I must dispense with something unnecessary, that is, I must dispense with the notion of the natural as distinct from the supernatural. I find the best approach is in terms of the concept of "consciousness." On the materialist side (sort of) is the undeniable fact that (evidence at least of) consciousness is attributable to organisms other than human beings. It would be hard for a religious person to maintain that the elusive business of "consciousness" is strictly human rather than animal, and therefore possibly coterminous with "soul." I say that this is no matter, since it is the supernatural that concerns me, not that subdivision of the supernatural often called "soul."
On the religious side is the--as I said--elusive aspect of the business of "consciousness." Any materialist conception of consciousness would have to concede at the very least that consciousness is not a thing immediately observable. However, consciousness is, of course, entirely consistent with the quite logical assertion that thought understood--or at least experienced--by an organism is an adaptive mechanism of great utility. An organism can be understood to have interests, and sensory perception channeled through thought processes will serve those interests, especially insofar as the organism's thought processes inform its survival and fulfillment of functions.
That is to say, we can see how an organism can conceive of itself--or if not of itself, of its surroundings in such a way as to react and respond to such matters as furthers the self's interests. But what yet is this thing we call consciousness? We can each say that consciousness is a thing we possess, yet it only exists for us in that we are surrounded by a constellation of things--objects, persons, settings; or memories, concepts; or emotions attachable to predictable stimuli. And we can each say that consciousness is a thing possessed--as we presume--by other creatures, as we observe them responding to their own constellations of things. In a materialist conception, then, consciousness can be called a thing among things. Some of those things are tangible, but they need not all be. Only an absurdly obtuse conception of "materialism" would claim that all that is real and observable is particles and waves (as opposed to say, concepts, like "materialism.")
I contend, however, that consciousness is not a thing. It is a postulated, ungraspable endpoint to analysis. It is a conjecture we have about ourselves and others. It is ultimately as unprovable--by definition--as the "singularity" from which the Big Bang is thought to have proceeded. There may well have been such a thing as the original singularity, but that is to assign "thing-ness" to a concept, not to the subject of that concept. A physicality that would encompass everything is also a physicality that would contain all elements of reference by which existence is understood. The Big Bang singularity would not be a thing, such as could be rightly understood to exist in a materialist world-view, even a materialist world-view that embraced as "real things" the most esoteric concepts that seem to inhabit the ether of our thoughts.
Similarly, consciousness is not a thing. We can talk about such a "thing," but we cannot assign to it criteria that would establish it as a "thing." To illustrate, I can conceptualize five leprechauns sitting on five toadstools, and my imaginings would be as much "things" as my drawing up of conceptualizations of five empty toadstools that do not happen to exist. Or I can actually see five leprechaun-less toadstools that do in fact exist, and conjecture all I want about the stages of sense perception and memory-evocation involved in the business of my consciousness apprehending the existence of those five toadstools. All of this involves the true thing-ness of the constellation of things that surround and inform my thoughts.
But then let me feel a panicky need--why I might feel so does not matter--to collect those five toadstools and make off with them. Strange things can happen to me or to anyone else--or perhaps it would be better to say--we can all recall inexplicable strangeness observable both in ourselves and others when placed in such stress. Perfectly normal, perfectly reasonable people placed under such stress can grab only four toadstools and begin to make off, or can pick up all five and look frantically about for additional ones that we know do not exist. We can say that we "lose it," and--as we are apt to say--a "part" of us will know that we are behaving irrationally. Can we truly say that something we assume to exist--"consciousness", precisely because it encapsulates and furthers our interests as individuals--could ever be divided? And yet it is possible for persons in times of stress to actually have the "feeling" of watching themselves--organisms over which they no longer possess functional control--do things under apparent volition and with apparent reasoning.
This illustration bears upon a far more prosaic type of situation than would at first seem to be the case. An instance of panic would seem to be a contrived scenario in which to portray the "thing" of consciousness as fissile, but we all know more down-to-earth examples. We start sentences before we know how we are going to finish them. We--as me now--start typing before we know how we are going to finish the sentence. Quite often we do not even know why the first word came out. Quite often we say complete sentences and are mortified by what we just said.
