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A Short Course in Current Academic Thought About The Mind, for the Non-Academian. Background Assumed: General intelligence, a taste for analytical discussion, appreciation of critical thought, patience with intellectual structures, but most important: wonder about science and humanity. |
1. WHENCE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS?
• Within the past decade, the study of human consciousness has taken on an identity of its own. It used to reside exclusively in the house of psychology, where it was either taken for granted (Freudians) or ignored (behaviorists) for the most part. Up until about 1980, many people, even many academians, assumed that human consciousness was a "given", something you didn't need to think about. It was either accepted uncritically as the locus of our perceptions, feelings, thinking and decision-making; or it was ignored, as the "behaviorism" movement held sway. Under behaviorism, the brain and mind became little more than a "stimulus-response" transducer in the determination of behavior. At best, "mental states" were studied for their "functional" role in the causal chain of human behavior. Consciousness and mind were thus seen in the light of physicalist functionalism; mostly a step in a deterministic process, albeit a somewhat more flexible and complex process.
• However, within the past 20 years there has been a lot of research on the structure and workings of the brain, and much of this research questions the nature and importance of consciousness. Many analysts have wondered and pondered whether in fact there is consciousness at all, in any important sense. An increasing number of thinkers have become interested in these questions and have produced a growing body of books and papers on the topic. Some of these people are neurobiologists, others are computer experts, but many of the authorities on the subject are philosophers.
• The major controversy is whether consciousness, as we seem to experience it and describe it, is real; or, is our vivid sense of conscious existence just a side-effect (i.e., an "epiphenomenon") of the brain's physical workings? I.e., is it something like an illusion? (But not really, because an illusion requires a conscious observer to mis-perceive it.)
2. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?
• The problem starts with the fact that many (if not most) people think that their consciousness is like --- well, like having another conscious person inside our head, watching all the sense data coming in, and making decisions on how to respond to it. Is there a little person inside that person's head? And a littler person still . . . Where would it end? (I.e., there is an absurdity, a.k.a. a reducio ad absurdum).
• There is also the strangeness of it all; there appears to be an "explanatory gap". We believe that consciousness takes place in the brain. But the brain is a three-pound mass of wet fiber. How do our lives and our feelings and our perceptions and our thinking and our dreams take place in a 6 by 8 inch shell? How do our lives and our feelings and our perceptions and our thinking and our dreams take place in a 6 by 8 inch shell? Admittedly, the brain is highly complex and extremely organized, having many times the data storage and computing capacity of the largest supercomputer now in existence. We still can't build a machine that can do what the brain does in terms of input signal processing and output commands directing the many components of the body. But the brain runs according to ordinary physical laws and programming routines that aren't all that different from what we can do with our computer software (especially the newer generation of object-oriented programming and neural network architecture). And it's similar to the brains that many other living creatures have.
• We seem to have on-going mental experiences (even in our sleep, i.e. dreams). We react to the redness of a rose (or the yellowness of a yellow rose); or the odd smell of gasoline; or the taste of a strawberry; or the cold feel of snow hitting your cheek. It makes some people want to write poetry or compose music. Modern-day consciousness analysts have a name and a concept to cover all of this: qualia. Qualia as a word is the plural of quale, which is an experience, e.g. the color green, the feeling of pain, the emotion of anger, the sound of C flat, the smell of camphor, etc. But there is no little man or woman in there experiencing these quales (i.e., qualia). There are just a lot of neurons and water and chemicals and electric signals, all hooked up in some complicated arrangement. It's really just a machine. So how is the vividness of experience taking place inside this machine?
• The vividness of phenomenal experience promotes in many of us a "gut feel" that consciousness is something more than the physical processes that support it (this feeling is called "folk psychology"). And yet, our consciousness is thoroughly beholden to those physical processes. For every normal, healthy human being, consciousness just "goes away" for a few hours each day, when we are in deep sleep. There are also instances of suspension during injury or anesthesia. And yet, it usually comes back much as it was left -- due to physical memory processes and structures in the brain. As such, the ontology of consciousness doesn't seem so ethereal after all.
3. THE HARD PROBLEM
• Philosopher David Chalmers separates the problem of consciousness into a set of "easy problems", and an ultimate "hard problem". Chalmers says that the easy problems of consciousness are susceptible to the standard methods and metrics of modern science, and probably can be solved to everyone's satisfaction in the long run. These include differences between brain states such as waking, sleeping, intoxication and unconsciousness; deliberate versus non-deliberate control of behavior; the focus of attention; and awareness / discrimination of stimuli (hot versus cold, pressure versus pain, etc.). The hard problem is the question of how physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective, phenomenal experience. Even if you believe that everything is a question of behavior, you still need to ask why do humans say that they feel as though a little person is inside of their heads? Just what is "experience", why does it seem so vivid? Just what is "experiencing" that vividness?
4. DUALISM: CONSCIOUSNESS IS REAL
• The "dualists" are those who say that qualia and consciousness are real -- fundamentally real, not unimportant side-effects. Dualists view consciousness as a basic, irreducible feature of the universe. They say that there truly exists a hard problem. David Chalmers is obviously a dualist of sorts -- although Chalmers, like most modern dualists, is a Property Dualist.
• Property Dualism generally implies that conscious experience is a property of our physical universe, one that has not yet been convincingly identified yet in the way that gravity and electromagnetism have. As a property of matter and energy, and not something ultimately independent of them (as stipulated in the substance dualism view), consciousness is not believed by most property dualists to have a causal effect on the universe. As such, consciousness is said by the property dualists to be real, but epiphenomenal (without effect in the world). If this view is right, then you believe that you are acting according to your own free will, but you are wrong. Your brain circuits determine everything, and "you", as a conscious entity, are just along for the ride!
