Consciousness is a word worn smooth by a million tongues. Depending upon the figure of speech chosen it is a state of being, a substance, a process, a place, an epiphenomenon, an emergent aspect of matter, or the only true reality. Maybe we should ban the word for a decade or two until we can develop more precise terms for the several uses which “consciousness” now obscures.
No official ban was imposed, yet the word largely disappeared from scientific discourse until it resurfaced with a vengeance in the 1990’s. Here is how Stuart Sutherland defined “consciousness” in his 1989 Dictionary of Psychology2:
consciousness. The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means.... Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.
A turning point came in 1994, at the first “Science of Consciousness” conference at Tucson, Arizona, when David Chalmers proposed to separate the “easy” problems of consciousness from the truly “hard” problem. In an interview with Susan Blackmore,3 Stuart Hameroff recalls that fateful day:
It was the first ever international interdisciplinary conference on consciousness and we had it all planned out. The first day was philosophy, the second day was neuroscience, the third day was cognitive science, and so on. On the first day a very well known, famous philosopher spoke first and he gave a very boring talk, the second speaker was kind of dull, and so I was getting worried that this was gonna flop. Then the third speaker was an unknown young philosopher named David Chalmers, who got up there with hair down to his waist, in a T-shirt and jeans, and gave the best talk I'd ever heard on the topic of consciousness. He talked about the easy problems of consciousness (which include reporting, perception, and things like that), and then the hard problem of conscious experience, which is “what it's like to be,” or qualia, or raw sensations. After that there was a coffee break and I went out among the people, as one of the organizers of the conference, listening in like a playwright on opening night. And people were just buzzing about Dave's talk and the “hard problem,” as he called it. I think that moment really galvanized an international movement in consciousness, because the problem was identified. From then on we knew what distinguished this field from cognitive science and other fields that deal with how the brain works. They don't attempt to grasp the difficult problem of consciousness itself.
[t]he really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.... But why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.
Chalmers assumes not only that when we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but also that the brain in which this information-processing takes place exists — more or less as we perceive and conceive of it — in a real, objective, and mind-independent world. The problem then is not merely how a whir of information-processing in a brain can give rise to sensations, emotions, and the rest, but rather how there can be such things in a real, objective, and mind-independent world.
What exactly do we know about this world or about the physical basis from which our rich inner life is believed to arise by the likes of Chalmers? If there is something from which our consciousness arises, we know nothing of it. Zilch. Nada. If by “physical basis” we mean the theoretical construct that it actually is — a structure that has been abstracted by us from the contents of conscious experience, using concepts that owe their meanings partly to the logical or grammatical structure of human thought or language and partly to the spatiotemporal structure of human sensory experience — then that is not something from which conscious experience can arise. A mental construct cannot give rise to the mind or the minds by which it has been constructed.
The situation is actually worse, for the notion that we have a mental construct that could pass for a real, objective world or a self-existent physical reality is by now an exploded myth. All that the general theoretical framework of contemporary physics places at our disposal is a calculus of correlations between events whose occurrence it cannot account for but presupposes and is required to be consistent with. What is characteristic of these events is that they indicate outcomes of physical measurements. The inconvenient truth that no outcome can be indicated without a conscious observer to whom it is indicated, is to be left alone.
Chalmers was of course not the first to point out the “hard” problem; he merely gave it a name that became a rallying cry, so much so that the 1990s came to be designated “Decade of the Brain.” According to Colin McGinn,5 the Nineties were to consciousness “what the Sixties were to sex”:
For most of the [20th] century consciousness has been comparable to sex in Victorian England: everyone knew it was there, throbbing away, but it was not a fit subject for polite conversation, or candid investigation.... Recently consciousness has leaped naked from the closet, streaking across the intellectual landscape.... The deep, dark secret is out.... You can almost hear the sigh of relief across the learned world as theorists let loose and openly acknowledge what they have repressed for so long.
In 1866, Thomas Huxley famously wrote: “how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.” The incredulousness elicited by claiming that the squishy gray matter in our heads produces our rich internal lives, was also neatly captured in a science-fiction story by Terry Bisson.6 It contains the following report given by an alien explorer to his commander on his return from Earth:
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they’re made out of meat.”
“Maybe they’re like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage.”
“Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn’t take long.... They’re meat all the way through.”
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“So ... what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”
“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”
“Omigod. You’re serious then. They’re made out of meat.”
Image by Thomas Budach from Pixabay
If nothing in the nature of “meat” necessitates the presence of conscious experience, then it ought to be logically consistent to imagine a world exactly like ours except that it contains no conscious experience. As George Stout7 wrote in 1931,
it ought to be quite credible that the constitution and course of nature would be otherwise just the same as it is if there were not and never had been any experiencing individuals. Human bodies would still have gone through the motions of making and using bridges, telephones and telegraphs, of writing and reading books, of speaking in Parliament, of arguing about materialism, and so on.
