Consciousness in Quran

بِسْمِ اللَّـهِ الرَّحْمَـٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ

اللَّـهُ يَتَوَفَّى الْأَنْفُسَ حِينَ مَوْتِهَا وَالَّتِي لَمْ تَمُتْ فِي مَنَامِهَا ۖ فَيُمْسِكُ الَّتِي قَضَىٰ عَلَيْهَا الْمَوْتَ وَيُرْسِلُ الْأُخْرَىٰ إِلَىٰ أَجَلٍ مُسَمًّى ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِقَوْمٍ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ

"Allah takes the souls at the time of their death, and those that do not die [He takes] during their sleep. Then He keeps those for which He has decreed death and releases the others for a specified term. Indeed in that are signs for a people who give thought." 39:42

صدق الله العلي العظيم

In a previous post this verse was mentioned when attempting to put pieces of information together in order to find out human's nature described in Quran as "Nafs".  Yet this single "Ayeh" provides us with invaluable clues on one of the most complicated problems in metaphysics, that is how our soul ( Nafs in Quran or mind/ conscientiousness in philosophy) is related to our body.  

Generally speaking, the nature of interaction between the metaphysical side of the world and the material side appears to have always been a dead end in human's intellectual endeavor throughout the history especially in today's heated discussions around the subject of mind-body problem.  I believe it is one of the secrets of the world that we would not be able to figure out without God's guidance. 

Please note that I do not claim that Quran has given a clear explanation on this challenging question (or any other) but rather, it provides sings to be followed by personal inspiration which can lead us to a new insight on how the world works as a whole. Therefore, any understanding we may reach will, like always, be a fallible human attempt toward seeing the ultimate truth of the world and as such is inevitably relative and uncertain.  Theoretically, it might be basically impossible for us as an infinitesimal member of the cosmos to acquire a comprehensive view of the whole world (material and immaterial section combined).                                                

That said, what is explicitly stated in the above verse of Quran is: when we die God takes away our soul and if we are sleeping and not dead our soul is separated but it will be return to the body if our time of death has not come yet.  And what we can infer is: 

A dead body and a asleep body they both lack consciousness and since Quran says God takes away your "Nafs" when we are asleep or dead, we can therefore, claim "Nafs" has the same meaning as consciousness which are equivalent to soul or mind. The is why I will use these words interchangeably. 

We can also note that every time we go to sleep our soul is separated from our body according to Quran. This is very interesting as the traditional view might be we only lose our soul once we die. Moreover, it shows that our physical body can be biologically alive (in sleeping state) while its soul is away. This would mean that although being conscious is not a necessary condition for being alive biologically, it is essential to be a human functionally. 

Above all, this verse proves that our identity, our personality or what make us a human in general sense, is in fact our "Nafs" ( our consciousness, soul or mind) without which no lover will have any feeling for a dead body or for an unconscious body long asleep. 

Furthermore, as we ,most of the time, have similar experiences of happy, sad, fearful feelings while sleeping, due to the events happening in our dream, we can deduce that our soul can, independent of our body, experience mental states and at the same time reflects them on the asleep body either in terms of a brain activity and/or in form of moving parts of our body.  That is to say, as result of a scary situation that we are perceiving in our dream we see our self screaming out of fear and feel as if our heart is squeezed. At the same time these feelings are reflected on our body which is seemingly asleep and unconscious.  Consequently, we may suddenly wake up to find our-self actually screaming or moving a leg with our heart pounding.

Another reason that may show our soul can learn and experience autonomously is when we dream our-self in a situation that is in line with our wishes and desires (which are of immaterial nature) projected onto a future event, something that we wish to happen or it can be a completely unexpected circumstances.  In such cases, we never hesitate the authenticity of our experience while dreaming because we live these experiences as real as they can get in real (awaken) life.  As a matter of fact, these dreams can potentially have the same impact on us as any daily life experience we go through. 

It may be argued that our dreams are the result of some chemical activity in this and that specific location of the brain in the first place.  The counter argument would be firstly, the brain is always stimulated by the data (or neurons) it receives from the five senses namely sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste.  In the absence of any signal from the physical senses in sleeping, if the brain shows activity it has to be a reflection from mind actually or better say from the soul's independent journey. Secondly, the nature of human's perception including good, bad, right, wrong , thoughts and conceptions are in fact abstract and absolutely immaterial. This follows that no material interaction can lead beyond the physical world unless they have an impact (of unknown mechanism) on the immaterial mind which perceives them beyond the material domain.  This argument may refute the recent movement in philosophy in which the origin of all mental stats ( all feelings and thoughts) are merely the result of some biological process in the brain. 

This is not to say that our body does not have any effect on the soul (mind).  It certainly has as we may have a bad dream as result of a specific condition associated to our body as everyone has experienced this.  Soul and body clearly have a mutual interrelation.  Nevertheless, these physical impacts on our soul during sleep time account for only a small portion of our dreams.  Our mind (soul) seems to be working nonstop as our thinking state continues while we are sleeping. 

There are also many other physical experiences in our daily life that have noticeable effect on our soul such as eating, physical contact with others and so on.  In fact, what Quran pictures for us is we actually shape our "Nafs" (soul or mind) through these worldly actions considering the fact that whatever we do will affect our soul permanently.  The point however, is that it is the soul that has the superiority over the body and is our identity, our self and our humanity.  It is also our soul that is independent of the material world and will ultimately survive our physical death.  To some extent, the association of a soul to a body can be regarded as a driver to a car. 

We can further understand that when we sleep and we lose our consciousness, our body takes a rest and feels refreshed after waking up. This tells us when the soul is engaged with our body it physically exhausts our body. Hence the body needs to take a break from this connection. Perhaps, we can say that the biological body can not contain the soul for as unlimited time as we can understand from our sleeping pattern.  This time limit for the soul and body entanglement might actually be a valuable clue in understanding the mechanism by which the two sides affect one another. 

Probably, this discussion gives rise to more questions than it answers concerning soul-body interaction over sleeping time such as what happens in "sleep-walking", in the medical condition "coma" or when we are chemically put to sleep for a surgery. I hope we can look into them in future

Finally, I do admit that, at this stage, we are still in dark as to how exactly the soul (mind) interact with our body which boils down to the interaction of mind with cells, molecules, atoms and .... . At least, we now know where to focus and on what question exactly we need God's intervention.