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Paraphrasing the English bard William Shakespeare himself, we read these immortal lines:
“The qualia of consciousness is not strain’d…
It is an attribute to God himself…”
The original lines from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” actually read:
“The quality of mercy is not strain’d…
It is an attribute to God himself.”
This Godly attribute informs us of the divine nature of the qualia of consciousness:
That it is a divine gift of mercy bestowed upon humankind…
That it is a divine gift of mercy given to humanity, made in the likeness and image of God…
That this gift of consciousness defies our understanding…
It defies our every effort to measure it and to quantify it definitively.
It is an intensifying gift, pervading our waking moments; and providing our deep-sleep moments with perplexing insights.
It presents itself to us as a picturesque landscape of “felt” experience in our minds; with impulsive neural firings; registering the unseen contents of the “black box” in our brains.
Such is the mysterious nature of qualia — the subjective qualities of our innermost experiences that are so richly felt by us with such emotions; appearing only as electrical firings in our brains, yet can never be measured in any qualitative objective way. Our physicists and our philosophers describe this gap of understanding as “the hard problem of consciousness.”
So baffling is this profound experience to the greatest minds of the world — in all disciplines:
Physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, anesthesiology, medicine, linguistics, artificial intelligence, mathematics, philosophy, theology.
All these disciplines forever fail to grasp these very personal experiences that we all have, even as these disciplines fail to grasp the unfathomable mind of God.
Thus it may be said by us with justified reasoning: “In the beginning of human experience, ‘fore the dawn of Time and Space, there was the logos of consciousness.”
It is this qualia of consciousness of humankind that scriptures inform us, employing the use of metaphorical language, how wonderfully we are made “in the likeness and image of God.”
I close this introspective poem by repeating this message uttered by Portia, in Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” and paraphrased thus:
“The qualia of consciousness is not strain’d.
It is an attribute of God himself…”
As the Italian Dominican friar and priest, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) himself, would have described the qualia of consciousness, once said: “It is God’s sustaining activity of divine concurrence.”
I ask you these “teasing” questions: Have you ever wondered whether you are the sole manufacturer of your private thoughts; or whether, just maybe, they have a ‘source’ and urging beyond your comprehension?
Have you every wondered about the source of your dreams; who is observing, and who is being observed?
Have you every wondered where it is that you ( the “I,” the “Ego”) ‘go’ in your mind when you are sleeping?
Have you ever wondered why “time” and “space” seem to behave so strangely and so differently during our sleeping moments?
Have you ever heard of and wondered about the strange unexplained phenomenon of consciousness called Hyperthymesia, known medically as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), occurring in the posterior cingulate cortex, and manifested in fewer than 100 people around the world?
These are all questions pertaining to the nature of consciousness in its various states; what it is; and our role and our purpose in it.
After all is said and done, there remains for humanity the enigma of our experiences of reality. We, as first-person subjective observers of consciousness, are ourselves both the product and the participants of the logos of a divine observation; a divine observer and a divine observation involved in a hypothesized integrated “causal loop” that defies and is outside of all human measurements of “reality “ and our perceptions and experiences of consciousness.
About this poem
Qualia are the subjective, “felt-like” qualities of conscious experience. Described metaphorically, it is the “what-it-is-like” character of seeing red, tasting coffee, or feeling pain imaged in the mind and measured in the neuronal firings of the brain, but without any physical representations of such manifestations, thereby indicating a gap in our capacity of what can be measured scientifically, and our lack of understanding of what is experienced consciously, personally, and privately in a subjective manner by an individual; and therefore cannot be measured. Scientists and philosophers describe this phenomenon as “the hard problem of consciousness.” Unlike objective physical facts about light wavelengths or neural firing patterns, qualia represent private ineffable sensations that resist complete description or communication. The term “qualia” itself comes from Latin and was introduced into modern philosophy in 1929 by C.I. Lewis (1883-1964), an American pragmatist epistemologist, who became a leading authority on symbolic logic; who profoundly influenced 20th century analytic philosophy; and who continues to do so in the 21st century, particularly in the allied fields of quantum physics and computing, neurolinguistics, structural linguistics, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, neurobiology, medicine; and philosophy in general. As a pragmatist epistemologist, Lewis conceived qualia as properties of sense-data that are stored away in the metaphorical “black box “ of the human brain; and which are made available only indirectly through simulated introspection — perceived as the raw, quantitative “feel” of ‘seeing red’ or of ‘tasting bitter’ that cannot be fully reduced to physical descriptions. It is instructive to note that the phenomena of qualia as subjective felt qualities of conscious experience is captured beautifully by the poet William Shakespeare who, in Act 4, Scene 1 of “The Merchant of Venice,” has the character Portia delivering these memorable enduring lines: “The quality [qua qualia] of mercy is not strain’d….It is an attribute to God himself.” more »
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