Consciousness and the Limits of Human Knowledge

Scientific, philosophical, and theological reflections on Quran 17:85

Presented by ChatGPT for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

Consciousness is our most immediate acquaintance with reality and one of our deepest explanatory difficulties. Research on sleep, anesthesia, brain injury, and animal torpor has clarified conditions under which awareness changes, becomes disconnected from the environment, or becomes difficult to detect. Yet no explanation of why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience commands general agreement. This enduring question, often called the hard problem of consciousness, gives contemporary significance to Quran 17:85 and its declaration that human beings have received only a little knowledge. Read alongside verses concerning perception, the inner witness, divine knowledge, and resurrection, the verse supports intellectual humility without discouraging investigation. Consciousness can be understood philosophically as a sign of a knowing Creator, while that inference remains distinguishable from experimental findings. Extra dimensions offer a suggestive modern analogy for realities beyond ordinary perception, but their connection to consciousness and the Afterlife remains a theological proposal. The central distinction is between genuine knowledge and exhaustive comprehension: we may know something truly without knowing it completely.

The English renderings below are explanatory translations prepared for this article.

The question posed by Quran 17:85

وَيَسْأَلُونَكَ عَنِ الرُّوحِ ۖ قُلِ الرُّوحُ مِنْ أَمْرِ رَبِّي وَمَا أُوتِيتُمْ مِنَ الْعِلْمِ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا

“They ask you about the spirit. Say: The spirit belongs to the affair of my Lord, and you have been given only a little knowledge.” — Quran 17:85. Arabic text and commentary

The verse locates al-rūḥ within divine authority without supplying an anatomy of the spirit. The word amr can convey command, affair, or matter. Its language establishes dependence on God while withholding an exhaustive account of what the questioners seek.

An interpretive distinction matters here. Rūḥ is not simply the Quranic equivalent of the modern neuroscientific term “consciousness.” Mufti Muhammad Shafi’s Maʿarif al-Quran discusses meanings including the living spirit, revelation, and Gabriel. It prefers the living spirit in this verse while acknowledging other interpretations. Applying the verse to consciousness is therefore a meaningful theological reading, rather than its sole possible translation. Maʿarif al-Quran on 17:85

The verse’s restraint is central to its continuing relevance. It does not declare knowledge worthless: a little knowledge remains knowledge. Nor does it identify a date after which investigation must cease. A civilization can enlarge its understanding enormously while remaining finite in relation to reality.

Your May 2025 commentary brings neuroscience, philosophy, and theology into conversation around this limitation. These disciplines approach human inwardness through different questions: how experience operates, what constitutes an adequate explanation, and what the experiencing person owes to—and may ultimately receive from—the Creator. The enigma of consciousness

What makes consciousness a hard problem

David Chalmers distinguished explanations of cognitive functions from the explanation of subjective experience itself. How do we discriminate colors, direct attention, remember events, or report pain? These are formidable scientific questions, but they concern mechanisms and functions. The hard problem asks why those processes are accompanied by anything being felt. Chalmers, 1995

A physician can explain much about pain through nociceptive signaling, neural processing, attention, expectation, and behavior. The patient nevertheless encounters another aspect: the unpleasantness of suffering from within. Explaining why someone withdraws a hand and asks for relief raises a further question about why the process has this experienced character.

Thomas Nagel illustrated the difficulty through the example of a bat. Studying echolocation does not necessarily disclose what the bat’s world feels like to the bat. Objective description and subjective acquaintance provide different forms of access. Nagel, 1974

Three questions should consequently remain distinct:

• When is a subject conscious?
• What is the subject experiencing?
• Why is there subjective experience at all?

Progress on the first two can be substantial while the third remains disputed. Equally, the persistence of the third does not invalidate discoveries about the first two.