• The ancient Greek concept of "the soul" is something like what Chalmers is getting at (although Chalmers would not admit it, since he needs to maintain credibility in the academic world). He talks of differing properties of the substance of matter/energy being behind consciousness (i.e., property dualism). But such differing properties and effects would have to be a function of an as-yet unknown body of physics. These hypothetical "alternate" or "additional" physics might also be an explanation for "the soul" (although not for the religious idea of the eternal soul).
5. PHYSICALISM / REDUCTIONISM: CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT REALLY REAL
• The physicalists (also sometimes called materialists) and reductionists believe that consciousness isn't what it seems to the average person. Consciousness is not truly fundamental, but is more of a side effect. To them, there really is no "hard problem". There is no corresponding question regarding epiphenomenalism; consciousness to them must be causally inert, as it doesn't truly exist at all.
• It's somewhat like watching the sun set into the sea. The sun is not really dipping down into the ocean, although it appears to. Our science tells us quite convincingly that it's just an illusion; the overwhelming evidence supports the idea that we're on a round planet The reductionists say ... inside our heads, nobody is home; it's just a machine in there. spinning around the sun in a certain way, one which makes the sun appear to arc across the sky and into the horizon every day. The physical reductionists say that our illusion of consciousness and self-consciousness are questions of cultural programming and an inherent (evolutionarily selected) tendency to search for root causes of things we experience. There may be some survival value behind this, i.e. to expressing our joys and pains and loves and fears, especially in the social context. But inside our heads, nobody is home; it's just a machine in there.
• Two prominent schools within physicalism are functionalism and identity theory. Functionalism focuses upon the functions served by mental activity; the ultimate function of the mind, under functionalism, is to process sensory inputs and determine behavioral outputs. Obviously, one can go into much more detail, such as the functions that pain or laughter serve. But ultimately, the mind and its consciousness are like a computer program; the actual physiological structures and activities of the brain are of secondary importance. As such, a functionalist can easily imagine conscious states occuring in other "platforms" hosting similar "software", e.g in other species or in machines (once they can be made to assume important self-survival functions).
• By contrast, the identity theorist feels that the mind and consciousness just are the physical processes going on in the brain, much as lightening just is a massive electrical discharge within the atmosphere. A somewhat similar but more flexible position is called supervenience, which is the notion that a thing, in this case consciousness, takes its primary characteristics from its constituent elements (just as a cabinet made of steel maintains the cold, strong and rigid characteristics of steel -- but also has its own characteristics, such as spaciousness and security). According to the physicalist/supervenience argument, even if consciousness does have unique incidental features against the electro-chemical neural processes occuring within the skull, it ultimately reflects the nature of the structures and processes that cause it, which are material and physical.
6. THE ZOMBIES
• One way that the dualists try to prove their point is through a thought experiment about zombies. They ask us to imagine a human being that has everything except consciousness. Is this possible? Many people are willing to entertain the notion, for sake of argument. A philosopher's zombie could act the same, and yet have all of its mental processes occur "in the dark". Zombies could still talk to each other, still have friendships and love affiliations, still have enemies, cry tears and laugh at jokes. Arguably, the existence of zombies is just a question of computer-like programming; complex programming, but not inherently impossible programming. We now have robots that can act in very complex ways, but they don't have consciousness (at least we don't think so; once you start thinking deeply about consciousness, there aren't many definites). Against all of this, the argument goes, the fact that we do experience consciousness indicates something is happening beyond what we now know in our body of science. That something may not be magic, but it surely awaits an advanced future science to be explained -- so the dualist's zombie argument goes.
• The zombie dualist argument is speculative at best -- basically because the kind of zombie that is required just doesn't exist (or at least no one has detected one yet)! But the concept may be relevant in a weaker sense to consciousness research,
7. PHYSICALISTS AND "THE MACHINE"
• The physicalists / reductionists have all sorts of research results from brain experiments of the past 25 years to support their arguments. A handful of studies, many led by Benjamin Libet, show fairly conclusively that consciousness is a half-second or so behind reality; you perceive what has already happened. Related studies show that you act before you are aware of making a decision. They add up to fairly strong evidence that most, if not all, human behavior has nothing to do with consciousness. The sense that you make a decision and act on it may be mostly an illusion. Most, if not all, behavior is set up and executed "in the dark". For example, I have a little game to relieve boredom at work: I fire a rubber band against the wall of my cubicle and reach out in mid-air to catch it after it bounces. I know that I'm not thinking about how to catch the rubber band; my eye isn't even centered on it. It's all happening too fast. My arm just stabs its way into the air and most of the time it snatches the twirling rubber band before my boss can walk by and tell me to get back to work. An amazing little machine at work there.
• So, when physicalism is taken to its farthest point, we obtain another answer to the zombie question: we are all machine-like zombies. NON-ZOMBIES are the delusion!
8. IS THERE ANY PURPOSE TO CONSCIOUSNESS?
• The reductionists say that consciousness is, at best, "epiphenomenal". It doesn't directly influence our behavior. Many dualists, especially property dualists, agree with this. They are hesitant to claim that consciousness is "something from another world", something beyond our science. As such, they have to agree with the reductionists that consciousness is "casually impotent", because they don't want to claim that mysterious psychic forces interact with the neurons in the brain as to help determine our behavior. The neurobiologists haven't found anything to corroborate that. Most dualists thus shy away from causalilty issues by agreeing with the epiphenomenal viewpoint, i.e., we're all just going along for the ride -- at best.