There is sometimes even, unfortunately, a cruel interpersonal dynamic that accompanies such things. A dominant person in a relationship can tidy-up or conveniently mold something he or she has said after the fact. A subservient person often lacks such a luxury. Untold agonies have been visited on persons who have "unconsciously" uttered imprudent things, or who have been told that utterances that they would never want to own actually reveal their "true" feelings.
We believe that we are conscious of what we think and conscious of what we say, and yet the individual persons that we feel ourselves to be can moment-by-moment inhabit the same bodies with other stimulus-driven and feeling-driven versions of ourselves. That is to say, one moment we can be conscious of ourselves, and the next moment we can be conscious of that within ourselves which is acting like the governing consciousness of that amalgam that is our person.
Consciousness, like the Big Bang singularity, does not exist as a thing. It exists as a concept only in that the naming of the concept fills for us a void where the thing ought to be. Consciousness exists as our name for an eruption that comes simultaneously from something--the stimuli and imprints that we can postulate as a collection of causes--and from nothing--the cause-defying spilling out of what we can truly say arises from who-knows-where. Now we, in good materialist fashion, might well contend that we can plumb with greater and greater precision the "who-knows-where," but we can never hope to know that consciousness is a "thing" rather than "things" (and therefore fit for its understood definition, the seat of self-awareness.) We might as well hope to prove that the Big Bang was one emergent particle rather than two (such particles being by definition referenced only against each other rather than against any independently-existing scale of time, distance, or mass.)
Nor is it ultimately of value to describe us as torn between the "conscious" and the "subconscious." To describe a being as "conscious" is most usefully meant to describe a being as conscious of itself. Other beings than humans can be marvelously receptive to the stimuli and conditions of their environments. We might even call such organisms more "conscious" than ourselves, except that it is not that receptivity we mean when we refer to consciousness. Our concept of consciousness refers to self-identification. if not self-understanding, and to invoke the mysterious concept "subconscious" is taken to mean "hidden consciousness" rather than "alternate consciousness" only because we prefer the former to the latter.
Indeed, given half a chance we will assign to a being a duplicity of intent or a mistakenness of outlook, far more readily than we will assign to that being a multiplicity of competing consciousnesses, though this choice of assignments be entirely without warrant. People do not even know themselves, much less know other people, but we do not want to accept this about ourselves or about others, even when an extremity of circumstances would be the most likely explanation for strange behavior. Many a commentary, for example, has been written about the theological implications of Peter suggesting at the Transfiguration, "let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias" (Mark 9:5, KJV). So many profound truths have been--supposedly--embedded in Peter's suggestion (or in the theologians' refutation of it); so many insights into the mysteries of the faith. It is almost as though the following verse's description of Peter's utterance did not exist: "For he wist not what to say." Now there's a wild thought: perhaps Peter said what he said when his master's raiment shone and ancients stood again upon the earth because he simply "wist not what to say."
I do not accept the notion that there is natural and there is supernatural. The "I" that presumes to comment upon the matter does not exist as what it purports to be, that is, it is not a thing such as would be analyzable in terms of the natural world. The conjecture that it could very well be a thing existing only in the natural world is beside the point. The "I" that is my consciousness is not a "thing." It is not by any natural criteria singular rather than plural; it cannot be disproven as being a thing of parts; it cannot be shown it its parts to be contiguous rather than disjointed.
My consciousness cannot be shown to be a thing. It cannot be shown to possess thing-ness. It can be described with equal logic to be natural, supernatural, or unnatural. My consciousness might as well be described as non-existent, since it must pronounce upon its own existence in order to draw conclusions about the contention of its own existence.
Or my consciousness might be directed to a matter, and to a choice. The matter is one of being a part of a whole, and the choice is one of embracing part-ness, brief-ness, and limitation--all the things we would do if we realized that we did not know ourselves. All the things we would do if we wanted to grow toward knowing ourselves.