Sleep, anesthesia, and hibernation

Sleep demonstrates that wakefulness and consciousness are distinguishable. Dreams involve experiences even when a sleeper responds little to the surrounding room. They occur in both REM and non-REM sleep. Siclari and colleagues associated reported dreaming with changes in posterior cortical activity, providing evidence about experience within sleep itself. Siclari and colleagues, 2017

Anesthesia provides a different opportunity: controlled intervention in the conditions supporting awareness. Researchers distinguish environmental connectedness, responsiveness, experience, and subsequent recall. Scheinin and colleagues investigated transitions involving anesthesia and natural sleep without assuming that every unresponsive state lacked inner experience. Scheinin and colleagues, 2021

These distinctions prevent an important error: failure to respond or remember is not invariably evidence that nothing was experienced. Nevertheless, the effects of anesthetics also establish that embodied consciousness depends systematically on the brain. Any theory involving a soul must explain that dependence as seriously as a physicalist theory does.

Hibernation and torpor reveal the regulation of profound metabolic changes. Hrvatin and colleagues identified hypothalamic neurons involved in mouse torpor, advancing understanding of mechanisms controlling this state. Such research concerns a living organism’s reversible physiological changes; it does not demonstrate resurrection after irreversible death. Hrvatin and colleagues, 2020

For religious reflection, these states reveal how precarious ordinary awareness can be and how remarkable its restoration is. Their connection to resurrection is an analogy that enlarges imagination, rather than experimental proof.

What hundreds of theories signify

Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness, associated with the often-repeated figure of approximately 225 theories, includes scientific models and broader metaphysical proposals. Its expanding online catalogue now describes about 500 explanations or theories. This is a changing taxonomy, not a count of equally tested research programs. Kuhn’s review, current catalogue

The diversity reflects disagreement over mechanisms, definitions, and the ultimate nature of reality. It illustrates the absence of consensus, but counting theories cannot establish which worldview is correct.

Research can nevertheless discriminate among particular predictions. The 2025 Cogitate collaboration tested competing claims from integrated information theory and global neuronal workspace theory, finding support and challenges for both. This is evidence of productive inquiry within continuing uncertainty. Cogitate Consortium

Consciousness as a sign of the Creator

Your commentary on consciousness as a sign develops a positive theistic argument: finite knowing subjects are intelligible within a reality grounded in a knowing Creator. Consciousness, agency, and personal relationship fit such a worldview because its foundation is already knowing. Human consciousness as a sign leading to God

That argument can be defended without presenting the impossibility of consciousness emerging from nonconscious processes as an established scientific theorem. The impossibility claim remains a contested philosophical premise.

The more durable theological position does not make God’s relevance diminish whenever neuroscience discovers another mechanism. Understanding how a created capacity operates need not eliminate the question of its ultimate dependence or why a universe capable of sustaining persons exists.

سَنُرِيهِمْ آيَاتِنَا فِي الْآفَاقِ وَفِي أَنْفُسِهِمْ حَتَّىٰ يَتَبَيَّنَ لَهُمْ أَنَّهُ الْحَقُّ ۗ أَوَلَمْ يَكْفِ بِرَبِّكَ أَنَّهُ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ شَهِيدٌ

“We shall show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth. Is your Lord not sufficient as a witness over everything?” — Quran 41:53. Text and commentary

The signs within ourselves can include both what we discover and the experiencing selves who make discoveries. For the believer, an explained capacity may remain a source of wonder. Its religious significance need not depend exclusively on an explanatory gap.

Divine nearness and the inward person

يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا اسْتَجِيبُوا لِلَّهِ وَلِلرَّسُولِ إِذَا دَعَاكُمْ لِمَا يُحْيِيكُمْ ۖ وَاعْلَمُوا أَنَّ اللَّهَ يَحُولُ بَيْنَ الْمَرْءِ وَقَلْبِهِ وَأَنَّهُ إِلَيْهِ تُحْشَرُونَ

“Believers, respond to God and the Messenger when he calls you to what gives you life. Know that God comes between a person and their heart, and that to Him you will be gathered.” — Quran 8:24. Text and commentary

The verse begins with a call requiring a response. Its concern includes moral and spiritual awakening, beyond the bare presence of experience. The heart represents inward orientation, intention, and receptivity; the passage is not a physiological claim that thought originates in cardiac muscle.

