Over there is a bird, in silhouette, standing on a chimney top on the house opposite. It is evening; the sun set about an hour ago and now the sky is an angry, pink-grey, the blatting rain of an hour ago threatening to return. The bird, a crow, is proud (I anthropomorphise). He looks cocksure. If it’s not a he then I’m a Dutchman. He scans this way and that. From his vantage point he must be able to see Land’s End, the nearby ramparts of Cape Cornwall, perhaps the Scillies in the fading light.
What is going on? What is it like to be that bird? Why look this way and that? Why be proud? How can a few ounces of protein, fat, bone and feathers be so sure of itself, as opposed to just being, which is what most matter does?
Old questions, but good ones. Rocks are not proud, stars are not nervous. Look further than my bird and you see a universe of rocks and gas, ice and vacuum. A multiverse, perhaps, of bewildering possibility. From the spatially average vantage point in our little cosmos you would barely, with human eyes alone, be able to see anything at all; perhaps only the grey smudge of a distant galaxy in a void of black ink. Most of what is is hardly there, let alone proud, strutting, cock-of-the-chimney-top on an unseasonably cold Cornish evening.
We live in an odd place and an odd time, amid things that know that they exist and that can reflect upon that, even in the dimmest, most birdlike way. And this needs more explaining than we are at present willing to give it. The question of how the brain produces the feeling of subjective experience, the so-called ‘hard problem’, is a conundrum so intractable that one scientist I know refuses even to discuss it at the dinner table. Another, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland, declared in 1989 that ‘nothing worth reading has been written on it’. For long periods, it is as if science gives up on the subject in disgust. But the hard problem is back in the news, and a growing number of scientists believe that they have consciousness, if not licked, then at least in their sights.
A triple barrage of neuroscientific, computational and evolutionary artillery promises to reduce the hard problem to a pile of rubble. Today’s consciousness jockeys talk of p‑zombies and Global Workspace Theory, mirror neurones, ego tunnels, and attention schemata. They bow before that deus ex machina of brain science, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. Their work is frequently very impressive and it explains a lot. All the same, it is reasonable to doubt whether it can ever hope to land a blow on the hard problem.
For example, fMRI scanners have shown how people’s brains ‘light up’ when they read certain words or see certain pictures. Scientists in California and elsewhere have used clever algorithms to interpret these brain patterns and recover information about the original stimulus — even to the point of being able to reconstruct pictures that the test subject was looking at. This ‘electronic telepathy’ has been hailed as the ultimate death of privacy (which it might be) and as a window on the conscious mind (which it is not).
The problem is that, even if we know what someone is thinking about, or what they are likely to do, we still don’t know what it’s like to be that person. Hemodynamic changes in your prefrontal cortex might tell me that you are looking at a painting of sunflowers, but then, if I thwacked your shin with a hammer, your screams would tell me you were in pain. Neither lets me know what pain or sunflowers feel like for you, or how those feelings come about. In fact, they don’t even tell us whether you really have feelings at all. One can imagine a creature behaving exactly like a human — walking, talking, running away from danger, mating and telling jokes — with absolutely no internal mental life. Such a creature would be, in the philosophical jargon, a zombie. (Zombies, in their various incarnations, feature a great deal in consciousness arguments.)
Why might an animal need to have experiences (‘qualia’, as they are called by some) rather than merely responses? In this magazine, the American psychologist David Barash summarised some of the current theories. One possibility, he says, is that consciousness evolved to let us to overcome the ‘tyranny of pain’. Primitive organisms might be slaves to their immediate wants, but humans have the capacity to reflect on the significance of their sensations, and therefore to make their decisions with a degree of circumspection. This is all very well, except that there is presumably no pain in the non-conscious world to start with, so it is hard to see how the need to avoid it could have propelled consciousness into existence.
Ray Kurzweil, the Messiah of the Nerds, thinks that in about 20 years or less computers will become conscious and take over the world (Kurzweil now works for Google)
Despite such obstacles, the idea is taking root that consciousness isn’t really mysterious at all; complicated, yes, and far from fully understood, but in the end just another biological process that, with a bit more prodding and poking, will soon go the way of DNA, evolution, the circulation of blood, and the biochemistry of photosynthesis.
Daniel Bor, a cognitive neuroscientist at Sussex University, talks of the ‘neuronal global workspace’, and asserts that consciousness emerges in the ‘prefrontal and parietal cortices’. His work is a refinement of the Global Workspace Theory developed by the Dutch neuroscientist Bernard Baars. In both schemes, the idea is to pair up conscious experiences with neural events, and to give an account of the position that consciousness occupies among the brain’s workings. According to Baars, what we call consciousness is a kind of ‘spotlight of attention’ on the workings of our memory, an inner domain in which we assemble the narrative of our lives. Along somewhat similar lines, we have seen Michael Graziano, of Princeton University, suggesting in this magazine that consciousness evolved as a way for the brain to keep track of its own state of attention, allowing it to make sense of itself and of other brains.
