically
compelling evidence yielded by the phenomenology of your conscious act or process of
reading it. There are no epistemic gaps between you, the reader of the first sentence of
this essay, and your consciously reading that very sentence. So you have authentic,
skepticism-proof, empirical or a posteriori knowledge of your own consciousness (see
also Hanna, 2015: esp. section 1.7). Or in René Descartes’s technical terminology, you
have clear, distinct, and certain intuitive knowledge of your own consciousness
(Descartes, 1984-1985b, 1984-1985c, 1984-1985d, 1984-1985e).

Granting that, then how does consciousness relate to the natural universe,
including our own bodies? This, of course, is the classical mind-body problem. In
Embodied Minds in Action (Hanna and Maiese, 2009), Michelle Maiese and I claim that the
mental-physical relation in minded living organisms like us is nothing more and nothing
less than (i) a synthetic a priori two-way necessary complementarity relation, and also (ii)
a neo-Aristotelian hylomorphic relation, that is, a mental-to-physical and also physical-
to-mental entangled necessary equivalence of “fused” inherently activating irreducible
formal or morphetic mental properties on the one hand, and complex non-equilibrium
thermodynamic material or hyletic biological physical properties on the other, such that,
(iii) as minded animals, i.e., as conscious living organismic animal bodies, we’re an

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indissoluble and physically irreducible form-matter composite, by virtue of which we’re
always “minding our bodies” (Hanna, 2011), that’s (iv) inherently poised for causally
efficacious intentional action, spontaneously initiated and creatively guided by our
synchronous acts of desire-based willing (Hanna, 2020). In short, our minds are
physically irreducible forms of animal life and we’re essentially embodied minds in
action; and this is what Maiese and I call the essential embodiment theory of the mind-body
relation and mental causation. More explicitly, the essential embodiment theory says that
the physically irreducible conscious, intentional minds of minded animals are necessarily
and completely embodied in those animals, and, more specifically, and that the
physically irreducible conscious, intentional mind of a minded animal is the global
dynamic immanent structure of the living organismic body of that very animal, a
structure that synchronously activates and guides that animal’s causally efficacious
biological powers—or as Aristotle puts it in his own terminology: “the soul (anima) is the
first actuality of a natural body that has life potentially” (Aristotle, 1968: II.i.412a22).
Hence the essential embodiment theory is committed to an updated version of neo-
Aristotelian hylomorphism about the mind-body relation.

According to the essential embodiment theory, consciousness is subjective

experience, which is to say that it inherently involves a self that’s egocentrically-centered
in orientable space and unidirectional time (= subjectivity), and also that this self enacts
or engages in mental acts, states, or processes of various kinds (= experience), and
furthermore consciousness has two basic modes: (i) pre-reflective or non-self-conscious
consciousness, which, in being naturally directed towards cognitive or intentional targets
other than itself, is immanently reflexive, or aware of itself egocentrically and
subjectively, without implicitly or explicitly forming judgments or propositional
thoughts about itself, and (ii) reflective consciousness, or self-consciousness, which, in being
naturally directed towards, or about, itself as a cognitive or intentional target, is aware of
itself allocentrically and objectively, by implicitly or explicitly forming judgments or
propositional thoughts about itself. More simply put, pre-reflective or non-self-
consciousness consciousness is just being a conscious mind that’s directed towards other
animals or things; whereas reflective or self-conscious consciousness is thinking about
itself as a conscious mind that’s also directed towards other animals or things.

But what about the relation between consciousness and rest of the natural universe
beyond our bodies? In my opinion, in order to understand the nature of conscious mind
in general and rational human conscious mind in particular, we need radically to re-
think what Alfred North Whitehead so aptly called our concept of nature itself (Whitehead,
1920/1971), radically re-conceiving nature as inherently processual and purposive,
running from The Big Bang Singularity forward, via temporally asymmetric or
unidirectional energy flows, to organismic life, and then on to conscious mind in general
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and to rational human conscious mind in particular, which in turn entails including
radically re-conceiving the mind-body relation, free agency, and emergence. In a nutshell,
my thesis is that there’s a single, unbroken metaphysical continuity between The Big
Bang Singularity, temporally asymmetric/unidirectional energy flows, organismic life,
conscious mind, and free agency (Hanna, 2024: esp. chs. 1 and 16).

