Consciousness

I am going to tackle a difficult problem here. I am not an expert here, not even an expert on my own experience of consciousness. Quite often it is described as The Hard Problem. Some pundits don’t see it as a problem at all. Problem or not, all is not well in the house of consciousness. First of all, if we don’t have free will in the libertarian sense … I could have done otherwise, then there are problems for our, or at least my, inability to be aware of why I can’t see that I can’t do otherwise. The sense of agency that I had certainly appeared to think it could do otherwise, so what can I do? Well one thing we can do is have a little introspection.

Over the years I had come across Susan Blackmore in the New Scientist debunking pseudoscience etc, I generally did not pay much attention as I had little interest in pseudoscience. But after I started becoming interested in, shall I say, the philosophical side of existence ten years ago,  I came across Susan Blackmore’s essay “Am I Conscious Now?”. It is a quick ten-minute read.

Not everyone experiences this “awakening”, won’t admit to it, or perhaps they don’t see it as relevant somehow. I will let you come to your own conclusions on her essay, but I am not ready yet to agree with her conclusion:

Am I conscious now? No, I’m not.

But I never tried to experience that woken moment all the time, it was not important to me. Just seeing there is a difference (at least for me) was intriguing. I think the important thing to recognize is not whether we are conscious or not, but to be aware that consciousness is not quite what it seems. I thought Am I conscious now? was a really insightful introspection.

The video below is a blurb for a VSI (very short introduction) book on consciousness that Blackmore has written.

My preliminary take on the aspects she promotes:

1. Mystery: if by mystery, do we mean we don’t understand everything about consciousness, then yes. We don’t understand everything about a lot of things. Will it always be a mystery? Perhaps, but I will take August Compte’s prediction to heart here, “… but we can never know anything of their [stars’] chemical or mineralogical structure; …”
2. What’s it like to be a bat? while this is an interesting question. I am struggling with its implications. I certainly think I experience the world as a movie, theatre of the mind so to speak. I am quite willing to accept a bat’s experience could be quite different. eg it might experience sound as colour, synaesthesia from a human point of view.
3. Qualia: again, qualia are definitely part of the theatre of the mind or at least mine, but people like Dennett famously argue against qualia. This is something I will have to explore further.
4. Philosopher’s Zombie: an interesting question, why would evolution evolve what we call consciousness if it served no function? We can imagine a philosopher’s zombie that has no consciousness but would laugh, cry, love, laugh etc, but the emotions that go with these actions may not be there. I suppose the question is, could we have a philosopher’s zombie that believed that it had the requisite emotions? Are these emotions useful from an evolutionary point of view? Sure, the signalling to others is useful. Do emotions emphasize the sincerity of our emotions helping convince others and even ourselves? And indeed, such a philosopher’s zombie would be us; though I would agree there some criticisms that can rightly be levelled. I am not sure we need consciousness for this. I read somewhere the suggestion that consciousness is like the hum an electric motor might have. It does not actually do anything “useful” as such and is simply a by-product of brain function. This makes sense.
5. Are other animals conscious? almost certainly. But I suspect there are likely different shades of consciousness. Would they have the same richness? Is our experience of consciousness that rich? What would our consciousness be like without language? Also am I using some theory of mind, say for my cat to predict its behaviour, it does not make clear my cat has a mind.
6. Altered states of consciousness: I suppose these include things like, near death, experiences, drug use, sleep and even death. But we are beginning to have a slightly more detailed sense of what is going on in the brain.
7. Neural correlates of consciousness: Wikipedia quotes Koch as saying, “The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept.” This is all well above my paygrade and is likely interesting; but, does it fundamentally answer the question, does consciousness do anything?
8. Is consciousness an illusion? the short answer for me would have to be yes, in the sense that consciousness is not what it seems. I will touch on this later.
9. Free will: if we accept, we are completely a product of cause and effect, then it is hard to believe in free will in a libertarian sense. If we take on a compatibilist point of view, I can’t help thinking, we are missing out on an important aspect of how the universe ticks.
10. The self: if we don’t have free will, then the self is definitely not what it seems.

This book will be on my reading list soon. I suppose the big question, for me, is, “does consciousness drive our choices and actions?”

In a blog Blackmore gives what she thinks are five books on consciousness that are worth tackling. Including Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. While Dennett did not do it for me, I thought he brought up some interesting ways at looking at qualia and how we come to decisions. She says:

Where I really agree with Dan Dennett is that this is the job that we need to do first. We need to expose all the illusions and delusions that we have about our own minds before we can even begin to know what the right questions are to ask about experience

Here’s a story… as accurate as I can remember it.

May be six seven years ago, does not really matter, I was in a meeting on a technical problem a plant was having. At the end of the meeting I was talking to a young engineer (they’re all young these days), about another plant next door and that I had not seen it in quite a while. He suggested he’d give me a quick tour of the plant; to which I readily agreed. There is isn’t a logical route to tour the plant as it has been modified many times over the years. Anyway, we were discussing the new US Autojet Filters that had replaced the old Sperry filters and some problems they had been experiencing at the end of the “cold stage”. I had done some work on some similar Autojet filters that had been installed in 1989 for the “hot stage”. I was explaining the work I had done in some detail, and in the middle of a sentence a voice popped into my head.

I don’t know how this sentence is going to end.

This voice was me, but not the me I think I usually experience. I broke out into a cold sweat. It was a nice warm sunny day, and the plant was humid. I am not supposed to experience voices in my head, even if it is still me, though not the regular me. My regular me scanned the events and agreed that it too, could not see how the sentence will end. I continued explaining the test work I had done. I have no idea how long or how this lapse came across to the engineer I was talking to. But I was shaken by this experience.

This other me-voice has not reappeared since then. But the regular me occasionally can catch itself in mid-sentence and see it does not know how the sentence is going to end. This shows up in spades when writing, if a post does not take and is lost, it is just about impossible to reproduce what was written before if it is more than a couple of sentences.

This reminds me, maybe I should have a crack at Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was on Blackmore’s reading list. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion described it as:

It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.

Does consciousness actually do anything useful from an evolutionary point of view? Or is it like the electric hum of a motor, a simple by-product of the immense complexity of the brain? I suppose this is where we can sort the libertarians from the compatibilists.

When I was working there was a few minute walk to the outside carpark. The parking lines were at an angle to the rotogates leaving the facility, and there was a building between the gates and the carpark, so the carpark was not visible at that point. There were a couple of questions, where did I park, what is the quickest way, and that boiled down should I go straight or turn left. Sometimes I would find myself thinking “go left, it is quicker”, except I had already taken one or two paces “left”. Why was my consciousness a step or two behind my body? One might argue there might have been a timing slip in the consciousness, much as we experience déjà vu. Similarly, whilst driving I find myself looking in the mirror and thinking to myself, “I should check the mirror.”

These last two are a couple of examples of where I am in some sort of autopilot mode. But examining the “Am I conscious now?” question, it’s not just while I am driving, it is pretty much all the time.

I read somewhere (listened to) Blackmore saying that neuroscience by itself is not going to explain consciousness. She goes onto to say we need careful introspection of our minds as well. No doubt Blackmore has taken the meditative route here, which is fair enough. I suspect other methods will be found for introspection too, and together with neuroscience this will inform us more about consciousness.