• As noted in the 'Physicalists and the Machine' section above, much of our daily behavior is clearly not controlled by conscious analysis (i.e., our "free will"). Breathing and the heart's beating is controlled by the autonomous nervous system (ANS), not by consciousness. But in addition, a lot of our daily acts fall into a grey zone, where they COULD be controlled by conscious process, but most of the time are not. For example, when we drive a car or ride a bike, we don't think too much about how we move the wheel and the gas and brake pedals, unless something unusual happens (e.g., an impending collision). Humans can do many things with low levels of attention to muscle movements. Think of a ballet dancer or a baseball infielder. They may be concentrating, but they are not making individual decisions on how to move their arms and legs and torsos. That is happening sub-consciously, in a "machine-like" way. People can even give speeches or be engaged in a conversation, and yet the conscious mind is thinking of something else. The words seem to be coming out, robot-like.
• Even though much of our actual muscle movements are not controlled by the conscious mind, we can still say that they are given executive oversight by it. Some studies following up on Libet's time-delay work indicate that we have "free won't"; we can start an automated set of muscle movements, e.g. a punch about to be thrown in anger at someone, then realize that it's wrong and immediately stop the process. So perhaps the relationship between consciousness and behavior is mostly "executive oversight" in nature.
• But even the "executive within us" often seems directed from something happening in the brain's "machine zone" or subconscious. For example, many creative ideas seem to "just flash into our minds". When we are in a crisis, or are otherwise trying to solve a difficult problem, the most original and powerful solution concepts do not often result from plodding logic. Do these solutions come from a computer-like mechanism, or from the dualist's "other realm" where consciousness ultimately resides, or from some connection to an implicate / generative order of reality which underlies our current physics, as postulated by physicist David Bohm?
• As such, even the "executive" role of consciousness seems limited. Some consciousness analysts feel that the whole notion of consciousness having any executive role in determining our behavior is false. If true, then we are simply observers, something like the people who sit in the so-called "control booth" of a computerized subway car. The computer runs the subway train, and they just watch. They might still have a panic button to stop the train in an emergency; if the "epiphenomenalists" are right, our conscious minds don't even have that. Free will would thus be an illusion.
9. EVOLUTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS
• There is a fair amount of disagreement as to whether consciousness, in
the sense of "the hard problem" (i.e. in the sense of qualia and vivid experience), evolved over the eons through natural selection, or is just an
accidental effect or an incidental but illusionary side-effect from other features that promote survival. If "qualia", in its most ethereal
sense, were to have survival value, it would imply that our knowledge of physics is not complete; the mind would be seen to have the ability to move
matter and influence known forces. As a compromise that accommodates the reality of experiential consciousness and maintains the completeness of physics,
some thinkers have compared mental phenomenon to "spandrels",
areas of ancient buildings (above arches) that are not load-bearing but are necessary adjuncts to the load-bearing design. Philosopher Daniel Dennett, who generally takes strong physicalist positions, not surprisingly
denies the relevance of this idea to human evolution.
• If consciousness, as an extremely subjective and individualistic entity, did not play a part in animal evolution, it is interesting to ponder why mammal species didn't mimic the eusocial insects, an arrangement that is relatively rare in evolution but quite successful when it does occur (consider the fecundity and survivability of the ant and termite, which together with other social species make up at least half of the world's insect biomass). If evolution favors the toughest and most fecund biological arrangements, why aren't we like The Borg from Star Trek? One must wonder why mammals and humans
did not evolve with highly cooperative and specialized roles (queen, worker, drone, etc.) with minimal sense of independence and instinctual readiness to sacrifice at any time for the good of the colony. If evolution ultimately favors the toughest and most fecund biological / social arrangements, then why
aren't we like The Borg from the Star Trek shows and movies? Why did natural selection guide evolving mammal species towards brain arrangements that fostered increasingly individualistic mental states? Admittedly, mammals and humans certainly did develop strong social structures, probably assisted by genetic features such as mirror neurons; but again referring to Star Trek, the credo of humankind remains that "the good of the one outweighs the good of the many".
• Huge brains and prodigious cognitive abilities gave humans incredible survival advantages. But why wasn't that taken to an even higher level through the selection of eusocial mutations, e.g. hard-wired collectivism, self-denial and aggression control? Perhaps there would now be 12 billion humans instead of 6, all living at minimum survival levels (so as not to exceed the Earth's carrying capacity, as the real human race is now doing through resource-intensive living habits). The eusocial, non-self-conscious variant of the human race pictured here would have developed sophisticated data exchange and environmental control techniques but would have avoided wasteful investments into love, art, culture and ideology (and the warfare that ensues from it). Such a utilitarian arrangement would arguably be the most logical outcome of a natural selection process where individuating consciousness did not play a role (or played an unsuccessful role). So why didn't it happen?
• Caveat: the previous is highly speculative, as this writer is not an expert on biology and evolution. It is presented to stimulate thinking, not as a declaration of truth. And it is certainly not the arrangement that I would have preferred. I am not here supporting creationist critiques of natural selection, but instead am considering the dualist contention that consciousness is a significant and unique ontological factor in the universe. Consciousness would thus be seen as an integral aspect of the environment that natural selection ultimately shapes itself around, and not simply as a side-effect of it (or a non-existent illusion). Alfred R. Wallace, who co-founded the theory of evolution with Darwin, held a somewhat similar position.