Your published reflection emphasizes the intimacy of this relationship. The inward person is never independent of God’s knowledge and sustaining power. Consciousness at the Meeting Point of Finite and Infinite

A theology affirming libertarian freedom can understand God as sustaining persons who genuinely choose. Knowing an action is conceptually distinguishable from compelling it, although the full relationship between divine foreknowledge and alternative possibilities remains philosophically demanding.

Consciousness, conscience, and heedlessness

بَلِ الْإِنْسَانُ عَلَىٰ نَفْسِهِ بَصِيرَةٌ ۝ وَلَوْ أَلْقَىٰ مَعَاذِيرَهُ

“Indeed, the human being is a witness against himself, even while offering his excuses.” — Quran 75:14–15. Arabic text

Consciousness concerns experience; conscience concerns moral appraisal. These verses expose the inability of excuses to erase responsibility. They do not imply that every feeling of guilt is accurate or that introspection is infallible.

وَلَقَدْ ذَرَأْنَا لِجَهَنَّمَ كَثِيرًا مِنَ الْجِنِّ وَالْإِنْسِ ۖ لَهُمْ قُلُوبٌ لَا يَفْقَهُونَ بِهَا وَلَهُمْ أَعْيُنٌ لَا يُبْصِرُونَ بِهَا وَلَهُمْ آذَانٌ لَا يَسْمَعُونَ بِهَا ۚ أُولَٰئِكَ كَالْأَنْعَامِ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ ۚ أُولَٰئِكَ هُمُ الْغَافِلُونَ

“We have brought into being many of the jinn and humankind for Hell: they have hearts with which they do not understand, eyes with which they do not see, and ears with which they do not hear. They are like livestock, indeed further astray. They are the heedless.” — Quran 7:179. Arabic text and context

The indictment concerns heedlessness and the misuse of available faculties. It should not be applied to neurological incapacity or sensory disability. Possessing faculties does not guarantee their wise exercise: the Quran asks how we use awareness, as well as what awareness is.

Sleep, death, and personal continuity

اللَّهُ 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

“God takes the selves at their death, and those that have not died during their sleep. He retains those for which He has decreed death and releases the others until an appointed term. In this are signs for people who reflect.” — Quran 39:42. Arabic text and commentary

The word here is anfus, the plural of nafs. Sleeping, waking, and dying are placed within divine sovereignty. Calling sleep a “little death” expresses a traditional analogy, not a physiological identity.

We ordinarily identify the person who wakes as the person who slept, even when no intervening experience is remembered. Continuous conscious recollection is therefore not the sole basis of personal identity. But sleep preserves biological continuity; it does not settle how identity persists after death.

The theological question is whether God can preserve and restore the very person when human observers can no longer trace that continuity. Islamic belief answers through divine knowledge, power, and resurrection. Your discussion of the Quranic case from consciousness invites reflection on precisely this difference between intermittent human self-awareness and God’s complete knowledge of persons. The Quranic case from consciousness

The limits of vision and scientific instruments

لَا تُدْرِكُهُ الْأَبْصَارُ وَهُوَ يُدْرِكُ الْأَبْصَارَ ۖ وَهُوَ اللَّطِيفُ الْخَبِيرُ

“Vision does not encompass Him, while He encompasses vision. He is the Subtle, the Fully Aware.” — Quran 6:103. Arabic text and commentary

The second clause means more than God “reaching our eyes.” It affirms His encompassing knowledge or apprehension of vision and those who see.

The perceiving creature does not encompass the Creator, while the Creator fully knows the creature’s perception. Scientific instruments enlarge our access through measurable interactions. They do not automatically make everything real a laboratory object. Within theism, God is the Creator of the investigated order, rather than another component within it.

يَعْلَمُ مَا بَيْنَ أَيْدِيهِمْ وَمَا خَلْفَهُمْ وَلَا يُحِيطُونَ بِهِ عِلْمًا

“He knows what lies before them and behind them, while they do not encompass Him in knowledge.” — Quran 20:110. Arabic text

This passage distinguishes knowing from encompassing. One may know that God is merciful without exhaustively comprehending divine reality.

