by Matt Whiteley
November 02, 2024
from Medium Website

I am sitting at my desk as I write this.

Let's imagine instead of sitting in my room by myself. I'm in a busy office, and my colleagues are throwing a football back and forth.

 

One of them throws it at me, I have a lot of work to do so I roll my eyes and move my head out the way so the ball hits the floor behind me.

 

Said colleagues complain I'm no fun, pick up the football and I return to my work.

Let us isolate one part of that.

The ball flying towards my head, me seeing it, deciding to react by moving out the way, and then moving.

Theoretically everything within that sequence can be explained by the lights of brain science.

 

I see the ball, information flows into my up the optic nerve to my lateral geniculate nucleus, charged ions move through neurons and synapses to my visual cortex and is sent to the appropriate parts of the brain, if it happens quick enough it might be fired straight to my amygdala, causing a reaction to a stimulus I have hardly consciously noticed, but in this case let's say I am fully 'aware' of the thrown ball, have time to apprehend it and feel that I have chosen in good time to move aside.

Here, then, is the question.

Where in the causal sequence of events involved is the experience of seeing the ball coming towards me?

 

Not its correlate, but the experience: what property in the brain does the 'qualia' of thrown ball have?

As I can establish, there are three options:

1. the conscious experience has a causal property in an objective sequence
    

2. the conscious experience has no causal properties at all and is just there on top of everything else doing nothing
    

3. the physical processes that we might observe and the conscious experience are the same thing, and physical processes are what conscious experience looks like in the third person

Number 1 is difficult to make work and is a non-starter scientifically.

If you read any book on neuroscience and behavior - take for example Dr Robert Sapolsky's 'Behave' - you find almost no reference to consciousness...

It is not mentioned in any of the chapters on brain processing, hormones and behavior, the biology of decision making etc, and it is not in the index.

For all intents and purposes, a neuroscientist such as Sapolsky can in theory lay out a causal sequence of what makes us behave the way that we do, without reference to consciousness, indeed this is what he believes:

the book that followed this NYT bestseller is a book describing how we have no free will because all our behavior is explainable by causation within the brain, the body, and the conditions under which the preceding are shaped and formed over which 'you' exert no control.

Add to that that simple experience is by definition subjective and it cannot have an objective causal effect. Objective causal effects must be reducible to their objective properties and have a 'location.'

Conscious experience cannot have an objective location or it would be an objective thing, it simply makes no sense to describe experience as having a role in causing something.

So option 2 is what is right now favoured by many in the sciences. Or perhaps put it another way, option 2 is what most of the sciences are cornered into.

Yuval Noah Harari sums up this view in his book Homo Deus:

"Consciousness is the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes.

 

Jet engines roar loudly, but the noise doesn't propel the airplane forward. Humans don't need carbon dioxide, but each and every breath fills the air with more of the stuff.

 

Similarly, consciousness may be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It doesn't do anything. It is just there."

I guess depending on your inclination this might either be the stupidest non-explanation ever or an acknowledgment of an inevitable and obvious fact.

But approaching it skeptically there are several very significant problems.

Firstly, consciousness is not like anything we find in the universe and it is the ground of everything we value about existence, at the very least this requires a better explanation than 'useless brain pollution', especially since this is not proven and could probably never be.

Secondly this leaves you with some explanatory problems.

 

One presumes the fact that a non-causal by-product can't be selected for by evolution is bypassed by suggesting that the thing that produces it is selected for, but you would have to evoke a psycho-physical law in which complex neural networks simply are conscious for reasons we have no idea how to comprehend - more mental pollution I suppose.

Thirdly, and perhaps obviously:

if this was true, you would not know you were conscious.

What is it that is viewing consciousness?

 

The obvious answer is me, but what is me to a neuroscientist? The brain.

 

So the brain knows the brain is conscious,

but how if consciousness is just a pollution?

The fact that I can think about my own consciousness means it is impossible to remove consciousness from the objective properties of thought.

 

You cannot get around the fact that the brain, or rather just me, is looking at consciousness.