Meanwhile, the IT crowd is getting in on the act. The American futurologist Ray Kurzweil, the Messiah of the Nerds, thinks that in about 20 years or less computers will become conscious and take over the world (Kurzweil now works for Google). In Lausanne in Switzerland, the neuroscientist Henry Markram has been given several hundred million euros to reverse-engineer first rat then human brains down to the molecular level and duplicate the activities of the neurones in a computer — the so‑called Blue Brain project. When I visited Markram’s labs a couple of years ago, he was confident that modelling something as sophisticated as a human mind was only a matter of better computers and more money.
Yes, but. Even if Markram’s Blue Brain manages to produce fleeting moments of ratty consciousness (which I accept it might), we still wouldn’t know how consciousness works. Saying we understand consciousness because this is what it does is like saying we understand how the Starship Enterprise flies between the stars because we know it has a warp drive. We are writing labels, not answers.
So, what can we say? Well, first off, as the philosopher John Searle put it in a TED talk in May this year, the conscious experience is non-negotiable: ‘if it consciously seems to you that you are conscious, you are conscious’. That seems hard to argue against. Such experience can, moreover, be extreme. Asked to name the most violent events in nature, you might point to cosmological cataclysms such as the supernova or gamma-ray burster. And yet, these spectacles are just heaps of stuff doing stuff-like things. They do not matter, any more than a boulder rolling down a hill matters — until it hits someone.
Compare a supernova to, say, the mind of a woman about to give birth, or a father who has just lost his child, or a captured spy undergoing torture. These are subjective experiences that are off the scale in terms of importance. ‘Yes, yes,’ you might say, ‘but that sort of thing only matters from the human point of view.’ To which I reply: in a universe without witness, what other point of view can there be? The world was simply immaterial until someone came along to perceive it. And morality is both literally and figuratively senseless without consciousness: until we have a perceiving mind, there is no suffering to relieve, no happiness to maximise.
While we are looking at things from this elevated philosophical perspective, it is worth noting that there seems to be rather a limited range of basic options for the nature of consciousness. You might, for example, believe that it is some sort of magical field, a soul, that comes as an addendum to the body, like a satnav machine in a car. This is the traditional ‘ghost in the machine’ of Cartesian dualism. It is, I would guess, how most people have thought of consciousness for centuries, and how many still do. In scientific circles, however, dualism has become immensely unpopular. The problem is that no one has ever seen this field. How is it generated? More importantly, how does it interact with the ‘thinking meat’ of the brain? We see no energy transfer. We can detect no soul.
If you don’t believe in magical fields, you are not a traditional dualist, and the chances are that you are a materialist of some description. (To be fair, you might hover on the border. David Chalmers, who coined the term ‘hard problem’ in 1995, thinks that consciousness might be an unexplained property of all organised, information-juggling matter — something he calls ‘panprotopsychism’.)
Committed materialists believe that consciousness arises as the result of purely physical processes — neurones and synapses and so forth. But there are further divisions within this camp. Some people accept materialism but think there is something about biological nerve cells that gives them the edge over, say, silicon chips. Others suspect that the sheer weirdness of the quantum realm must have something to do with the hard problem. Apparent ‘observer effects’, Albert Einstein’s ‘spooky’ action at a distance, hints that a fundamental yet hidden reality underpins our world… Who knows? Maybe that last one is where consciousness lives. Roger Penrose, a physicist at Oxford University, famously thinks that consciousness arises as the result of mysterious quantum effects in brain tissue. He believes, in other words, not in magic fields but in magic meat. So far, the weight of evidence appears to be against him.
Reading these giants of consciousness criticise each other is an instructive experience in itself
The philosopher John Searle does not believe in magic meat but he does think meat is important. He is a biological naturalist who thinks that consciousness emerges from complex neuronal processes that cannot (at present) be modelled in a machine. Then there are those like the Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett, who says that the mind-body problem is essentially a semantic mistake. Finally, there are the arch-eliminativists who appear to deny the existence of a mental world altogether. Their views are useful but insane.
Time to take stock. Lots of clever people believe these things. Like the religions, they cannot all be right (though they might all be wrong). Reading these giants of consciousness criticise each other is an instructive experience in itself. When Chalmers aired his ideas in his book The Conscious Mind (1996), this philosopher, a professor at both New York University and the Australian National University, was described as ‘absurd’ by John Searle in The New York Review of Books. Physicists and chemists do not tend to talk like this.
Even so, let’s say we can make a machine that thinks and feels and enjoys things; imagine it eating a pear or something. If we do not believe in magic fields and magic meat, we must take a functionalist approach. This, on certain plausible assumptions, means our thinking machine can be made of pretty much anything — silicon chips, sure; but also cogwheels and cams, teams of semaphorists, whatever you like. In recent years, engineers have succeeded in building working computers out of Lego, scrap metal, even a model railway set. If the brain is a classical computer – a universal Turing machine, to use the jargon – we could create consciousness just by running the right programme on the 19th-century Analytical Engine of Charles Babbage. And even if the brain isn’t a classical computer, we still have options. However complicated it might be, a brain is presumably just a physical object, and according to the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle of 1985, a quantum computer should be able to simulate any physical process whatsoever, to any level of detail. So all we need to simulate a brain is a quantum computer.