10. CAN YOU COMPUTERIZE CONSCIOUSNESS?
• A big question being discussed is whether or not a super-complex computer could be programmed with super-complex software and super-complex environmental inputs such that it would have consciousness. The related question is whether or not our minds are really computers. Right now we don't have computers or programming capacity nearly complex enough to mimic the levels of complexity and organization in the human brain. However, some day we might. The materialists seem confident that some combination of programming and hardware might someday yield a machine that claims to be conscious, and that acts similar to our own conscious behavior. They say that the bottom line here is environment and behavioral response. As with us, it's what happens outside, not what goes on inside, the physicalists claim. This also reflects the "externalist" approach to the mind-body problem within philosophy.
• There's another thought experiment called the "Chinese Room" that attempts to prove that cognitivism, externalism and functionalist materialism (i.e., the view that consciousness is mostly a question of the right software doing the right functions) are wrong, and that artificial intelligence efforts based on standard computer algorithms will never capture the essence of human consciousness.
• The argument, from philosopher John Searle, is developed around the topic of language; language is obviously an important topic in the study of consciousness, as it reflects our way of representing and conceptualizing what we perceive and experience in our world, and then socially share that. Searle's thought experiment goes like this: imagine a closed room with a slot where people on the outside can write questions on a piece of paper and drop them into the slot. Then, right below it, there is another slot where a written answer to the question is delivered. The people asking the questions are Chinese, and thus the questions and answers are written in Chinese. Inside the room is some American guy who has no idea how to read or understand Chinese. But he's got a big, well-indexed book that tells him how to answer any combination of Chinese symbols. He does a good job in answering the questions of the Chinese people outside his room, but he has no idea what they're asking or what his answers mean.
• The question behind this experiment is ultimately whether the workings of the human mind, and the consciousness they produce, are like this system. Is it that the mind has a fantastic "algorithm" (akin to an instruction book or a computer program), Is it that the mind has a fantastic programming algorithm, or is there something deeper in its workings? or is there something deeper in its workings? If it's just a matter of having a good, comprehensive program, then we can arguably computerize consciousness; it's just a question of ramping up to the proper scale of program complexity, processor capacity, and input/output comprehensiveness. But if not, then just what is it that allows consciousness to happen within the gray matter under our scalp? (If it really is happening at all . . . ). Is it a question of a different kind of programming, e.g. neural networking, set up in such a way that consciousness somehow "emerges" from the system's complexity? Or is it something deeper still?
• A closely related thought experiment is Ned Block's China Brain, another criticism of functionalism. In Block's highly imaginary scenario, the citizens of China act as neurons do in the human brain, i.e they exchange signals (in this case by telephone or hand-held radios). As with neurons, each citizen takes "calls" from others; in each call, some simple message is passed on, perhaps a number from 0 to 9. According to a set of rules, each citizen calls someone in response to a certain number or pattern of calls (e.g., call citizen XWQ378BZ and send the number 9 if you receive three calls with the number 6 and two calls with the number 2 within the past 60 minutes). Some of these Chinese citizens serve as receptors for signals from a real human body; some of them serve as signal-senders back to that body. The experiment assumes that the set of rules followed by each citizen will, in the aggregate, result in the right signals finally being sent to the attached body, so as to keep it alive and flourishing.
• As such, the nation of China has become a fully functional brain. According to functionalism, China should thus have mental states including conscious experience and qualia. But just where and how is that consciousness manifested in this national brain? Interestingly, Leibniz proposed a somewhat similar thought experiment in 1714 (involving a mechanical mill instead of the people of China).
11. GODEL'S THEOREM: THE END OF CONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE?
• Godel's Theorem roughly says that a formal system of logical rules cannot prove or disprove every possible statement that it can generate about itself, aside from the issue of not having enough empirical input data. There's always some sort of statement or proposition that the system will choke on. Every formal "computation" system has its limits -- no system can step outside of itself and look back in at itself. If this holds, the perhaps we cannot have a true science of consciousness, as science requires a subject and an object, an observer and the observed. The two are assumed to be independent. But with consciousness, ultimately, the two are tied together. Perhaps consciousness could still be discussed through the guidelines of philosophy, but not studied as a logical system. This summarizes the "mysterian" approach to consciousness, i.e. that consciousness is ultimately not comprehensible, not in the way that we understand lightening or radioactivity. However, other experts have said that "hypercomputation" is possible, i.e. computing ability beyond the "Turing machine" limit (perhaps by availing of quantum physical properties, i.e. quantum computing). Is the brain a "hypercomputer" or a "Turing Machine"? If the latter, it is subject to the Godel limit regarding things that can be known from within a system.
• Roger Penrose has written several books postulating that the brain and its dynamics (i.e., "the mind") transcend normal "Turning Machine" limits on computation-capacity, through quantum mechanical processes deep within the neurons. As such, per Penrose, the brain is "hypercomputational" 12. NEURAL CORRELATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS: from the bottom up
• The concepts of dualism and materialism, which I have very briefly and inadequately sketched out here, are "top down" approaches to the problem of understanding human consciousness. These concepts are quite interesting, but they haven't yielded anything that everyone can agree on. So, the brain research people try to approach the problem from the bottom up (i.e., "creeping up" on the hard problem). Using sophisticated imaging technologies such as CAT and fMRI scans, they try to look for pieces of the puzzle by seeing what areas of the brain become active in response to a particular stimuli (seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling), or in correlation with a particular kind of thought or mind state (fear, happiness, sleep, hunger, interest, boredom, anger, memories, etc.).