So that leads you unavoidably to option 3.

This is profoundly problematic for a materialist and even scientific view of the brain, and part of the reason there is so much obstinate circling back to the cul-de-sac of option 2.

What does this actually mean though?

Well, we can start by what it can't mean. It can't mean that we can describe brains as simply 'material' in any sense. Consciousness is 'in' a brain, and the stuff that you are looking at when you look at someone is not stuff, it contains qualities, natures, experiences.

The brain is what someone else's consciousness looks like in the third person.

Describing the objective process of a sequence of perception and action such as moving out of the way of the football is to describe the patterns of a conscious experience, to experience that experience is to know what the nature of those patterns is. Importantly, the latter is more ontological, consciousness is nearer to being than an objective description of it.

There is no sensical materialism to be had here.

We can go one of two directions:

• as a materialist let's say I decide on the exact centre of the brain where consciousness is produced.

• I must assume if I drill down to an atom, I have an atom that contains consciousness, or that is working to produce consciousness.

Both of those are nonsensical.

It must be the other way around, an atom must be participating in consciousness, or rather must be what consciousness looks like. Atoms are described by objective properties, consciousness is what those properties are part of.

It is very difficult for us to adopt this position, Western philosophy and science have taught us to resolutely think the inverse, that we start with a great mesh of stuff bouncing around according to physical laws and that somehow this stuff congregates sufficiently that suddenly something comes online in a new ontological category: the logical incongruities are trifling, trust us, explanation pending.
 

Idealism solves this problem in several ways.

Firstly, by shifting the duality from object to subject it does not demand the dismissal of the other.

The properties, patterns and laws described by science are describing phenomena within a conscious field, all of which participate in consciousness, but their validity is undiminished.

Consciousness is an ontological framework in which everything exists, something that materialism purports to offer but ultimately fails.

Idealism of course comes in many forms, and the scope of this essay is not to argue for any one of them. But it is not just consciousness that presents us with this problem, it is also ideas and meanings themselves.

If we consider not just the brain but our entire biological selves, what we find is less a set of distinct bottom-up causal entities than a set of potentials or contingencies shaped by the meaning of the world around you.

The more we know about the biology of our behavior the less we are able to reduce behavior to physical states without reference to their meaning.

Hormones don't produce a mood or a behavior, rather their effect has contingency upon cultural and personal circumstance and expectation, genes we are increasingly finding don't code for things as much as they code for their own interpretation, reflecting less a biological determinism than a biological preparedness for contingency and adaption.

All of these are features of our biology that remain inseparable from meaning.

'Environment' in the gene-environment relationship is not simply a set of external factors like the amount of pollution in the air or your diet, but since we are talking about behavior, which we assume is still,

• your biology

• then also your culture

• your religion

• the people and values you absorb

• the things you come to

• the personalities around you...

The effect of testosterone for example as aggression producing or pro-social, depends on who you are, what you have a tendency towards, and what the social environment you are in incentivises.

There are unquestionable biological contingencies and realities, but they also relate unquestionably to a reality of meaning that they cannot be removed from, as hard as biological science might try.

That said, one objection that might be made in regards to ontological claims about consciousness or meaning is that,

we are on a spec of a planet in a universe discussing the nature of brains when the universe is full of a lot of nothing that as far as we are aware does not seem to contain any consciousness.

 

Speaking of consciousness and meaning when considering a distant nebula seems to make the valuing of our own experience in regard to our assessments of reality somewhat absurd.

The problem though is that said distant nebula cannot be outside of consciousness.

 

It is impossible to speak of any contingent thing without inferring consciousness and meaning...

 

If meaning is not a part of reality then a 'nebula' is not part of reality, since the very word nests in an entire set of givens inseparable from consciousness.

Science may assume a neutral objective observer, but if we do not recognize that this can only ever be a contrived heuristic approach we are in danger of believing that we have actually magically produced this objective neutrality, somehow looking at a thing called a nebula with the a gaze free from the perspective of consciousness.

