Life and consciousness: Rouleau excerpt #2

Erwin Schrödinger

Rouleau writes: To describe how the consciousness of a living human can survive death, several important terms will first need to be defined, beginning with a review of “life”. In his 1944 book entitled “What is life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell”, Erwin Schrödinger provided the theoretical groundwork for the scientific study of life, anticipating among other things the “aperiodic crystal” structure of DNA and the role of mutation in evolution. Most notably, Schrödinger emphasized that life, as with all products of physical laws, is dependent upon “order-from-disorder”. That is, from the percolating chaos and disorder of the quantum world emerges – not as an accident or coincidence but as a property of the conditions themselves – highly ordered molecular structures that give rise to living organisms.

Schrödinger’s speculations provided a new and exciting path from fundamental particles to life and are recognized as foundational to the field of molecular biology. He even discussed the relationships between life, free will, and consciousness. His insightful unification of non-living matter and energy with life and conscious experience was an important acknowledgement of the continuous and inseparable chain of interactions that connect the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Since Schrödinger, there has been an explosion of information about the fundamental nature of life but the primary role of the cell as its structural and functional unit is among the least controversial facts in the field of biology.

Cells are approximately 10 millionths of a meter wide, mostly water by volume and surrounded by a thin, gated membrane that maintains order by keeping certain molecules in and others out. The cell membrane acts as a selective bridge between the inside of the cell, where chemical reactions are highly controlled, and the outside of the cell, where they are largely spontaneous or random. Because membranes can separate charged particles – also called ions – cells store an electric charge, like a battery, that can be actively discharged to help them divide, proliferate, or communicate with their neighbors. The boundary of the membrane is what distinguishes the living cell from its non-living environment.

Consider that viruses must cross the important threshold of the cell membrane to suddenly become activated and “life-like”, with disastrous consequences to our bodies. When membranes are dissolved, cells and their environments become assimilated, and life becomes non-existent. Life is therefore a state of ordered conditions maintained by a thin and delicate cell membrane that divides the world into living and non-living parts: “order-from-disorder”. As its direct negation, death, to reverse Schrödinger’s formulation, is “disorder-from-order”. More generally, death is the disorder that a living system experiences when its boundaries dissolve and it is no longer distinguishable from its environment.

Not all cells are equally relevant to the death of the individual. That is, when considering the essence of a person, we are not preoccupied with cell death in the gallbladder or kidneys. Where life, death, and consciousness interact is, as we understand it, the brain. And while the human body is a highly interconnected system, and the heart might be necessary for its function, the brain is the only known organ in the human body that is sufficient for consciousness.

Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that a brain supported by a series of artificial organs could not sustain consciousness. There are, after all, many such examples in modern medicine including circulatory pumps, ventilators, and dialysis machines that sustain conscious life. But what do I mean by the word “conscious”? A system is conscious if there is something that it is like to be it. That is, consciousness is pure subjective experience and the entry point for everything we know and can know about the external world and our internal states. It is the stream of mental chatter that defines our point of view relative to events in the world. Consciousness is, fundamentally, the thing we refer to when we say the words “I” and “me”.

For all practical purposes, it is the soul under a different name. However, just as the phlogiston theory of combustion led to the discovery of oxygen, the ancient idea of the soul has given way to a focused science of consciousness and its relationship to the essence of human life.

While consciousness and the related mechanisms that allow experience or internal representations to arise from matter are not fully understood, its existence is certain. Indeed, it was Descartes who famously pointed out that thought is the original ground truth and the foundational argument for personal existence. Today, philosophers and scientists alike generally agree that human consciousness exists and is a function of the brain.

Therefore, if the question at the core of this essay is “Can consciousness survive the death of the body below the neck including the heart?”, the answer is an uncontroversial and emphatic “yes”. However, without addressing brain death, the significance of the question at the core of this essay is completely lost. Therefore, any proposed solution for the survival of consciousness after bodily death must account for its persistence following brain death in particular.

 

Nicolas Rouleau, PhD, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, is an assistant professor at Algoma University in Canada. He received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies "An Immortal Stream of Consciousness" in response to its search for "scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death." Footnotes and bibliography are omitted from these excerpts from his essay, but the full essay is available online at https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/contest-runners-up/.