• Based on these experiments, brain researchers have a lot of good information now which has given a wealth of insights on how the mind works (e.g., the problem of "binding"; when you look at a blue box, for example, one area of the mind processes blueness; another area processes the boxy outline; another processes the texture of the box's surfaces; so how and where are all three "process states" brought together into a unified image of the box?).
• Sidenote on neural studies: At present, neuroscientists have two main approaches regarding the effects of consciousness on brain activity (or vice versa): they can study a small number of neurons in action, through implanted microelectrodes. Or they can watch billions of neurons in action at a fuzzy resolution, through MRI and other scanning techniques. What they really need, however, is a way to closely observe the interactions between "mission groups" of a thousand neutrons or so (each group is thought to process a specific task, e.g. checking for sound patterns from the ear, or detecting disrespect in social interaction, or sensing sadness from our memories). These neuron mission groups or "maps" are thought to be extensively and flexibly connected to each other, allowing them to form temporary associations as processing loops (e.g. in a case where disrespect and a certain sound bring on a sad memory). However, our current technology and ethical standards do not allow the brain to be observed at this level. So for now, we can only learn so much about how consciousness forms in the brain; we can't really figure out how the "consciousness software application" and the "general operating system" behind it work. It would be like trying to figure out how MS Windows works by watching the power consumption of the master components on a computer motherboard, or monitoring the electrical changes in one tiny section of the processor or virtual memory board. The point of view is either too big or too small.
13. MARY AND THE ROSE -- a thought experiment regarding "KNOWLEDGE"
• The dualists, i.e. the defenders of the substance and special nature of consciousness, have another thought experiment to support their position. Based on a 1982 article by philosopher Frank Jackson, they ask you to imagine a woman named Mary who grows up in a world of black and white. She goes to college (a black and white college) and takes courses on brain biology and consciousness, and is taught that there is such a thing as color. She is taught how color works in the brain, how the optic nerves processes color and sends signals to certain areas of the brain, which process those signals and add color to the "binding" of a perceived object. But she's never experienced it herself; she just knows black, white, and maybe shades of gray.
• Then one day, Mary finally experiences color -- but not all at once, we don't want to overwhelm her. Just one thing -- a red rose enters her black and white world. She knows precisely what is going on in her brain, what neurons are lighting up, what chemical transmitters are flowing out from the thalamus and what stimulants are entering the blood stream. But until now, she didn't know what the experience of red color was like. Now she does. Then she goes on to blue, green, etc. In the brain, amidst the neurons, slightly different things are happening for each different color; but it's not such a great difference, physically. And yet the experience of each color seems quite new and different. Purple makes Mary feel one way, red makes her feel another, yellow does something entirely different for her, then there's seafoam, apricot, lavender, etc. The different experiences of color seem so much bigger and so much more significant than the fact that certain neuron sets are firing at slightly different frequencies. It seems as if she now has additional KNOWLEDGE regarding color; knowledge that could NOT be conveyed by science through its system of symbols, logic and objective evidence.
• That's the alleged difference between the physical electro-chemistry of the brain and the qualia of consciousness. This writer personally feels that MUSIC gives the better example of what conscious qualia is all about. The perception of color can be satisfactorily defined as the function of discriminating phenomenal visual input features, for purposes of enhancing survival (see neuroscientist Gerald Edelman's explanation of qualia in "Wider Than The Sky"). Musical notes can be similarly defined. But a great song or a concerto can take completely take over one's consciousness, peaking and focusing it, mixing it with bodily reactions of emotion and feeling (and thus enhancing further the state of conscious attention and focus). The "experience" of music seems to justify the notion that the whole is different in character from the sum of the parts; i.e., it obtains a new "ontology", a new being. It is KNOWLEDGE that cannot be conveyed by science. As such, science CANNOT be a complete description of the Universe!
• Interestingly, Jackson's argument was anticipated in 1810 by Goethe in his book Farbenlehrer, an analysis of color vision in humans. Goethe considers Newton's theories of light and the human body's physiological response to light. He then points out that physics and biology disregard the most important thing -- our inner experience of light. Goethe, in keeping with the spirit of 19th Century Romanticism, claims that classic physics tells us nothing about the most important acts of the mind, such as the appreciation of beauty. Science, as a system of symbols and logic rules, has an inherent limitation just as Godel proved that mathematical systems of symbols and logic have an inherent limitation.
• However, the materialist/reductions would counter that Mary's different emotional reactions to variations in color-related nerve inputs are triggered by physical after-affects of the color perception processes in the brain, where small differences get magnified greatly. Thus, it's still a matter of matter and energy physics and organizational effects, not of magic.
• In that vein, philosopher Daniel Dennett criticizes the "Mary" argument regarding the non-objective knowledge allegedly conveyed by qualia. He conveys his criticism by positing a counter-example involving beer. Dennett points out that some "qualia" change with time (if not all), thus lending suspicion to the notion that mental experience has ontological status (i.e., actual "being"). His case-in-point regards beer. Most people do not enjoy beer when they first drink it (and assumedly, Mary wouldn't either). It seems rather strange and thin and bitter. Only after drinking it on several occasions with the encouragement of their friends do most people start enjoying this beverage. The "quale" attached to the beer-drinking experience seems to change. As such, we cannot look at qualia as atomistic, as a fundamental building block in our picture of reality. Dennett cites this to support his contention that consciousness is ultimately an illusion.