And then what? Then the fun starts. For if a trillion cogs and cams can produce (say) the sensation of eating a pear or of being tickled, then do the cogs all need to be whirling at some particular speed? Do they have to be in the same place at the same time? Could you substitute a given cog for a ‘message’ generated by its virtual-neighbour-cog telling it how many clicks to turn? Is it the cogs, in toto, that are conscious or just their actions? How can any ‘action’ be conscious? The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz asked most of these questions 300 years ago, and we still haven’t answered a single one of them.
The consensus seems to be that we must run away from too much magic. Daniel Dennett dismisses the idea of ‘qualia’ (perhaps an unfortunately magical-sounding word) altogether. To him, consciousness is simply our word for what it feels like to be a brain. He told me:
We don’t need something weird or an unexplained property of biological [matter] for consciousness any more than we need to posit ‘fictoplasm’ to be the mysterious substance in which Sherlock Holmes and Ebenezer Scrooge find their fictive reality. They are fictions, and hence do not exist … a neural representation is not a simulacrum of something, made of ‘mental clay’; it is a representation made of … well, patterns of spike trains in neuronal axons and the like.
David Chalmers says that it is quite possible for a mind to be disconnected from space and time, but he insists that you do at least need the cogwheels. He says: ‘I’m sympathetic with the idea that consciousness arises from cogwheel structure. In principle it could be delocalised and really slow. But I think you need genuine causal connections among the parts, with genuine dynamic structure.’
As to where the qualia ‘happen’, the answer could be ‘nowhere and nowhen’. If we do not believe in magic forcefields, but do believe that a conscious event, a quale, can do stuff, then we have a problem (in addition to the problem of explaining the quale in the first place). As David Chalmers says, ‘the problem of how qualia causally affect the physical world remains pressing… with no easy answer in sight’. It is very hard to see how a mind generated by whirring cogs can affect the whirring of those cogs in turn.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Daniel Dennett wrote that: ‘Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.’ A few years later, Chalmers added: ‘[It] may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe.’ They were right then and, despite the tremendous scientific advances since, they are still right today. I do not think that the evolutionary ‘explanations’ for consciousness that are currently doing the rounds are going to get us anywhere. These explanations do not address the hard problem itself, but merely the ‘easy’ problems that orbit it like a swarm of planets around a star. The hard problem’s fascination is that it has, to date, completely and utterly defeated science. Nothing else is like it. We know how genes work, we have (probably) found the Higgs Boson; but we understand the weather on Jupiter better than we understand what is going on in our own heads. This is remarkable.
Consciousness is in fact so weird, and so poorly understood, that we may permit ourselves the sort of wild speculation that would be risible in other fields. We can ask, for instance, if our increasingly puzzling failure to detect intelligent alien life might have any bearing on the matter. We can speculate that it is consciousness that gives rise to the physical world rather than the other way round. The 20th-century British physicist James Hopwood Jeans speculated that the universe might be ‘more like a great thought than like a great machine.’ Idealist notions keep creeping into modern physics, linking the idea that the mind of the observer is somehow fundamental in quantum measurements and the strange, seemingly subjective nature of time itself, as pondered by the British physicist Julian Barbour. Once you have accepted that feelings and experiences can be quite independent of time and space (those causally connected but delocalised cogwheels), you might take a look at your assumptions about what, where and when you are with a little reeling disquiet.
I don’t know. No one does. And I think it is possible that, compared with the hard problem, the rest of science is a sideshow. Until we get a grip on our own minds, our grip on anything else could be suspect. It’s hard, but we shouldn’t stop trying. The head of that bird on the rooftop contains more mystery than will be uncovered by our biggest telescopes or atom smashers. The hard problem is still the toughest kid on the block.
Correction, 10 Oct 2013: The original version of this article stated that Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine would have been Turing-complete. In fact it was Babbage’s Analytical Engine that had this distinction. We regret the error.
Published on 9 October 2013
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I have two hypotheses that *might* explain consciousness, though I do not claim that either is accurate. I simply would like to posit them as they were unmentioned in the article.
1) Consciousness, and for that matter “souls”, are part of a symbiotic relationship between the conventional “meat” of our bodies and a plasma-based life form that is the actual “soul” or consciousness component. Most matter in the universe is plasma and on a universal time scale, matter in the solid/liquid/gas phases is relatively new (or at least the existence of any substantial quantities of it), so there was more than enough time for “life” to evolve in plasma, potentially to the point of some type of consciousness. Plasma can become organized, possesses remarkable electromagnetic properties, and can manifest itself as a double-helix structure, making it perfectly compatible with DNA, which itself has some remarkable electromagnetic properties (as does the brain, and it stands to reason that whatever consciousness is, it has a substantial electromagnetic component). Whether this plasma-based entity can exist or function absent the corpus I do not know. Perhaps a “seed” of such plasma is contained within DNA. At any rate it is worth investigating and would be rather hard to detect, so it would not surprise me that it has not yet been discovered despite this being the answer.
2) We live in a simulation. Many are probably already familiar with this theory. There is evidence supporting it – my favorite candidates are things like Planck lengths and quantum effects. These suggest the possibility that our simulation runs much like a vector-based graphic in which the specific location of a pixel is not determined until the image is constructed (just as the location of an electron is not determined until the moment it is observed). This would further imply that our universe is itself an iterative process in which conscious perception plays a key role, which makes sense if we are in a simulation that is about “us” (or at least about life, as opposed to a simulation about the aggregation of interstellar dust in which humans happen to have evolved). That would allow for the concept we generally refer to as “free will”, as it suggests our actions within this simulation are no more pre-ordained than the location of the electron, though, as a simulation, our choices and the likely outcomes are circumscribed by laws of probability much like those that apply to the electron.