Now, given (i) that we actually exist, (ii) that we also know a priori that our actual
existence logically follows from the fact of our conscious and self-conscious thinking (the
Cartesian Cogito: necessarily, if I’m thinking, then I actually exist), (iii) that the natural
universe actually exists, and (iv) that the natural universe actually existed long before
rational “human, all-too-human” minded animals began to exist as a biological species,
then since actuality entails possibility, it follows that we cannot be either logically,
metaphysically, or nomologically impossible. Or otherwise and now positively put,
necessarily, given that we actually exist and also know a priori that our actual existence
follows from the fact of our conscious and self-conscious thinking, then the natural
universe, from The Big Bang forward, structurally contains our real possibility as rational
“human, all-too-human” minded animals. And this fact about the natural universe
remains true even though consciousness does not exist always or everywhere; indeed,
this fact about the natural universe remains true even though consciousness did not
necessarily have to exist at all, far less necessarily have to exist here and now. In short, it
is a profound mistake to think that the round peg of consciousness has to be somehow
crammed into the square hole of the natural universe. On the contrary, without the real
possibility of consciousness, there would be no such thing as as natural universe.
Panpsychism (i.e., the thesis that everything in the natural universe is actually conscious
or proto-conscious) is false, but necessarily, the natural universe is potentially conscious
whenever and wherever organismic life reaches a certain level of thermodynamic
complexity; in this sense, necessarily, the natural universe is the home and matrix of
consciousness. Let’s call this thesis consciousness-oriented cosmology.

Correspondingly, here is what the contemporary cosmologist, Thomas Hertog,

building on the work of the later Stephen Hawking, calls top-down cosmology:

In this book I have argued that a genuine quantum outlook on the universe counters the
relentless alienating forces of modern science and lets one build cosmology anew from an
interior viewpoint—the essence of Hawking’s final theory. In a quantum universe, a
tangible past and future emerge out of a haze of possibilties by means of a continual
process of questioning and observing. This observership, the interactive process at the
heart of quantum theory that transforms what might be into what does happen, constantly
draws the universe more firmly into existence. Observers—in this quantum sense—
acquire a sort of creative role in cosmic affairs that imbues cosmology with a delicate

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 subjective touch. Observership also introduces a subtle backward-in-time element into
cosmological theory, for it is as if the act of observation today retroactively fixes the
outcome of the big bang “back then.” This is why Stephen referred to his final theory as
top-down cosmology; we read the fundamentals of the history of the universe
backward—from the top down…. Top-down cosmology turns the riddle of the universe’s
apparent design in a sense upside down. It embodies the view that down at the quantum
level, the universe bioengineers its own biofriendliness. Life and the universe are in some
way a mutual fit, according to the theory, because, in a deeper sense, they come into
existence together. In effect, I venture to claim that this view captures the true spirit of the
Copernican Revolution. When Copernicus put the sun at the center, he realized all too
well that from then on one would need to take the motion of the Earth around the sun
into account in order to interpret astronomical observations correctly. The Copernican
Revolution did not pretend that our position in the universe is irrelevant, only that it isn’t
privileged. Five centuries on, top-down cosmology returns to these roots. (Hertog, 2023:
pp. 254-255)

In my opinion, the essential embodiment theory of the mind-body relation and mental
causation, together with consciousness-oriented cosmology, jointly provide a rich
metaphysical framework for Hawking’s profound remark, as recalled by Hertog:

With [a] top-down [approach] we put humankind back in the center [of cosmological theory], he
said. Interestingly, this is what gives us control. (Hawking, as quoted in Hertog, 2023: p. 207,
italics in the original)

This remark captures Nicolaus Copernicus’s original Copernican Revolution in 16th

century cosmology, as refracted through Immanuel Kant’s 18th century Copernican
Revolution in metaphysics in the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant, 1781/1787), as refracted
yet again through Hawking’s and Hertog’s 21st century top-down cosmology, finally
coming home to where it always truly belonged (Hanna, 2024: ch. 7).

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