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Good morning. I'm Bill Greenway, and I teach philosophical theology here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. It is my pleasure this morning to introduce Dr. Robert W.

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Jensen, Professor of Religion Emeritus, St. Olaf College, now Senior Scholar for Research, Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton and the 2001 Thomas White Curry Lecturer. As a philosophical theologian, I am especially pleased for this opportunity to introduce Dr.

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Jensen, for his talks exemplify the particular promise of philosophical theology. Dr. Jensen begins with realities which stand near the heart of all humans striving for meaning and beauty and justice and community. Every day in seemingly well-understood realities such as death, freedom, and consciousness, he unveils their complexity, rehearses some of the West's most profound non-Christian reflections upon them, reflections of Heidegger, Hegel, Aristotle, Kant, relates these reflections to the insights of such seminal theologians as Luther and Augustine,

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and then puts all these reflections into conversation with the sensual Christian doctrine of the Trinity, thus suggesting how a doctrine which can seem to many like an abstract puzzle about three in one and one in three, how this doctrine of the Trinity can live not as a puzzle, but as a distinctly Christian way of thinking, being, and living faithfully, a way which can stand in conversation with the most complex of reflections upon these topics, in which can lend richness and coherence to our attempts to understand and thus faithfully to live our lives. It has been a privilege to join with a community of laity, pastors, students, and professors, eager to give the time and energy required to struggle together with these provocative and difficult reflections. And I think I can safely speak on behalf of all of us in thanking you, Professor Jensen,

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for the considerable experience and learning and research and insight and care which you have clearly poured into these lectures. We look forward to hearing your final lecture, Thinking Consciousness. Please join me in thanking and welcoming Dr. Jensen.

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Let me take the opportunity to thank Austin Seminary and its community for the hospitality you've shown to Blanche and me while we were here. This lecture or talk, lecture it hardly is, will be more like the first. I warned you of that in that I'm going to drag you through some seemingly remote reflections, but I guarantee we will get around to Christianity at the end.

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The same promise I made the first night. Suppose a robot were constructed that in general behaved intelligently, and when asked, Do you believe in God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? responded, I believe and ask God to help me. Should the church thereupon baptize the robot?

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Now, that supposition is not in fact made-up. They are building intelligent robots at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, and a young Lutheran theologian, a woman, is on the staff and says only half facetiously that it is her goal to build a robot she could baptize. Various puzzlements would bedevil the decision whether to baptize that robot. But among them surely would be uncertainty as to whether this confession of faith was done consciously.

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As to whether the robot, that is to say, is a conscious entity. And that itself would be a puzzlement for how would we find out. In my first talk in this series, it was the impossibility of thinking the termination of consciousness that launched our reflections. Now it is consciousness itself that I want to make our problem.

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The theological importance of being able to think the notion of consciousness may not be so immediately apparent as with death, the subject of the last talk, but it is nevertheless great. So, to some extent, the... theological problems about consciousness arise from considerations close to that which occupied the previous talk. After all, my resurrected self and my present self must surely be one consciousness, for otherwise it would be hard to see how it was I that was resurrected.

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But does consciousness need a body? If it does not, then why does it need a resurrected body at all? If it does, what about the time between my death and the resurrection when my body is not?

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Or in a different connection, is consciousness itself divine? As we will in a moment work out that it has been thought to be divine throughout Western history. But am I then divine because I am conscious? So there are two questions I will consider.

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One is a more conceptual problem. That's where I'll be dragging you through Aristotle and things. And the other is a more strictly religious problem. First, the conceptual problem.

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Our notion of consciousness displays a logical twist It is sort of the reverse of the one in which I played in the first talk. In the Hegelian jargon I used at that time, and I'll just use it for one second here and then drop it, the notion of consciousness seems to have a proper Hegelian picture for Stellen. We have an image of it, we can talk about it.

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But we seem to lack a proper concept. The sentence, I am conscious, or Jones is conscious, are surely usable sentences in many contexts. But The concept that seems to appear in such sentences, namely, is conscious, which should apply to anyone, is peculiar at very best.

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In certain contexts, we know how to fill the concept out to make a usable question or answer to a question. So I may be asked, here's Jones. And Jones' eyes are closed. And you ask, Is Jones conscious?

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Well, it's a perfectly respectable thing to ask. And I may poke her a bit, eyes pop open, wave my hands back and forth in front of her eyes, the eyeballs follow. I say, Yep, Jones is conscious. That's a perfectly ordinary answer to a perfectly ordinary question, or so it seems.

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But though we can handle many such particular questions, we seem unable to answer the general question. What must be so for us to say X is conscious? What would have to be so for us to say that that robot was conscious and confessed the faith consciously so that we could baptize him, her, or it? We seem to be unable to answer the general question, what must be so for X to be conscious, even though we may just have answered the question, is Jones conscious, by checking to see whether something was so, namely, whether her eyes followed a hand.