And before Stout, William James8 “thought of what [he] called an ‘automatic sweetheart,’ meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her.”
The revival of the old problem of consciousness begot a new breed of zombies: philosophers’ zombies are imaginary creatures which are exactly like us except that there is nothing it is like to be them. The idea that the characteristic feature of a conscious object is that there is something it is like to be that object, was originally proposed by Timothy Sprigge,9 who wrote:
One is wondering about the consciousness which an object possesses whenever one wonders what it must be like being that object.... To wonder what it is like being an object is to concern oneself with a question different from any scientific or practical question about the observable properties or behaviour of that object or about the mechanisms which underlie such properties or behaviour. A behaviouristically or physicalistically minded psychologist might be very good at knowing what a psychopath was like, without having any idea what it was like being a psychopath.
Chalmers10 uses the zombie idea to argue that nothing in the physical world as presently conceived by us necessitates the presence of conscious experience, and that therefore additional psychophysical laws are needed to account for it. Daniel Dennett,11 his most vociferous critic, “solves” the hard problem by denying that consciousness exists. As Ned Block12 has put it, “Dennett’s doctrine has the relation to qualia13 that the US Air Force had to so many Vietnamese villages: he destroys qualia in order to save them.” That there seems to be phenomenology is something that Dennett (in his own words) “enthusiastically concedes.” At the same time, though, he insists that “it does not follow from this undeniable, universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology”.14
To Dennett, what really exists (in all matters involving the human brain) is what can be found by examining cerebral activity. His denial of the real existence of phenomenology therefore boils down to the truism that phenomenology — your seeing or hearing something, your being in pain, your feeling hungry or hot or cold or remorseful — can’t be found by examining cerebral activity. He doesn’t appear capable of realizing that the real existence of cerebral activity is actually lesscertain than the real existence of phenomenology, since it is only through phenomenology that we arrived at our beliefs about cerebral activity. (To Descartes, our consciousness was among the world’s greatest certainties.) Dennett15 counters Chalmers’ zombie-based arguments by insisting that zombies are inconceivable:
Supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination you can remove consciousness while leaving all cognitive systems intact ... is like supposing that by an act of stipulative imagination, you can remove health while leaving all bodily functions and powers intact.... Health isn't that sort of thing, and neither is consciousness.
I have two reactions to this. The first is that we do have a fairly clear conception of health. Health, as officially defined by the World Health Organization, is “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” There is no explanatory gap between the physical state of an organism and its health (in the narrower sense of being free from illness or injury). But there certainly exists an explanatory gap between cerebral activity and conscious experience.16 We have no conception of cerebral activity, of the brain, or of physical reality that would give us any idea how cerebral activity can give rise to conscious experience. In his entry on “consciousness” in the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mind,17 Ned Block makes this point by contrasting the difference, within cognitive science, between understanding thought and understanding phenomenal consciousness:
Cognitive scientists have had some success in explaining some features of our thought processes in terms of the notions of representation and computation. There are many disagreements among cognitive scientists: especially notable is the disagreement between connectionists and classical “language of thought” theorists. However, the notable fact is that in the case of thought, we actually have more than one substantive research programme, and their proponents are busy fighting it out, comparing which research programme handles which phenomena best. But in the case of consciousness, we have nothing — zilch — worthy of being called a research programme, nor are there any substantive proposals about how to go about starting one. Researchers are stumped.
My second reaction is that Dennett is right: nobody is conscious in the way that Chalmers is trying to defend, which implies epiphenomenalism. In the ordinary sense of the word, an epiphenomenon is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside a primary one. It is a by-product of a physical process that is as detectable by physical means as the original product. In the peculiar sense of philosophers, however, an epiphenomenon is an effect of a physical process that itself has not effects in the physical world and therefore is undetectable by physical means. Epiphenomenalism implies that Otto’s heartfelt avowals that he has experiences with qualitative content cannot be evidence that he does have such experiences. (For his avowals to be evidence of his having qualia, they must be physical consequences of his having qualia. If Otto’s having qualia lacks physically detectable consequences, his avowals cannot be such a consequence, and his having qualia cannot be inferred from them.)
Dennett makes the same point differently when he writes: “Are zombies possible? They're not just possible, they're actual. We're all zombies.” In a footnote he makes it clear what he is not saying. (“It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!”) What he is not saying is that we’re all unconscious; what he means to say is that nobody is conscious in the way that “supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism.” After all, even though the reports I give of my experiences, and of myself as a person that has experiences, are to him the constituents of a fictional world, he finds is worth investigating, in the manner in which an anthropologist studies the beliefs of an Amazonian tribe, why it seems to me that my experiences are real.