• I agree with Dennett's contention that qualia are not the ultimate building block of consciousness; however, I disagree that this tarnishes the ontological status of the (subjective) experience of consciousness. Qualia is ultimately a function of emotion and feeling, and therefore is heavily influenced by body needs, environmental influences, social influences, memory, and cognitive notions. Admittedly, the qualia of any fixed set of sensory inputs (or imagined sensory inputs) is not itself fixed. The experience of drinking beer or viewing a red rose can cause very different mental reactions, depending upon the overall circumstances. Still, that does not denigrate the fact that there IS an impact on one's overall positive or negative "feeling of being". That, and not the quale itself, is where ontological significance is grounded, as I note on Page 3.
14. INTERNAL vs EXTERNAL -- more thought experiments
• There are other thought experiments put forth by philosophers meant to investigate the feasibility and coherence of dualistic versus physical - material views of consciousness. If consciousness is more a function of things going on in the external, physical world, then a physicalist / reductionist approach seems more credible. An important perspective on this question is provided by the "externalist" versus "internalist" debate. Obviously, if consciousness is more "internal", determined mostly within the dynamics of the subjective mind, a dualist view seems plausable. However, if consciousness is more a function of external factors, i.e. things going on out in the real, physical world, then a physicalist / reductionist approach seems more credible (although there are theoretical variations involving externalist dualism and internalist physical monism).
• One such scenario involves "Swampman", a perfect living replica of someone who perishes at the same moment, said replica arising instantaneously through some extraordinary cosmic accident (the original Swampman scenario, put forth in 1987 by philosopher Donald Davidson, involved lightening; but it could also have used the fictional transporter device from Star Trek). If we knew the person who died, call him Mr. X, and then encountered Swampman without knowing what happened, all would seem normal, as Swampman acts identical to Mr. X. But would it be the same for us if we knew what happened? When Swampman greeted us just as Mr. X would have, would we back away or be hesistant? Or do we accept Swampman as Mr. X, since his body and memories and behavior patterns were flawlessly copied?
• My own reaction to the Swampman scenario would be as follows: in the abstract, I would be willing to accept Swampman as Mr. X; the fact that Swampman is made up of different (yet functionally identical) atoms and molecules doesn't seem to matter; none of us retains the exact same set of atoms and molecules over time. But something else in me fears Swampman, because of the strangeness of what took place. Thus, I probably would treat Swampman differently than I would Mr. X. And most likely, so would the rest of society. Thus, Swampman could never be Mr. X, because EXTERNAL factors, i.e. the response of society, would not let him be Mr. X. If society decided to shun him and isolate him completely, arguably his very consciousness would degrade and be ultimately endangered, given the results of long-term sensory deprivation. By contrast, in the fictional Star Trek setting, teleportation is socially accepted, so the replacement being who arises at the end of the teleporter beam is accepted by society and maintains his or her identity and conscious being.
• Some other thought scenarios that address the question of whether mental content is "internal" 15. WHAT IS IT LIKE; AND DOES THAT MEAN ANYTHING?
• One of my own problems with what I've read thus far about consciousness is the use of the phrase "what it is like" or "something that it is like" to describe conscious experience, i.e. "phenomenal consciousness". Based on a 1974 essay about bat consciousness by Thomas Nagel, many analysts (originally N. Block, 1995) say that the essence of phenomenal consciousness is that there is "something that it is like to be conscious". Such a rationale seems tautological (circular); there appear to be too many is's in the previous sentence. I believe that consciousness is a process and an experience that is NOT like anything else (psychologist Daniel N. Robinson and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre appear to agree on this point; they both state that consciousness is "sui generis", NOT like anything else).
• That's why consciousness is such an interesting and troubling area of study. You can't say that consciousness is "like" eating ice cream, or "like" rafting through the Grand Canyon. Consciousness cannot be separated from any experience that it might be "like"; any and all experiences involve consciousness, depend on consciousness. (And it can be argued that consciousness depends upon stimulative experience; sensory deprivation experiments indicate that consciousness dies off after severe, long-term lack of sensory stimulation). There is no "metastructure", no external framework with which to analyze the question of consciousness. The best you can say is that a particular conscious experience is somewhat like another. And on and on, until you finally point back to the original experience. There is nothing bigger to ground it upon, as with other scientific notions. Philosopher David Papineau argues that consciousness is an inherently vague concept.
• As far as consciousness being like an abstract concept, i.e. "consciousness is like coldness" or "solidness" or "justice" or "quantum physics" or "quality" (remember Robert Pirsig?), this would seem a bit more acceptable. But in the end, the answer that "feels right" is that consciousness is like having a conscious person inside your head, watching all of the sensory inputs and memories and thoughts going on. This is called the "Cartesian Theater". We know that there is no little person in a Cartesian Theater inside our heads. But paradoxically, that still "feels" like the best explanation. Ultimately, consciousness is like . . . . consciousness. That's not an intelligible answer, which hints that the question of what consciousness "is like" is ultimately unintelligible, as Colin McGinn and Papineau seem to argue.