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Now, proper thoughts don't behave that way. Proper concepts do not behave that way. So far as we know, only those entities are conscious, that are living organisms, have brains of a certain complexity, and manifest certain behaviors. The problem is, that's only so far as we know.

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There's nothing about consciousness as we directly experience it, I experience that I am conscious. There's nothing about consciousness as it immediately presents itself to us that requires this restriction. Is an amoeba conscious? A penguin?

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A petunia? How would we tell? And what about that robot? However would we decide the question?

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about it or him or her. For after all, on the one hand, a disembodied consciousness, or on the other hand, a conscious tree, or rock, are easily imagined and in the history of religion have often been imagined. The soul, a disembodied consciousness, is frequently imagined in many religions, not just in Christianity.

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And in the other direction, shamanist religions regularly imagine conscious trees, rocks, or whatever. Nor, are the signs by which we sometimes decide that consciousness occurs, dispositive even with the embodied Jones, let's say, who follows our hand with her eyes. For even when she does this, we may remain doubtful about whether she is really conscious.

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And in conceivable circumstances, we might persist in doubting it, even were Jones to sit up and argue the matter with us. We still might wonder, in conceivable circumstances, whether she was doing this in full consciousness. Indeed, if we are perversely determined to do so, each of us can consciously doubt that there are any other consciousnesses. surrounded by many apparently conscious entities, though we may be.

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Are you out there? I know I'm conscious, but do I know that you are really? Or might not you all be some collection of highly sophisticated robots made by God to deceive me? I mean, even the ones of you who aren't obviously asleep.

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How would I know? Thus, it does not seem that we have a concept of consciousness that works as concepts are supposed to, which naturally provokes repeated attempts to achieve one. And here is the point where it becomes theological. Current attempts

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usually take the form of explanation of consciousness. That is, of theories aimed at covering the appearances, enabling predictions, and all the rest that theories of natural or historical phenomena are supposed to do. Many such explanations have been offered. It reflects the logical problem here, and is the point at which it impinges on theology, that the offerings regularly turn out to be what those unsatisfied with them often call reductive.

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That is, they explain consciousness by saying it is really something different. from what immediately presents itself, from what I know in knowing that I am conscious. Consciousness, it will be said, is really electrochemical patternings and events in one of the things of which I am conscious, namely the brain. Or a recent theory, it is the event of emancipation from control of mental behavior by continuous immediate divine revelation.

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The ancients, according to that theory, very seriously offered, and it's a serious theory, experienced complete control continuously of their minds by immediate divine revelation. And so they weren't conscious exactly. When that stops, is when self-consciousness emerges.

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Or it is a certain balanced interaction between different bodily locations of intelligent behavior. Ann Forrest, who's the woman I talked about earlier at MIT, they're convinced that a computer can't be conscious, but that a robot with a different computer in the grasping arms and in the feet and controlling the eyes and so forth, it could be conscious. But despite the popularity of such reductive explanations and the great academic fame and eminence, by the way, don't take academic eminence too seriously, but there's been many

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an academic idiot eminence. Despite the popularity of reductive explanations and the eminence of some of their proponents, they are all I think, rather crude category mistakes. Two points will make this clear, I think.

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First, I can explain a phenomenon, any phenomenon, by incorporating it into a body of theory like brain science in the present case. that does not itself mention that phenomenon, because, of course, brain scientists don't mention consciousness. They mention electrochemical patternings and things. I can explain a phenomenon by incorporating it into a body of theory that does not itself mention that phenomenon, only if I already have some concept of the phenomenon, only if I have some theory about it.

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For only theories can be reduced to or incorporated into other theories. But an initial theory of consciousness is just what we lack here. And second, the mere fact that we can imagine a disembodied consciousness, we can imagine the soul, shows that what is immediately given, what we've got some imaginative pictorial, if not conceptual, grasp of, what is immediately given will not be appropriately matched by a concept that by itself rules out that possibility.

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So there may or may not be so disembodied consciousnesses, but a theory that rules that out in advance, like an explanation in terms of brain waves, doesn't match the thing of which is supposed to be a theory. Now, obviously, I'm about to offer a theory of consciousness. And it will be a theological one.

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But it will not be reductive. That is to say, it won't try to explain consciousness in terms of something else than consciousness. And it won't have to, because in Christian theology, there is already a body of theory, a body of discourse that mentions consciousness, and that is Christian teaching about God and the church. And therefore, within Christian theology, there is a body of theory to which what we experience and immediately grasp each of us as consciousness can be fitted.

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Now, any such non-reductive theory of consciousness, as I am going to offer shortly, will, in a way, seem unsatisfactory. For it will not explain consciousness in terms of something else that we think we understand better. But maybe there isn't anything else that we understand better than consciousness in terms of which we might explain it. Perhaps the order has to run the other way.