Both of my theories are entirely capable of being tested, and I hope scientists will eventually test both. At any rate I will test these myself at some point if no one else does, though at present I am building my business and have the next 10 – 20 years’ business ventures planned out, so it will be a while (they’re all tech and/or science related, and one is quite likely to solve global warming, so for both financial and humanitarian reasons I feel compelled to tackle that before dedicating precious time to trying to figure out consciousness).
I hope my thoughts on the matter contribute to the discussion, or at least stimulate your consciousness.
LOL. Ok.
The problem with hypothesis 1 is that even if there is some sort of plasma-soul-stuff, we are still no nearer to explaining the Hard Problem. How does this nebulous material generate self-awareness? We are back to homonculi in the head I fear. And yes we may be simulations – I think it seems quite reasonable to suppose we might be, but again that leaves the Hard Problem untouched.
Thanks Michael – this is exactly why the hard problem is so hard – because of the “so what” response that’s always possible to whatever identity theory is offered.
No, thanks Michael. You offer no coherent definition of the “hard” problem. It just comes off as so much whining with an unsupported assumption that no explanation of consciousness is possible by science.
There is a “homonculi” in the head. It is as I said farther down, our self-model within our environment model. We do model ourselves and others in our own heads. When we think about ourselves, we interrogate this self-model and lose awareness of other parts of our environment model, and vice-versa.
No, I did not say it was impossible to explain consciousness. I said we have not done so and took issue with some of the claims (not approaches) that have been made, namely that consciousness is ‘just another biological process’. I think consciousness is real, deeply weird and needs explaining and I am (fairly) confident that one day we will do so.
IF, as many want to believe, scientific knowledge is a set of objective facts about the physical universe, then it is rather obvious that no explanation of consciousness is possible by that kind of “science”.
Suppose you are in a sensory deprivation chamber, and a physical copy of your body is in another sensory deprivation chamber, and these chambers are in rooms that are recognizably different from each other. Suppose also there is a means by which both of you have access to complete objective knowledge of the entire physical universe including its present state. Note that the two of you start off in the same mental state, and have access to the same information. Therefore it is impossible for you to conclude which chamber you are in, until you climb out and have a subjective look around you. All the objective, “scientific knowledge” in the world cannot even determine/predict your subjective reality. It is an incomplete description of *your* reality.
The simulation theory is elegant and cannot be discounted (although it sounds ridiculous). Anything that has not been disproven is, by definition, still a possibility. My problem with this theory as a theory of conscious is that it still doesn’t tell us what consciousness IS. If we were to determine that the cosmic background radiation traverses along the lines of a constrained 3D lattice generated within a computer would this really tell us what consciousness is?
If you read some of crazy Frank Tipler’s stuff, which draws a lot upon Turing, then you know that one theory is that simulating computers would actually emulate cognition. That is, the process being carried out in the computer would be no different than that which is carried out in an organic mind. If so, we’d imagine that our simulated consciousness was no different than organic consciousness. If so, what the hell is consciousness?! (Where’s the terrobang when you need it?!).
I feel, and probably sound, like a crazy person.
We’re closer to answers than we think. (We just have to let go of some sacred cows to get there.) Good thing Giulio Tononi has it figured out: http://www.biolbull.org/content/215/3/216.full
The fact that when the “meat” malfunctions, and consciousness consequently disappears or is disrupted, makes it clear that consciousness is physiological, and in fact consists of a self-model imbedded in a model of our environment. Our brains function by modelling ourselves and our environment in neural field firing patterns. It is more interesting that subjectively this is hard to swallow. I believe that easily believing in the obvious, that our consciousness is not some fluid that exists independently from our neurons, debilitates fear of death and our will to survive under difficult circumstances. Also intuitively, we subjectively sense that we are continuous since our brains are conditioned to keep memories in sequence and keep track of our current state. We wake up knowing what day it is, where we are, etc. (at least most of the time). But science tells us that this is our neurons in action, not some mysterious fluid. That our subjective sense of pain comes from neural firings is obvious. That our self awareness is also neural firings should be just as obvious.
A quick reply: The very concept of a “model” is wholly intentional (in the philosophic sense, as in pointing to, or “meaning”) and therefore is loaded with mental terms through and through. The brain, the “meat,” is the representation of a non-material causal system which uses the necessary truths of platonic geometry and spatiotemporal metaphors to “see” itself. The brain is a really good “map” of a territory that is, actually, irreducibly mental. The brain wiring (the connectome) is a “graphical” representation of our abstract belief network. To know everything about “the brain’s” behavior one would have to know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING. Brains do not exist in and of themselves. (That being said, it’s important that, FOR SCIENCE, we continue to use the metaphor as it’s a good and helpful one for interfacing with the causal world. We can study it AS IF it were real and “causing” our perceptions.) The best treatment of this POV (not just about the brain but perception in general) is from UCIrvine Professor Donald D. Hoffman who wrote an amazing paper on consciousness as an evolved “graphical user interface.” http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
I have no idea what a “non-material causal system” is. All the causal systems that I know of are material, that is exist in this universe, even if they are mathematical constructs represented by neural firing patterns in someone’s brain.