• The question made sense in the context in which philosopher Thomas Nagel used it. In discussing the nature of consciousness, he asked "what is it like to be a bat?" The point is that we can't experience what it's like to be a bat, i.e. to perceive the world with a very different [and much smaller] brain while using very little eyesight but lots of hearing and smelling. Consciousness is ultimately subjective, and thus not sharable and comparable. There is no common ground, no epistemological metastructure to allow such sharing. And some would disagree that a bat has consciousness at all (depending on how you define consciousness; the bat probably doesn't have a self-concept, doesn't have the ability to think in terms of "me", although perhaps phenomenal consciousness can still be experienced without this). But many consciousness writers (including, disappointingly, David Chalmers) use the concept of "something-it-is-like" in the positive sense, as though such a comparison exercise might convey a deeper understanding of consciousness.
• The question certainly would be valuable as a Zen koan, i.e. an impossible question meant to break the intellect and open one's mind to a better appreciation of raw existence. But as far as a logical teaching tool, the question of "something it is like" is ultimately confusing. The experience of human consciousness can only be like itself. To compare it against anything known by humans necessarily subsumes the experience of consciousness. There is no "North Star" to find your way to a deeper intuitive understanding of consciousness. The journey is essentially circular, though not without some linearity to it. Self-consciousness, a.k.a "apperception", is ultimately the mind thinking about itself thinking about itself thinking . . . Perhaps consciousness is indeed a "strange loop", as Douglas Hofstader asserts. But, as with other descriptions such as "emergent phenomenon" and "like something", the strange loop concept is ultimately another clever description, but not a fundamental explanation of consciousness.
16. WHEN IT ALL BEGAN . . . WHEN WAS THAT?
• The following questions are valuable not for their answers - there ARE no final answers to them at present - but as thinking tools.
• Question 1: When did consciousness begin in evolutionary history? That question brings up another question, i.e. whether animals have some form of consciousness (considered below). If "what you mean by consciousness" is limited to human consciousness, then you limit consciousness to the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens, the current form of the human species. However, many researchers and academians believe that consciousness is a broader phenomenon that extends to our extinct human predecessors (the neanderthals, homo erectus, etc.), and also to monkeys, dolphins, and perhaps to whales, maybe even dogs and other small mammals (but by that point in the chain, consciousness would be quite different from what we know).
• Even if you do limit your definition of consciousness to the human species, the question arises as to whether the first beings with modern human genes were conscious -- or did consciousness need something more than a big, flexible brain in order to "catch fire". That "something more" might possibly be the process of socialization and language. In other words, the point at which we learned to talk might be the point where the brain's electro-chemical potential for consciousness (again, depending on what you mean by "consciousness") was ignited and turned into actual consciousness. There is a Pink Floyd song called "Talk" which begins with a short speech by Professor Stephen Hawking. It goes like this: "For millions of years, mankind [i.e., the archaic pre-homo sapiens] lived like the animals; then something happened that unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk."
• Question 2: When does consciousness emerge in a modern individual human? Does consciousness develop in the womb, pre-birth? Or does it happen sometime after birth? If consciousness depends on interaction with society, then our time in the womb, and even our first few months, are not fully conscious. Only the experiences of relationship and society arguably develop the potential for full consciousness. The only way to test this could not be carried out: place a child straight from the womb in a minimum stimulation box, where he or she could be kept alive with as little stimulation as possible. If such a child could be kept alive for 20 years, he or she would probably be much like a "zombie" (or a sleepwalker or a "persistent vegetative").
• There are stories of feral children, human children who were lost and were brought up by wolves or some other species. When such children are found at a late age, e.g. in their teens, they usually cannot be humanized. The neuronal architecture of each person's brain is very dependent upon early environment (see "Neural Plasticity", below), and cannot be greatly changed later in life. Without human stimulation to guide the young child's neurons in forming the right network of inter-connections, the "fire" of human self-consciousness never ignites. Arguably, such humans never establish language abilities. As such, they never develop human-like consciousness, although they may experience a lower-level, non-reflective "primary consciousness" according to the tier-level theories of Edelman and Damasio.
17. ARE ANIMALS CONSCIOUS?
• Are animals conscious in a way that approximates human consciousness, with its self-awareness, its qualia and its continuous emotional vividness? Is there a "HARD PROBLEM" for animals? Even if they have cognition, episodic memory, the ability to "bind" sensory input into a unified "picture" of their environment relative to themselves, with the capacity to discriminate various features of that mental picture and adjust their attention levels based on the importance of particular features in that picture -- do they then experience "qualia" relative to those features? Is there a vividness to it all, a series of emotional reverberations from each moment of their lives that varies according to both the pieces and the whole of their "perception picture"??
• Most humans experience a continuous base-level of emotional feeling, in additional to the episodic emotions which result from daily life events; that background emotion goes with waking consciousness. Most animals don't -- or don't appear to, anyway. Their emotions are sporadic and basic, e.g. fear, anger, pleasure at finding food. Dogs do exhibit occasional playfulness and other human-like emotions, although one wonders if this is part of their evolutionary survival strategy, i.e. as mimes of human emotions and behavior. Some analysts have postulated such a co-evolutionary theory about the transition of "lone wolves" into human-friendly dogs.
• Certainly the lower level reptiles and animals behave mostly on instinct, on responses which evolution "hard-wired" into them as the best response to challenges that are common in their environment. They aren't able on any level to picture their bodies in relation to the environment, and concoct novel responses to varying situations. For example, frogs know how to capture flies buzzing through the air just above them. But if a frog came across a group of flies that were lying still on the ground, it would pass them right by, no matter how hungry it was. Higher up on the evolutionary scale, animals did gain the capacity to "picture" their situation in the environment, allowing more flexible responses to threats and opportunities for food, sex and the other basics of survival. Some consciousness researchers, including Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, feel that dogs and other "mid-level" mammals experience a primary or proto-conscious state, a mental state of awareness with a rudimentary experience of phenomenal "qualia", but not a clear sense of self.