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And consciousness has to be acknowledged as one of those things in terms of which we explain other things, and this being like time or space or otherness. The theory will be theological, and that brings us to the second of our problems with the notion of consciousness and the more directly religious problem, and here's where Aristotle comes. Three things have long been noticed about consciousness, as we know ourselves to be conscious. And notably and foundationally, they were noticed by the great Greek thinker Aristotle.

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First, there does not seem to be anything to my consciousness, but that of which I am conscious. That is to say, there is no consciousness that isn't consciousness of something or other. Second, nevertheless,

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There seems to be some difference between my being conscious and the things of which I am conscious. And third, and this is the point that won't be immediately obvious, we have to an argument, and I'll present the argument. So soon as we ponder the relationship between those two points, consciousness assumes an aura of godlikeness, an aura of divinity.

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And I'll follow Aristotle's argument in that order, then the first of his observations. Aristotle's introspective analogical analysis of consciousness produced two sets of what we can call phenomenological descriptions. According to the first, consciousness, quote, is not anything actual until it is consciousness of something. But then when it is consciousness of something, it becomes what it is conscious of.

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And that can be anything at all. In Aristotle's favorite language of potentiality and actuality, potentially, consciousness is everything. Potentially. Actually, it is nothing until it is consciousness of something.

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Now, in the abstract, Aristotle's analysis may seem paradoxical and difficult, but we can confirm it by each of us asking right now, what indeed is there to my consciousness except its contents? And we will all be, I think, driven to Aristotle's answer. There is nothing to consciousness except its contents. And yet, and yet, consciousness is somehow anterior to its contents.

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Now, according to Aristotle, consciousness is somehow anterior to its contents. in that it is a sheer possibility that belongs to individual living things, some of them. That is, though consciousness is nothing without contents, it is nevertheless not simply identical with its contents in that it is my. possibility, as I am an individual living someone, of becoming these contents.

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Pushing into language Aristotle would not have probably been comfortable with, may say, that consciousness, besides being its contents, is a particular focusing of the object of its consciousness. That's to say, look here, you are all the contents of my consciousness right now, huh? And if he would stand up and look out, the same people you see would be the contents of his consciousness, and yet all this stuff would be focused one place for me and over there for him.

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What consciousness is besides its contents is a particular focusing of it. Immanuel Kant, and here comes Kant, undoubtedly got it right when in his pompous language he spoke of a transcendental unity of apperception. That is to say, Kant was a genius at many long words for simple points. That is to say,

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The items of a particular consciousness have a structured unity with each other, which they have simply in that. They are items in someone's instead of someone else's consciousness. There is then a point of focus, a point of unity, which he calls transcendental, in that it isn't out there in consciousness.

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You see, I can't possibly be conscious of the point back here someplace, huh, where all this stuff comes together to be my consciousness. I think that there is a good image of this notion in the perspectival focus of a high Renaissance painting. I mean, you stand and you look at a high Renaissance painting

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And it's got perspective. All the items on the plane of the painting, you can draw lines, and they focus someplace. And if you stand at that place, you're looking at the painting exactly the way the painter wanted you to look at it. The inevitable image of Kant's notion is the focus of perspectival lines on a high Renaissance painting.

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The focus is not itself on the plane of the painting. It ain't in the painting. It's out in the viewer's space, outside the canvas. But now if we take that analysis as correct, and I do, what space is it in which the perspectival lines of my consciousness come together?

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If indeed we may compare the field of my consciousness, huh? There you all are, your field in front of me, to a painting's contents on the surface of the painting. In what space is the viewpoint located at which all of you items of consciousness are focused to be my consciousness?

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With such questions, we encounter the apparent divinity of consciousness. For putting it as simply as possible, in principle, I can be conscious of anything temporal. So where then must the point in me be from which I survey in this fashion and bring together and focus

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All temporal beings, possibly, and which never appears itself among the things surveyed. Must not that point be out of time, eternal, and so divine. According to Kant himself, the space in which is located the perspectival focus of my consciousness is a-- he called it luminal space at my metaphysical back. But that's where Kant's God dwells, too.

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And indeed, according to Kant, from this space, I am autonomous, universal, I bring everything together, focused at the point of me, just as is God. And Aristotle, though I didn't drag you through Aristotle's argument to the same point, has the same conclusion. The consciousness, he says, when it actually happens,

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happens only insofar as I am God. A bodlerized version of Kant's doctrine entered early into American religiosity, most blatantly by way of Emerson and the New England transcendentalists. With Emerson himself, it quickly escaped the limits of philosophical analysis and became a mythology apt for popular consumption, and to this day, The little spark of divinity in every human remains the one unchallenged dogma of American popular religion.

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Now to the contrary of all such transcendentalizing.