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co-dependence. Each of Consciousness, we say, is necessarily embodied, but it is not reducible to the body. Human consciousness cannot exist apart from neuronal processes in the brain and central nervous system, which constitute a necessary material the first two elements is an ingredient in the other.
substrate for human consciousness. However, conscious states are not merely neuronal processes, as, for example, materialists argue when they identify the immediate consciousness of pain with C-fiber stimulation in the brain, claiming that pain is utterly reducible to C-fiber stimulation. Likewise, the
healthy human body with a functioning brain and central nervous system is necessarily conscious, but it is not reducible to an idea in the mind. The fact that consciousness registers its awareness of the body in thinking does not mean that the body is merely a thought.
So far, we have distinguished our rudimentary model from the materialist and dualist models. How is our model different from emergentism? Recall that emergentism has to explain human consciousness as an “emergent prop-Beyond Emergentism
erty” of an evolving biological system that is not itself conscious. That leap, we have said, is so enormous that the emergentist model gives rise to reflec-tion. What if, just as the body is not utterly material, of consciousness, at least in some primitive form as a potentiality for freedom in matter is not utterly devoid
nature?movement that signifies the presence of consciousness. What is that funda-mental property? It is the capacity of a material system It is important to focus precisely on the fundamental property of bodily Try a thought experiment. to opt among alterna-
tives, such that this individual outcome is neither simply random (probabilistically predictable) nor wholly determined.example, among multiple possibilities, one may spontaneously attend to a painting – and not to the wall, the light fixture, the sound of the room, the (^21) In perception, for
crowd gathering at the entrance, etc. A selection is made in immediate consciousness. At other levels of consciousness, this pared-down moment of opting is enormously enriched in the complexity of deliberate choice and reflexive freedom in human existence, as we have discussed. “Opting” refers
only to the most elementary manifestation of freedom; it provides the sim-plest possible test for the analogous experience of another embodied con-sciousness – namely, the behavior of actualizing one possibility among others such that the event is individually unpredictable yet intentional. Opting so
defined exhibits a causality that is interconnected with, but not reducible to, natural causality.