There’s no way to argue this without sliding down an ontological rabbit hole, but, in short, all causal systems are ultimately non-material with material itself being merely a metaphor that consciousness utilizes to help control it’s own behavior, which is undetermined. 3-D material reality is like the interface that Windows uses so you don’t have to write in binary code to send an email. (It’s “real enough.”) Again, check out Hoffman’s paper for a thorough treatment.
(Obviously, this is just how I parse the intellectual territory. These are obvious contentious issues so, i don’t want to sound like a know-it-all.)
you are down the rabbit hole, if you believe that our reality is a “metaphor”, whatever you mean by that, of some “non-material” something. You are either a solipsist or some weird sort of dualist, certainly not a materialist.
Of those three, materialist seems the weirdest to me.
Hey Matt Sigl – you make a lot of great points here. I read the Hoffman article you linked to, very interesting stuff. I did have some concerns about his approach – for example, whenever confronted with the traditional problems to the view of “consciousness creates the world” (or, the world is mind-dependent) he falls back on a “nexu” of consciousnesses”, ensuring that no one consciousness gets the deciding vote (and therefore allowing objectivity). Ie, the world is “your mind independent” but not “mind independent”.
All in all, it there seem to be some big problems, mainly because that comes with the territory when your approach is so ambitious – most objects in the universe have not been observed (presumably) ever, but when they are, they are sensible. This leaves him in either a Kantian position (non-mind objects do have an underlying reality but it is unknowable) or to somehow come up with a way in which a nexus of observers can impact beyond what they have observed up to this point (which kind of violates the whole idea anyways).
But he has other papers, maybe my concerns are addressed there. Regardless, I will definitely be picking up his book “observer mechanics” if only because I expect it to be highly interesting (and more formal), and have interesting stuff on “observer mathematics”, so thanks for the link!
Sure! And yes, I feel the force of that problem. It’s always the problem with a principled “idealism;” how to account for the persistence of an objective reality that appears to be beyond the minds experiencing it? This is why, though something like idealism/panpsychism might be ontologically “true” (as I’m convinced it is) the paradigm of “matter” as “real” makes a lot of sense as a means of working through these issues scientifically, at least for now. This is what I love about the IIT. Its an important bridge between two very different ways of thinking about the world. (FWIW, I think Kant was wrong and consciousness IS the means by which we can experience the “Ding an sich.” Schopenhauer also took this view.)
The most serious, thorough attempt at a truly principled mental (sorta) ontology is Craig Weinberg at MultisenseRealism.com. He’s really articulating ideas at a higher level of abstraction than almost everyone else in philosophy. Check it out.
BTW, I recognized your name. You wrote an essay somewhere about art and science that was really great. I enjoyed it very much and thought it was a sentiment in much need of expression.
Small world! Probably literally, “small world” in the Watts and Strogatz (1998) sense. Glad to hear someone read it!
Funnily enough, I actually work on IIT – I’m a graduate student in Giulio Tononi’s lab. So I’m definitely biased, but I also think that IIT IS an important bridge, although its panpsychist nature has not been emphasized very much. Philosophically it fits right into what Bertrand Russell pointed out – that physics and the rest give external properties of objects, but not the intrinsic nature of the objects themselves – and that’s a good place (or at least, as good as it gets) to look for consciousness.
But the theory needs a lot more philosophical work – right now very few people actually understand it, and it gets attributed a lot of things which it doesn’t claim (your iphone is conscious! The USA is conscious!).
It’s not obvious at all really. I think you are probably right but I don’t think obviously so, and even if you/we are, this is a false-summit in the climb up the Hard Question. If it’s just neurons doing their stuff, then it can be cogs and cams doing their stuff, and tell me that a conscious Babbage engine is not weird and in need of some serious explaining!
A Babbage engine (an unlikely practical choice!) can rattle on as much as it likes, but if the program it is running is incoherent or nonsense then even one capable of processing human level thought would never approach consciousness. (It’d be unrealistically large and use so much energy that I think physics and thermodynamics would not allow it to work like that). Biological brains are very energy efficient.
Yes, but given a big enough Babbage engine it would work, at least theoretically. And if you are worried about all those cogs and cams overheating and needing a tame supernova to power the thing, then you could simply model the Engine in something more efficient, like an electronic computer.
The energy requirement is an issue – and I think there will be a limit with respect to the information that can be organised. So maybe two supernovae! I have a feeing someone has calculated… I’m not sure that even the modelling of a Babbage machine would be a lightweight option energy-wise. Even the virtual has its origins in a physical process. For what it’s worth, I have an idea that biological systems use not just their brains, but
information embedded in cellular structures of our bodies, and much is cross-linked – we make short-cuts. We are a mix of hard-wired and heuristic, with our brains masterminding the show, with a good deal of creativity! Our systems are the result of millions of years of evolution, and the accumulated biological experience is built in.
You have offered no logical reason why the “hard” question is answered by something different than the kind of answer I gave. Our minds are babbage engines, weird or not.
