Consciousness a Problem

The inner universe of our minds is ironically one of the hardest of phenomena to study. We all should know the basics. Senses, emotions, memories, ideas – all are the raw materials of consciousness. But where does the brain come in? How are your subjective experiences explainable by neurons and synapses? (Or are they explainable?) Generally, in neuroscience and psychology, these questions are phrased as two different problems of consciousness.

The first part is the “easy problem.” It is basically a question of cognition, or how we process information. Our attention span, language skills, learning abilities, memory capacity, perception qualities, and problem solving abilities have been well-documented and explain a great deal of mental activity. After that there is the second part, or the “hard problem,” and it is in a totally different league. Why is there any experience at all if we are only physical machines and bodies of cells? More generally, what kind of automaton (e.g. the brain, a computer, a cell, and so forth) could generate consciousness? This is a harder scientific question than the easy problem for one simple reason: it could even be metaphysical.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the questions of consciousness into three categories: descriptive, explanatory, and functional. Essentially this asks What? How? and Why? Describing consciousness is the easy problem, explaining it is the hard problem, and the question of its function is something not normally addressed with the first two. The question of its function comes down to how it is an adaptation in our evolutionary past. There are some ideas that say it is for free will, motivation, better flexibility (like learning), social coordination, and better cognition (like accessing cumulative information we gather). I’ll say a little more about the first two in the rest of this article.

There are some simple features of consciousness that everyone is familiar with. I would mark qualia, phenomenology, subjectivity, and flow as the major ones that are most self-evident. Qualia are the raw feelings of sensory perception that you have. How the world sounds, looks, feels, tastes, and smells to us. Isaac Newton wrote “to determine by what modes or actions light produceth in our minds the phantasm of colour is not so easie.” Behind the experience of qualia is phenomenology. Phenomenology refers to the organization that is intrinsic in consciousness. The “phenomena” are our thoughts and ideas we use to model the world. (SEP says “… the phenomenal structure of experience is richly intentional and involves not only sensory ideas and qualities but complex representations of time, space, cause, body, self, world and the organized structure of lived reality …”) Subjectivity is something of a casual term that we all know of. Subjective experience is dependent on point of view, and perhaps to some degree, it is uncommunicable to other people. For example, what is it like to be a cat? How would you know for sure? Finally, the dynamic flow of mental life is the storyline played out in your head. William James called it the “stream of consciousness.”

There is an explanatory gap present in trying to account for how consciousness exists. In a physical, material universe, it is hard to make sense of how consciousness arises and emerges from it. In spite of this there are numerous attempts to respond to this problem. Some are pretty common such as dualism (from Rene Descartes), where the soul is independent of the physical universe, or a closely related concept, idealism (from George Berkeley), where some contents of consciousness are uninvolved with matter. Other explanations seem odd or just plain absurd, like direct realism (from Thomas Reid), which says that the contents of consciousness are the world itself, or panpsychism (from Gottfried Leibniz), the notion that all matter is conscious. Emergence theory and epiphenomenalism posit that consciousness is the result of the brain’s immense complexity, and is therefore a physical construct. (For example, Hofstadter wrote a book I am a Strange Loop, saying consciousness is analogous to a sort of feed-back loop due to its self-reference, the “I.”) A strange combo of this idea and quantum physics is supported by Roger Penrose and some other scientists, called OOR. Their theory says a special quantum computation goes on in the mind allowing it to supersede some of the capabilities of rigid programming that regular computers have. (He argues his case in his book Emperor’s New Mind.)

Another very impressive question is whether or not consciousness is actually something that makes choices. It is conceivable that our consciousness is merely a byproduct of our deterministic brain so that it is only an endpoint and does not have any control over the brain’s processing. Perhaps you’re just along for the ride!

Some people (like Colin McGinn) say the hard problem is insoluble. Others (like Daniel Dennett) say it is an illusion; there is no hard problem. Still more (like David Chalmers) disagree with that, saying purely physical explanations are lacking. Take a look at the philosophical zombie, the Chinese room, the color expert Mary, and the Turing test for an idea of controversial issues with physicalism. A philosophical zombie is a theoretical human being that functions just as we do, exhibiting all of the ordinary behavior, but is not conscious. This begs the question, “What distinguishes conscious from non-conscious beings?” The Turing test is a situation played out between computers and humans where both a program and a real subject communicate with real interviewers, and if the interviewers cannot agree if the program is human, it is declared sentient. This raises the issue of whether or not it is even feasible to discern between conscious and non-conscious beings. (In AI research, this Turing test has been carried out in real life and is a part of an annual competition to see who can code the “most” human program. Also, for fun: An xkcd-twisted version of the Turing test.) The Chinese room is where a man sitting in a closed room, using instruction books, “translates” Chinese to English (or back), but does not truly “understand” Chinese. What makes up true comprehension? Lastly, the color expert Mary is a hypothetical scientist who learns all of the academic information about the color red possible, but then experiences seeing it for the first time afterwards. (Many people debate what her experience would be like.) What is the difference between qualia and information about qualia? These thought experiments flesh out some of the ambiguities we have in understanding consciousness, which prove problematic in reliably answering the hard problem.