The objective realism that defines modern public science itself rests upon assumptions that involve meaning.

After all,

what is the difference between a person who believes in objective realism and a person who doesn't...?

Unless we assume that meaning itself has validity the answer is a set of contingent facts that have nothing to do with the outcome, which is to say variations of personality based upon various environmental influences over which 'I' exert no control, 'I' being meaningless anyway.

The belief that we can arrive at any kind of truth depends on a belief in consciousness as a transcendent knower.

We are not within the mathematical system, trapped by the improvability of Gödel's theorems, but we must be outside of it, possessing what Roger Penrose calls 'understanding'...

To believe we can arrive at truth in any kind, is,

to believe consciousness has transcendent properties...

You could choose to believe that science doesn't actually arrive at truth, only that it 'works' and that nothing else could be said.

We might compare a large language AI system, which if fed on nothing but incorrect information would not and could not 'know' it was wrong, to a piece of software designed to hack passwords.

In the latter case there is no 'knowing,' there is simply outcome, which is the password working.

If we see science as simply attempting to fit keys into locks we have less of a value epistemology and more of a blind heuristic, one that can produce lots of stuff we can do but can't really tell us anything about the nature of reality itself because any statements about nature would involve things that we cannot know that we know.

But this is not what is believed by contemporary materialism.

Instead we have the assumption that science somehow takes us outside of consciousness epistemologically and that everything that we describe and refer to has a contingent existence that can be spoken of.

We rest everything we believe on assumptions we claim we don't believe, producing philosophies full of contradictions of which the hard problem is the tip of an iceberg.

Why, though?

A large part of the emergence of the stubbornly irrational contemporary philosophy has to do with schismogenesis.

Many positions come to be defined by their stereotypical opposites, a phenomenon that is depressingly evident in much contemporary politics, and in the age of religious decline many views in modern public science still retain listless dynamics of science vs. religion and materialism vs. theism in which theism means superstition, irrationality and anti-scientific thinking.

Take as an actual example a paper in the journal Nature in 2014 in which a discussion was held between those advocating for something called Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), a theory that aims to incorporate wider understandings of species formation into the theory of evolution, and those arguing that evolution's establishing upon standard genetic theory is comprehensive as it is.

The EES writers Kevin Laland and co pointed out:

"Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation.

 

Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science."

There you have it, evolution itself cannot be questioned, even by those who accept all of its axioms, because of the threat of the religious hanging around at the door waiting for a chink in the armor to shove their creationist pamphlets into.

You might consider for example why the entire New Atheist movement even made any sense.

Science vs. religion was an ingrained assumption of the entire phenomenon, in which an objectively real materialism was simply the only option outside of a perceived irrational, superstitious religiousness.

The entire dynamic might be compared to modern politics in which everyone hatefully declares everyone else full of hate, unconcerned by their own incongruities as long as they are defined against them.

Today, even as the science vs. religious debates and the New Atheist arguments recede into insignificance, we inherit the latent dynamics of these movements, and public scientists express philosophical positions they assume to be given and obvious, without reference to what that philosophy implies or infers or why they have come to adopt it.

But many of the problems of the modern world are inextricably connected to the irrationalities within our popular dogmas.

Thinking outside of them is deeply important. You don't have to go back that far before public science did not have such a dogmatic hegemony.

In 1936 a young girl from New York wrote a letter to Albert Einstein asking if scientists pray, and he responded by saying,

"Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man."

Pioneering physicist Max Planck wrote:

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.

 

We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."

Understandably such statements today give us a fear of woo woo, of Deepak Chopra and quantum healing, of glib spirituality or platitudes that have no use in valid epistemology.

Perhaps it gives us the same fear of those evolutionists afraid of the religious waiting for them to acknowledge question marks so they can shove religion into the hole.

But the reason popular public scientists today would not make such statements is not because of anything we know now that they didn't, but simply because of the calcifying of dogma.

Yes, there is much accumulated chaff to brush out of our way, but if we are open and humble in the way we think, we can brush it out of the way.

It is time we opened some doors we haven't opened in some time.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...