But again we are saying ‘consciousness’ boils down to ‘meat doing really complex things’. This does not get to the heart of the matter.
We are? I’m not saying that.
Ultimately, you are. You are explaining what consciousness may be for and why it arose but not how the subjective experience is created nor what it is. Consciousness is unusual in philosophy/science in that he ‘why’ questions are less interesting than the hows-and-whats …
I hear ya. (And enjoyed the article very much BTW.) What is it? Science is going to have to expand its conceptual categories if it really wants to make headway on this problem. There are many reason for resistance; this is a conceptual revolution happening. So, here’s an answer: Consciousness is existence itself. (Obvious point if you think about it.) All phenomenon are located within it, as is all understanding. What does it do? It’s a selection mechanism that evolves (makes choices based on what it knows at any given time) to remove entropy from itself so that it may understand it’s own nature with more clarity and make better choices in the future. More signal, less noise. The more it knows (is conscious of) how it is determined by antecedent circumstances, the freer it is to make informed choices. “Matter” is a current paradigm of understanding in which consciousness assigns ontological grounding to the geometric objects within its conceptual manifold when in fact they are evolved “interface icons.” (A video game analogy is imperfect but effective here.) The “brain” is like a graphic representation of the evolved/learned network of abstract logic gates that determines what we perceive; when activated this network IS our perceptual conscious state. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the Hoffman paper I mention below or the Tononi paper I linked to above. How does consciousness exist in the first place? Well, why is there something rather than nothing? It’s that kind of problem.
This is nonsense. As far as we can tell, most of the universe was around without us, our consciousnesses, for a huge amount of time before the present. You really are a solipsist. Good luck with that.
You are too quick to dismiss this, Elizabeth. IIT is a serious response to this problem. It is the middle of my working day, but I will try to respond at greater length to unpack IIT this evening. Michael – I think such an article would be a great follow up on this site, but its certainly beyond me.
Not me, Matthew!
we have no idea if this proposition is true or not.
The Hoffman paper is fascinating. The thesis is (probably) insane, but extremely compelling and at least addresses the issue of the possible cosmological role of consciousness.
Like many, I cannot get my head around the idea of a non-conscious universe existing pointlessly for maybe billions of years and then, bang, along come things that can perceive it and it is suddenly a very different place. This is not purely solopsism/mysticism; it is not inconceivable, for instance, that we, or our descendants (machine or animal), or some other alien species that either exists now or in the future – or indeed an alliance between many such species – decides that, faced with the impending heat-death of the Universe, something should be done about it. A conscious universe has at least the possibility of making itself immortal; a non-conscious universe does not care so it doesn’t. So a universe with consciousness in it is a very, very different place to one which is just gas and rocks and stuff.
Michael, you say “Like many, I cannot get my head around the idea of the non-conscious universe existing pointlessly for maybe billions of years and then, bang, along come things that can perceive it and it is suddenly a very different place.” The idea of a conscious universe is not particularly new, and some major scientists have discussed it seriously. But as far as I know, no one has offered any details, based on, I suppose, the idea that this makes the universe Zen-like, or God-like, or what have you.
I’m not saying it doesn’t, but then either you have a basic dualism, mind and matter, or there is some connection between the consciousness of the universe and the matter of the universe. If there is a connection, it is either physical or nonphysical. If nonphysical, then it’s essentially of a spiritual or religious nature, but if physical, then there should be some physical interaction that is relevant when I decide to raise my arm and do work against gravity. Of course some think that physical reality is an illusion, but that’s not very productive in any objective sense, although it may be subjectively pleasing, I don’t know.
If one assumes that 1.) Consciousness is inherent/innate to the universe and 2.) Consciousness interacts with matter, then it’s possible to propose a theory of how consciousness interacts with material objects (such as brains) in the sense of a.) sensing physical phenomena (awareness) and b.) controlling physical phenomena (volition). This does NOT say what awareness IS (as it is subjective) but it does say (hypothesize) HOW interactions are governed. And it integrates well with logical physical structures such as neural networks.
If you find a non-mystical view of a conscious universe of interest, I hope you find time to explore my ideas.
Thanks again for the article and your participation in the comments.
Edwin Eugene Klingman
Just to be clear – Tononi’s integrated information theory of consciousness is wholly panpsychist. It is the best panpsychist theory presented, because it gets around the “mereological sum problem” whereby things like chairs are conscious entities by evoking the idea of a “complex”, ie, maximally integrated causal structures.
Intriguingly, such panpsychist views don’t have the same relationship to consciousness as theories that divide the world into consciousness/non-conscious objects. Those dichotomous theories need reasons behind their dichotomies, and those are not forthcoming from any conceptual structures currently in place in science (as Michael well argues).
But panpsychist theories (if framed correctly, as IIT is or is trying to be) have a relationship to the problem of consciousness that is different – they don’t need to specify why this process vs this other process is conscious, as consciousness becomes, like existence itself, an inexplicable global property.
Wonderfully provoking – thank you. Just a couple of ideas from a non-specialist. Consciousness must be energetically efficient for complex living organisms and work with the second law of thermodynamics. At the very least, consciousness perhaps gives us apparent continuity of process so that we can have a complex neuro-biological manifestation, which makes us more efficient thermodynamically. Separating the brain from the organism misses the importance of integration of the mind and body. I believe much of what we may consider ‘abstract’ in thinking terms is deeply integrated with physiological processes – we make efficient use of our biology. But ultimately, we are all fields!