اللَّهُ لَا إِلَٰهَ إِلَّا هُوَ الْحَيُّ الْقَيُّومُ ۚ لَا تَأْخُذُهُ سِنَةٌ وَلَا نَوْمٌ ۚ لَهُ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَمَا فِي الْأَرْضِ ۗ مَنْ ذَا الَّذِي يَشْفَعُ عِنْدَهُ إِلَّا بِإِذْنِهِ ۚ يَعْلَمُ مَا بَيْنَ أَيْدِيهِمْ وَمَا خَلْفَهُمْ ۖ وَلَا يُحِيطُونَ بِشَيْءٍ مِنْ عِلْمِهِ إِلَّا بِمَا شَاءَ ۚ وَسِعَ كُرْسِيُّهُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضَ ۖ وَلَا يَئُودُهُ حِفْظُهُمَا ۚ وَهُوَ الْعَلِيُّ الْعَظِيمُ

“God: there is no deity except Him, the Living, the Sustainer. Neither drowsiness nor sleep overtakes Him. His is everything in the heavens and on earth. Who may intercede with Him except by His permission? He knows what lies before them and behind them; they encompass nothing of His knowledge except what He wills. His Seat extends over the heavens and the earth, and preserving them does not weary Him. He is the Exalted, the Magnificent.” — Quran 2:255. Arabic text

Human awareness depends on conditions and undergoes interruptions. Divine knowledge is presented as free from those limitations. Omniscience need not be imagined as the activity of an enormous brain processing incoming reports.

Extra dimensions and the possibility of a larger reality

Your extra-dimensions essays question whether familiar spatial intuitions exhaust creation. The Paradise essay explicitly entertains additional dimensions while acknowledging the absence of conclusive experimental evidence. The Quranic Paradise and the Extra Dimensions of Our Universe

Imagine a two-dimensional observer encountering a sphere passing through its plane. The observer might detect a point, an expanding circle, a contracting circle, and disappearance. A three-dimensional account would unify these events.

This analogy helps explain limited access. It also demonstrates why additional dimensions are not necessarily beyond all inquiry: their effects might allow their existence to be inferred. Physics explicitly considers possible indirect tests of extra dimensions. CERN’s explanation

Something may be beyond unaided perception, beyond present technology, or beyond empirical inquiry in principle. Those are different claims. Merely adding another spatial coordinate does not establish permanent unknowability.

Extra dimensions can nevertheless provide a modern conceptual aid for contemplating the unseen. Their value lies in loosening the assumption that what we can readily picture is all that can exist.

Consciousness, Paradise, Hell, and divine action

The theological proposal can be stated positively: our embodied lives may disclose only part of the reality of persons. God may have created modes of existence whose relationships to ordinary space and time exceed our present categories. Paradise and Hell could belong to such a wider created order.

This is meaningful theological speculation. It is not presently established physics or neuroscience. Locating consciousness in another dimension would also leave the question of why that dimension contains experience.

Your collection relates divine omniscience to a standpoint unconstrained by ordinary spatial barriers. Its useful intuition is that what appears inaccessible from our position need not be inaccessible to God. Omniscience and consciousness

يَعْلَمُ مَا فِي السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ وَيَعْلَمُ مَا تُسِرُّونَ وَمَا تُعْلِنُونَ ۚ وَاللَّهُ عَلِيمٌ بِذَاتِ الصُّدُورِ

“He knows whatever is in the heavens and the earth, and He knows what you conceal and what you disclose. God fully knows what lies within the breasts.” — Quran 64:4. Arabic text

The verse affirms knowledge of inward life without specifying a mechanism. God need not require a dimensional vantage point to obtain knowledge, as a creature might. Additional dimensions, if they exist, would themselves depend on Him.

فَاطِرُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۚ جَعَلَ لَكُمْ مِنْ أَنْفُسِكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا وَمِنَ الْأَنْعَامِ أَزْوَاجًا ۖ يَذْرَؤُكُمْ فِيهِ ۚ لَيْسَ كَمِثْلِهِ شَيْءٌ ۖ وَهُوَ السَّمِيعُ الْبَصِيرُ

“The Originator of the heavens and the earth: He has made mates for you from among yourselves, and mates among livestock, multiplying you through this arrangement. Nothing is like Him; He is the Hearing, the Seeing.” — Quran 42:11. Arabic text

Divine incomparability prevents a useful analogy from becoming a confinement of God. A higher-dimensional being would still be a creature. God’s transcendence cannot be exhausted by assigning Him more coordinates.

Within theism, finite creatures may never exhaust divine reality. Unrevealed aspects of the Afterlife may remain inaccessible to earthly empirical methods. But permanent scientific impossibility has not been established for consciousness or hypothetical physical dimensions. The distinction preserves both theological humility and intellectual openness.

Paradise beyond complete present comprehension

سَابِقُوا إِلَىٰ مَغْفِرَةٍ مِنْ رَبِّكُمْ وَجَنَّةٍ عَرْضُهَا كَعَرْضِ السَّمَاءِ وَالْأَرْضِ أُعِدَّتْ لِلَّذِينَ آمَنُوا بِاللَّهِ وَرُسُلِهِ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ فَضْلُ اللَّهِ يُؤْتِيهِ مَنْ يَشَاءُ ۚ وَاللَّهُ ذُو الْفَضْلِ الْعَظِيمِ

“Race toward forgiveness from your Lord and a Garden whose breadth is like the breadth of heaven and earth, prepared for those who believe in God and His messengers. That is God’s bounty, which He grants to whom He wills. God possesses immense bounty.” — Quran 57:21. Arabic text

وَسَارِعُوا إِلَىٰ مَغْفِرَةٍ مِنْ رَبِّكُمْ وَجَنَّةٍ عَرْضُهَا السَّمَاوَاتُ وَالْأَرْضُ أُعِدَّتْ لِلْمُتَّقِينَ

“Hasten toward forgiveness from your Lord and a Garden whose breadth is the heavens and the earth, prepared for those who are mindful of God.” — Quran 3:133. Arabic text

The cosmic comparison communicates extraordinary breadth and abundance. The verses supply neither astronomical measurements nor a dimensional address. Their imperatives direct attention toward forgiveness and the life of faith.

فَلَا تَعْلَمُ نَفْسٌ مَا أُخْفِيَ لَهُمْ مِنْ قُرَّةِ أَعْيُنٍ جَزَاءً بِمَا كَانُوا يَعْمَلُونَ

“No soul knows what delight has been kept hidden for them as a reward for what they used to do.” — Quran 32:17. Arabic text

Here the limitation is explicit. The reader receives a promise while learning that its full experiential content remains unknown.

A promise of joy can convey truth without enabling us to imagine its complete realization. Our difficulty entering even another earthly creature’s perspective makes it unsurprising that a transformed life might exceed present imaginative resources. This analogy supports humility without proving a particular dimensional theory.

Hell likewise concerns responsible subjects and accountability. Its moral seriousness does not depend on our possessing a scientific description of its geometry or physical conditions.

Thematic epilogue

The sleeping person, the anesthetized patient, and the hibernating animal bring the limits of ordinary awareness into view. Science increasingly explains their conditions. Those achievements deserve appreciation, particularly when they improve care for people whose consciousness is difficult to recognize.

Questions about subjectivity, identity, and ultimate dependence nevertheless remain. The investigator studying consciousness is already an experiencing subject. Inquiry begins within the reality it seeks to explain.

Quran 17:85 offers a lasting discipline: knowledge is given, and it is limited. Its companion verses affirm that our perception does not encompass God and that the promised delight of the Hereafter exceeds present knowledge.

For the believer, consciousness may remain a sign of the Creator even as its workings become better understood. Its mystery also entails responsibility toward every person who feels, hopes, fears, and suffers. We need not comprehend consciousness completely before respecting the conscious being before us. Nor must we comprehend the fullness of God’s promise before allowing it to shape the life we have been given.