Both Chalmers and Dennett argue from an unwarranted distinction. In Dennett’s case it is the distinction between what is real (or really real) and what is fictional (or only seems real). As I said, our “scientific” beliefs in “physical” reality are at least as fictional as our beliefs in conscious experiences, since it is only through conscious experiences that we have come to hold those “scientific” beliefs. In Chalmers’ case it is the distinction between problems of consciousness which are “easy” and the problem of consciousness which is “hard.” The easy problems he claims to be “directly susceptible to the standard methods of cognitive science” and “straightforwardly vulnerable to explanation in terms of computational or neural mechanisms.” Many of the terms that are used to describe such mechanisms, however, have entirely different meanings depending on whether they refer to the behaviors of machines like thermostats and computers or to the conscious, intelligent activities of creatures like us. While we may speak of a thermostat as “discriminating” ambient temperatures and “controlling” a switch, and of a computer as storing “information” and retrieving it from its “memory,” these activities differ in one all-important respect from those of human beings which we customarily describe in the same terms. The difference is that, applied to ourselves these terms do involve qualia, while applied to machines they don’t. In other words, the language used by Chalmers glosses over the fact that many or most of the so-called easy problems actually cannot be separated from the hard problem.
This point was made by E.J. Lowe in a commentary on Chalmers’ paper appropriately titled “There are no easy problems of consciousness”.18 Its gist has been anticipated by a famous dictum of Kant’s, according to which “Thoughts without [sensible] content are empty, [sensible] intuitions without concepts are blind”.19 No concept can refer to an object in the empirical world without connoting some lawful connection among qualia, and no congeries of qualia can be an object in that world without being brought under a concept.
Believing that human thought, and cognition in general, are simply matters of information processing, Chalmers is left with the idea that all that is really distinctive about consciousness is its qualitative or phenomenal aspect. This naturally prompts him to ask: “Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on ‘in the dark,’ free of any inner feel?” Purporting to show that reductive physicalism offers no account of conscious experience, by his wholly inadequate information-processing conception of cognition he concedes too much to the reductive physicalist, making it far too easy for the likes of Dennett to deny the reality of consciousness — by simply denying the reality of qualia. If reductive physicalism offers no account of conscious experience, then the conclusion ought to be that, far from being equipped to solve the “easy” problems of consciousness, it has in fact nothing very useful to say about any aspect of consciousness.
In C.W. Savage (Ed.), Perception and Cognition. Issues in the Foundations of Psychology, pp. 261–325 (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 9, University of Minnesota Press, 1978).
“Qualia” is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you — the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale. These various “properties of conscious experience” are prime examples of qualia. Nothing, it seems, could you know more intimately than your own qualia; let the entire universe be some vast illusion, some mere figment of Descartes' evil demon, and yet what the figment is made of (for you) will be the qualia of your hallucinatory experiences. [D.C. Dennett, Quining Qualia, in A.J. Marcel and E. Bisiach (Eds.), Consciousness in Contemporary Science, Oxford University Press, 1992]
Hi! Thanks for this post. I have been interested in this subject since it was called the mind-brain identity theory.
Western science, it seems, is fixated on physical substance. What if, for the sake of argument, physical substance is only one of or a special case of reality. The most fundamental term(s) used to describe the universe are space-time. Neither of which is, arguably, composed of physical substance.
Yet there is a precise and repeatable causal relation between physical substance (especially very massive or very fast) and spacetime. Skirting the issue of occupying space for the moment, does some-thing need to have mass to be real? Can a no-thing be real?
What if consciousness is a no-thing? Imagine the mind entangled in some as yet undefined way with the brain. A simple concept might be modeled on an electrical transformer and a convenient attribute of transformers is they can work in both directions. In this model the primary represents the brain and the secondary represents the mind. Much research has identified particular chemical electrical activities with associated thoughts but can we be certain which is driving which?
Is it any more fantastical to imagine all of spacetime, matter, energy, life and thought was present within a pin point at the moment of the big bang?
Hi! Thanks for this post. I have been interested in this subject since it was called the mind-brain identity theory.
Western science, it seems, is fixated on physical substance. What if, for the sake of argument, physical substance is only one of or a special case of reality. The most fundamental term(s) used to describe the universe are space-time. Neither of which is, arguably, composed of physical substance.
Yet there is a precise and repeatable causal relation between physical substance (especially very massive or very fast) and spacetime. Skirting the issue of occupying space for the moment, does some-thing need to have mass to be real? Can a no-thing be real?
What if consciousness is a no-thing? Imagine the mind entangled in some as yet undefined way with the brain. A simple concept might be modeled on an electrical transformer and a convenient attribute of transformers is they can work in both directions. In this model the primary represents the brain and the secondary represents the mind. Much research has identified particular chemical electrical activities with associated thoughts but can we be certain which is driving which?
Is it any more fantastical to imagine all of spacetime, matter, energy, life and thought was present within a pin point at the moment of the big bang?