Thank you! Yes the thermodynamic implications of consciousness are very interesting and something I didn’t really touch upon. I think we touch upon the possible delocalised, detemporalised nature of consciousness as some sort of emergent entity (I hesitate to use the word field because it has all sorts of unhelpful cartesian implications) which sets it apart from the material universe.
Thank you for the reply. My understanding of modern thinking in physics is that everything is a field. Matter is a localisation of energy, and geometry is at least 10 dimensional!
Matter is definitely a localization of matter. We know this as well as we know anything physical. But 10 dimensional geometry is a theory that has made no successful predictions, and after 40 years of failure to produce results should be taken with a grain of salt. I do like your comment above, “ultimately, we are all fields!” And your observation that there should be thermodynamic aspects of consciousness. Both of these topics are treated in the essay that I link to above.
Thank you, Dr Klingman. I have downloaded your essay and will read it with interest – within my capabilities! It seems to me that thermodynamics is at the heart of the matter. It underpins the description of the universe.
Hi, I hope you enjoy it. The essay “Gravity and the Nature of Information” discusses thermodynamics in some detail.
My understanding is that it is all up for grabs at the moment. But there does seem to be a move to put old-fashioned thermodynamics back at the heart of Life, the Universe and Everything which I think is a good move. The no-free-lunch rule is so good that it must be at the heart of reality.
Thank you, Michael. Notwithstanding the LHC, it appears to be an exciting time for theoretical physics. I think no free lunches come with the bonus of a dynamic and evolving universe! Again – really enjoyed the article.
There’s a fundamental problem with the scientific approach. Matter doesn’t create Consciousness; it’s the other way around.
Since i have always put my money where my mouth is, am willing to bet Ray Kurzweil INR million (about USD 16,000) that computers can never ever become conscious.
What would you accept as proof that a computer was conscious? If you can’t specify that, it’s not a fair bet.
Well I would ask it for its take on the Hard Problem – not proof, sure, but the answer would be interesting
If the computer is not conscious, it would speak like a physicalist. Perhaps that is also why physicalists speak the way they do.
the computer would blow up. i saw that on star trek.
I saw the Start Trek computer go insane. It was on the ‘Two Ronnies’.
Well, the computer should do something that it’s _not_ programmed to do.
Some more thoughts on this at Why Expert Systems Must Fail:
bit.ly/bsxYXSys
or
http://shastrix.blogspot.in/2008/05/why-expert-systems-must-fail.html
From your link:
“Am willing to pay USD 25,000 to anyone who can make an expert system do something that it’s _not_ programmed for”
In other words, you want someone to program a system to do something it’s not programmed for. I think your money is safe there.
Alternatively, just randomly damaging its RAM will eventually make it do something it’s not programmed for. But I’m sure you won’t accept that.
How do you know we are not programmed, by our heredity and environment?
I think this is the key question. Part of what makes this so hard is that we can’t even agree what consciousness “is”. It’s like trying to explain the color blue to someone who’s never had sight. We know vaguely it’s a feeling of being “self-aware”. We could theoretically program a computer to do some of the processing that our brains do but it’s a huge unknowable leap to then say that the computer is “aware” that it’s doing this processing. And no, it’s not the Turing test… we can pretty easily trick people into believing they’re talking to sentient beings when they’re talking to a computer.
Dangerous idea. Like it! Perhaps we have it all backwards? Perhaps the Brain simply acts as matter based receiver of conciousness and matter is the very end result of conciousness. Oh the problems this would be causing us if our civilisation defining Science of the last 300 years was predicated on exactly the opposite way of looking at the world.
Thank you; it was Peter Russell, ex-student of Stephen Hawking, who convinced me of this “dangerous idea”
More in Reality and Consciousness: Turning the Superparadigm Inside Out:
http://bit.ly/prSuPara
The strong intuition is that computers can’t be conscious. But if this is true, then you have to explain why neurons firing produce conscious while computer hardware doesn’t produce consciousness. I can see absolutely no good reason why that would be so — can you?
Good question; no good answers from me.
One can experience consciousness (Ramana Maharshi used to say that the Biblical statement “I Am That I Am” was the best on this front) but i don’t know whether one can explain It.
The Infinite One
Cannot be understood
Only experienced.
And, after reading the XP of George washington Carver, who discovered so many peanut products after a snafu, i stopped thinking of getting into that territory.
More on that at:
bit.ly/bsxPeanuts
or
http://shastrix.blogspot.in/2010/10/peanuts.html
That question is only a problem if one believes that it is the neurons producing consciousness, the presumption of a material reduction of consciousness.
Do you have any examples of consciousness where there no neurons? When people die and their neurons stop firing, there isn’t any evidence for consciousness there.
I would welcome comments on my own explanation of consciousness as ‘an adaptive model of reality that is emergent from the integration of sensory inputs and cognition’. http://finkabowdit.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/consciousness-towards-solution-to-hard.html
Your hypothesis explains what consciousness may do and why it came about, but it does not explain what it IS. The problem of how non-sentient meat generates self-awareness remains unaddressed.
