Denyse O'Leary at The Mindful Hack relates an interesting passage from a book by philosopher Roger Scruton. Scruton, writing about the mystery of consciousness, says this:
Consciousness is more familiar to us than any other feature of our world, since it is the route by which anything at all becomes familiar. But this is what makes consciousness so hard to pinpoint. Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects - a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them. Trying to grasp it is like trying to observe your own observing, as though you were to look with your own eyes at your own eyes without using a mirror. Not surprisingly, therefore, the thought of consciousness gives rise to peculiar metaphysical anxieties, which we try to allay with images of the soul, the mind, the self, the 'subject of consciousness', the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside.
To be conscious is to be aware of a world outside oneself, but how does this awareness come about? What, exactly, is it? The brain is a lump of matter. How does such a thing give rise to the experience of green or of a sweet flavor? And the greatest mystery of all is how blind, purposeless processes could ever have conferred upon matter this astounding ability.
Materialistic atheism cannot give us even the beginnings of an explanation. Why then does it scoff at the hypothesis that our conscious minds are derivatives of another conscious Mind, a Mind that is the ontological ground of all reality?
RLC