And so the debate on the hard problem still persists, and one still wonders how and even if the problem can be solved. Can it even be properly understood? Is it in the realm of metaphysics or naturalistic science? How can we tell? Is there anything obvious being overlooked? Surely, the hard problem of consciousness ranks right up there with solving the millennium problems and understanding quantum theory. It is easily one of the hardest problems of the universe, yet it is what you live with every day.

Modern Creationism is Hurting America

There is an ill polarity in the acceptance of evolutionary theory in the United States. The scientific community overwhelmingly supports evolution, while something like half of the general public believes creationism over evolution. The reason: religious fundamentalism and scriptural literalism. Religious leaders continually indoctrinate children about the literal truth of Genesis or phony flaws in the scientific theory of evolution. (I cringed watching this Nightline clip.) Ignorance breeds ignorance. It’s always been fundamentalists that have gawked at evolution. That isn’t to say religious people are all against evolution, it is in fact split in that sphere as well. Fortunately, the Catholic Church has seen its scientific validity. (Although it has still tainted evolution with a “divine intervention” addendum to explain the existence of souls.)

But the dead horse seems to be on some ungodly life support thanks to quite a bit of misunderstanding of evolution in popular culture, and that has been an active barrier to evolution’s acceptance. Issues such as Lamarckian evolution and “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” have been settled well over a century ago, and yet they are still painted upon the face of evolution by creationists. Shall we carry on the traditional discourse of gill slits and circular reasoning in the fossil record, or has everyone moved on yet? If not, then I highly recommend the TalkOrigins Archive.

This problem has been pummeled in the kingdom of science, but creationists have groped and gasped for air and then creeped over to the place where it has a chance to thrive – the political realm. (Take a look at the Wedge strategy.) Now we are sporting such ideas as “teach the controversy” and “academic freedom,” all of which fly in the face of true science. Shall we start teaching the “Stork Theory” alternative to our modern theory of sexual reproduction? (Dawkins uses this analogy to satirize Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.) Of course not, and so why should we teach something outside of scientific theory in our science classrooms? Creationism needs to gain legitimacy before it starts being taught in public schools. Creationism has the freedom to gain this legitimacy, and we should not confuse this with its lack of ability to do so.

Hence the birth of Intelligent Design theory. ID has no evidence; it has only proposed gaps in evolution. (Famously Behe’s “irreducible complexity.”) It purports to be entirely scientific, but it is not. ID has brought to light a more general social problem here: the God versus no God debate in culture. “One nation under God”; “in God we trust.” School prayer is out of the question; is God? Indeed, many take evolution to be a denial of God’s existence, and many see its teaching in schools as just another way the secular left is getting God out of the school system. Both atheists and religious have argued either side of the evolution + God question.

(Personally, I don’t think evolution rules out a god altogether. Obviously, it raises serious questions about things like the emergence of consciousness, the existence of souls, or our divine place in the cosmos. I can’t say there isn’t a logically possible god who would choose to have the universe give birth to life in order to evolve us. But one would expect any theory speaking to the human’s rank among the life on Earth as well as the origin of all known life in the observable universe would have some kind of tribute to its planner, and I don’t see any indication of that at all. Alas, we move on.)

The distorted views on evolution can range from the depressing to the hopefully ignorant, but I think there is almost always a measure of intellectual dishonesty involved in the hardcore activist. Is it really all that hard to go looking for the other side of a “controversy”? How difficult can it really be to conceptualize the processes of natural selection, adaptation, and divergence? It seems like creationists like to sit around their campfires telling their own yarns and guffawing at how we came here by “chance”, while genuine progress is being made in today’s biologically-related sciences as if it were a totally disconnected domain of intellectual thought.

This needs to stop. Science education has to be representative of the actual scientific train of thought; if anybody wishes to dissent, that would be fine, but don’t teach the views of the fringe. (Obviously this works in more than just science classes…) If evolution were taught correctly, if our biology teachers all knew what they were talking about, then creationist ignorance of evolution wouldn’t get very far in the our education system at all. So what we need are more teachers who are knowledgeable about evolution to educate our public, and more importantly, our children.

This is important because it is one of many ways to protect our free society from building theocratic underpinnings. It would be a slippery slope to making our nation (nearly-) officially sponsor uniquely religious viewpoints (which is definitely “respecting an establishment of religion” in my book). Beyond this, it proves internationally that America can walk the walk, not just talk the talk. America has a real potential to be a huge beacon of science, but the fact that America has the highest number of evolution “skeptics” makes us laughable. It’s just one more part of America that the rest of the civilized world makes fun of.