“I don’t know. No one does. And I think it is possible that, compared with the hard problem, the rest of science is a sideshow.”
I’m glad, as a philosophy student, that there may still be job options in the future.
But who knows if solving the Hard Problem will pay?
I don’t.
We should simply strike the word ‘consciousness’ from our lexicon. It draws a circular logic of the sort that to think of consciousness is consciousness.
Strike it and the hard problem goes away.
Consciousness is an illusion, a proud and anthropomorphic illusion. We are not, in fact, conscious. The notion is like an ouroboros with its tail in its mouth, self-consuming.
But we ARE conscious. Saying we are not is just silly and illogical. The fact that we can all sort of agree that there is such a thing as an internal mental life, call it what you will, shows that there is a problem there that needs solving. The Hard Problem will not vanish in a puff of semantics. People have tried that and it doesn’t work.
You can’t explain the red experience to a person born completely blind. Words cannot capture the meaning of red, but that doesn’t mean we should strike ‘red’ from our lexicon. We KNOW what we mean by ‘red’, and we KNOW what we mean by ‘consciousness’, even if there can be no objective definition of either.
Striking words that cannot be objectively defined is ignoring the problem, not making it go away.
Well yes it is an illusion if that’s how “you” perceive it. Enjoy.
Ladies and gentlemen, behold: A ZOMBIE!
This, article, and every other theory of consciousness I’ve seen (other that Julian Jayne’s theory) suffer from the same problem: they can’t actually provide a rigorous definition of consciousness. What many describe is “awareness” however awareness doesn’t allow us to distinguish our mental process from that of a say a dog. We might all agree that a dog is in some way “conscious” but, using this definition of awareness, we’re hard pressed to identify what it is that’s different between our consciousness and a dog’s. The definition of consciousness as “awakeness” falls into the same trap.
Nor does the definition of consciousness as “subjective experience” suffice. For example, different sea slugs can display different behavioral responses to the same external stimuli. This is the basis of personality and sea slugs have personality using this definition. This indicates that they have different subjective experiences. Whether or not they’re aware of this subjective experience is irrelevant, they HAVE a different subjective experience. Yet no one would argue that a sea slug is conscious.
My working definition definitely needs some work but I think it elides some of the problems of other definitions: 1) conscious requires the ability to perceive abstract reality and 2) consciousness is the intentional engagement with abstract reality in service of one’s own survival (sorry computers). This is consistent with an evolutionary basis for consciousness.
What the hell does abstract reality mean? Well, in my head, abstract reality contains those things that are objectively true but have no concrete existence. Math would be an example. God would be another (if God were to exist, I’d argue that’s up for debate). Note that “abstract” does not mean “imperceptible” to humans (otherwise infrared sensing, which snakes can perceive but humans cannot, would suffice). “Abstract” means literally having no physical form. This definition allows us to easily see the difference between humans and lower species. Using this definition we can start to construct a hierarchy of consciousness of species that is more consistent with how we actually view different species (dolphins are more conscious than gerbils, any disagreements?).
We see evidence of humans drawing upon abstract reality in purposeful ways all of the time. It is, I would argue, the basis of culture and religion. As soon as we realized that there is a reality outside of our direct experience we felt compelled to try to represent it in this physical world in some way. Hence art, music, script, literature, religion. We have constructed our civilization around abstract reality and this is the core difference between humans and all other species. We build monuments to gods unseen and launch satellites into space base on math we’ll never touch. Of course not everything that we grope out of the ether is bound to be “real” but we are unique in our pursuit of and ability to detect such abstract reality. It is through the pursuit of abstract reality that we believe we will be able to ultimately know ourselves and our purpose.
“Every other theory of consciousness suffers from the same problem: they can’t provide a rigorous definition of consciousness.”
This is the kind of thing that gets thrown up ever so often in these kinds of discussions and in the literature, but doesn’t actually matter and relies on a category error.
All that’s actually required to do philosophical/scientific work is a “working definition”, not a “rigorous definition”, because for any philosophical/scientific phenomenon, a rigorous definition is impossible without a theory, which is what you seeking to construct to begin with. If all other types of theories were held to this standard, we wouldn’t have science, philosophy, or history, because you wouldn’t be able to start without what you would be seeking to prove (ie, a rigorous definition based in a theory, which is what you want).
Consciousness is the ego-centric subjective mini-universe that you live in all day and that vanishes when you go into a deep sleep and which reboots when you wake up. Working definition, we all know what we’re talking about, work can proceed unhindered.
If consciousness is simply subjective experience then it becomes impossible to test and is therefore not a scientific question in the same sense that “does God exist” is not scientific. If consciousness is merely a subjective (internal) state then we cannot even necessarily say that clostridia aren’t conscious then since they have active modes and sleep modes (spore state). They likely also have differential internal responses to external stimuli due to mutational differences. Should we study bacteria to understand consciousness? Clearly not.
You have to rigorously define the question otherwise you have no way to interpret the results of your experiments. This is not necessarily always true of philosophical questions but it is certainly true of purely scientific questions. I think I’m being redundant here but in order to ask a scientific question you need to know explicitly what you’re asking.
“You have to rigorously define the question otherwise you have no way to interpret the r