• Even higher up the chain are the great apes, dolphins and whales. These creatures have a base sense of their relationship to the environment; they also have more sophisticated memory capacity, and more capacity to "bind" the various features of their senses into a detailed, coherent mental picture of their surroundings. As such, they may have some sense of their own existence; they may "know themselves", up to a point. Antonio Damasio defines this as "core consciousness", a state of self-knowledge, but one locked mostly in the present, without an autobiographical sense of the past, nor a long-range vision for the future. Gerald Edelman says that the higher level mammals evidence such self-awareness in their capacity to appreciate other abstractions (dangerous, good tasting, hot, cold, etc.) through their recognition and exchange of "symbols", mostly common gestures and sounds. They have a crude language, but one stuck in the present, one without syntax. Only human beings, with their "extended autobiographical consciousness", have the need to tell stories integrating the past, present and future. As such, only humans have syntactical language, with its complex sentences and paragraphs (see Language discussion, next page).
18. SOCIETY AND CONSCIOUSNESS
• The growing body of research regarding "mirror neurons" (see the interesting writings on this subject by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran) may support the idea that consciousness is a function of social interaction and language. The existence and actions of mirror neurons seem to indicate that the human propensity for social interaction is "hard wired", a genetic feature, more nature than nurture.
• In a nutshell, mirror neurons are neuron maps in the mind that are activated two different ways. Let's take an example of a mirror neuron map that goes off when we start eating something -- one that sets off salivation and gastric juice secretion so as to digest the food. The first way to set it off is to actually stuff an apple or a slice of pizza into Your brain is thus hard-wired to encourage social interaction, via mirror neurons. your mouth and start chewing. But what surprised researchers in the past few years was the discovery that the map also becomes active when somebody is just watching another person eating. That's why it's so hard to sit with somebody who is eating something and not start eating something yourself; your mouth waters and your stomach starts growling, even though they are empty. Your mirror neurons are pushing you into eating lunch with someone, not at your desk by yourself. Your brain is thus hard-wired to encourage social interaction, via mirror neurons.
• Human self-consciousness may, in some ways, result from the dynamics of mirror neurons (certainly not in a "sufficient" manner, but very possibly "necessary"). The mechanics of the brain encourage a certain amount of social behavior. Social behavior encourages language as the means of storing and sharing useful abstract concepts, like "coldness" or "heaviness" or "sweetness" or "danger", etc. Language and the abstraction process behind it encourage the mind / brain to come up with a strong concept of the self (in contrast with the concept of the group). A strong mental concept of the self, together with the semantics (early language building-blocks) for that concept, may help to ignite consciousness (or at least the kind of self-consciousness that we modern humans know) from the sub-conscious relationship established within higher animal minds between the body and its environment. As to this relationship, see Gerald Edelman's concept of "primary consciousness" and Antonio Damasio's "core consciousness" theory. The latter concept involves self-awareness / self-consciousness but not autobiographical memory, while the former concept is more basic. Damasio and Edelman feel that the complex form of autobiographical consciousness which humans experience is built-up upon such primary consciousness levels, as if in a layer-like fashion.
• Society and the idea of "self": The inward turning of the human brain's abstracting instinct was probably aided by the process described by Dr. Nicholas Humphrey's "Just-So story", regarding how humans learned to classify and conceptualize the responses of other humans. If some early human saw that most other humans get angry when hit, smile when smiled at, frown when frowned at, want food every 6 hours or so, etc., then it wouldn't have been a giant leap to realize that similar responses are part of that human's experience too. Thus, that early human could conclude there to be a "person" behind his or her own experiences; there must be a "me" inside. This conceptualization was probably reinforced by language development, words being the storage jars for abstract concepts. Once the idea of "me" was established, higher level emotions could be generated and self-directed.
NOTE: MIND versus CONSCIOUSNESS: I have generally used these two terms interchangeably, but some analysts feel that the two concepts should be distinguished. Psychologist Steven Pinker and neuroscientist Susan Greenfield say that MIND means brain dynamics, i.e. the brain in motion. By comparison, CONSCIOUSNESS is something more specific, encompassing the processes that support cogitation and subjective experiences, i.e. "qualia". MIND would include autonomous body regulation such as balance and heartbeat, while CONSCIOUSNESS would not. See the Degrees of Consciousness section on the next page.
in that there are known instances of humans beings having states of relative alertness, acting voluntarily, even carrying out complex tasks, and yet being without the normal features of consciousness; e.g. awareness of identity, continuous emotional engagement, ability to record new memories, and access to old memories other than very-short-run motor control and procedure memory (allowing short-term tasks). The phenomenon of sleepwalking comes most readily to mind. But psychologists and neurobiologists are also studying "absence automatism", persistent vegetative states, and blindsight (when people with working eyes who become blind due to cortex damage still have sub-conscious mental responses to objects in front of them). Dr. Antonio Damasio gives a good summary of these in "The Feeling of What Happens" (1999). These situations provide a real-world "ground level" that helps to determine and measure the features and components of consciousness.
ARE OUR MINDS COMPUTERS?
But so far, they haven't formulated a universally accepted "theory of everything" on consciousness, a concept that explains why we feel something that seems greater than the components of our sense perceptions, our memories, our emotional reactions, our thinking -- i.e., why do these things give the vivid feeling of "we".
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