I suspect that no topic has been obfuscated with more nonsense—religious, philosophical or scientific—than consciousness.
First, the focus on what consciousness “is” usually starts at the wrong place, at what might be called “high up” complex consciousness, rather than beginning with the basic phenomena. In fact, usually the basic phenomena of consciousness is not even recognized as part of consciousness! Instead “sense experiences” or “sense data” are usually assumed to be stuff outside of consciousness, stuff which our consciousness “perceives” or detects. This is a confusion you will find almost everywhere.
So let me provide an overview of my basic understanding of what consciousness is and how it more or less works. (In this I have been influenced by cognitive scientists like Nicholas Humphrey, though I may differ in my use of common-language terminology.)
There are no perceptions of the world prior to or outside of consciousness. Tactile feelings, sounds, light, color—none exist in the physical world outside of consciousness. They are subjective experiences created by the brain—they are consciousness.
Consider vision. What the scientific study of vision makes plain is that light is an experience created by the brain. It is not something outside of us which we detect. Now of course, something does exist outside of us, which we detect, and we describe that something as photons. And we identify photons as having properties such as wavelength, energy level, etc. The properties which photons have are not the same as the properties of the experience created by the brain—light—which has its own properties such as hue, brightness, and saturation. But light and its properties are created as a subjective personal experience (i.e. a type of consciousness) by the brain. I won’t here go into how we know this, but it is well known by scientists who study vision.
The same applies to sound, smell, taste, touch. They are types of consciousness created by the brain. They don’t automatically exist as phenomena—the brain has to create them. And in creating them (these first-person experiences) the brain is creating consciousness. Ears do not “hear” sounds; eyes do not “see” light. These body parts detect air perturbations or photons, pass samplings of these detections to various parts of the brain where they are “processed,” and those parts of the brain—or other parts—selectively create sounds and light (qualia) from these detections.
Sounds are consciousness created by the brain. Visual experiences are consciousness created by the brain. A tactile sensation is consciousness created by the brain.
In fact, it is obvious that such sensual sensations are what consciousness is.
What about thoughts? What about emotions? What about concepts? What about my sense of self? These are also sensations, or perhaps better put, complexes of sensations. They are (generally speaking) more complex constructions of consciousness created by the brain.
For studying the basic mystery of consciousness, it is misleading and confusing to skip over these basic sensations such as sounds, smells, and visual experiences. This is because the mystery is the same. How does the brain create a subjective sound? How does it create light, a color experience? And yet we know that it does. We know that if specific parts of the brain are damaged, the brain can’t create the experiences that part of the brain is involved in producing. Or the consciousness created is altered or warped.
Even seeing movement is a visual experience created by the brain (the area of the visual cortex called V5 is involved in producing the experience of moving things).
In “Has Neuroscience ‘Proved’ that the Mind is Just the Brain”, Mind Matters (Dec 1, 2020), Michael Egnor argues that the mind cannot equal the brain (true), and that the brain cannot produce mental states (false), because there is no way that brain states can equal mental states (true). Egnor writes,
How do material brain states correspond to mental states? How could a certain concentration of chemicals in my brain cause me to do calculus? How could a specific electrochemical gradient in my brain make me feel sad? What is the link?
The answer, says [David] Chalmers, is that we have no idea how brain states can cause thoughts. There is certainly no explanation provided by science—there is no mathematical formula that links neurons to thoughts and there is no reason to think there ever will be or ever can be. Brains are material, thoughts are immaterial, and there is no way imaginable to explain one by the other. This is why the hard problem (Chalmers himself coined the term in 1995) is hard—it’s not even tractable by neuroscience, let alone solvable.
Other philosophers have used different terms for the hard problem—Joseph Levine calls it the Explanatory Gap. But the problem is the same. There is no explanation for the mental on the basis of the physical. No physics or chemistry explains thought.
What is not in doubt is that, to some extent, thoughts correlate with brain activity. On that, dualists and materialists agree. But what is also not in doubt is that there is no materialist explanation—and there cannot be a materialist explanation— for the mind.”
All this is more or less true, and yet doesn’t conflict with the materialist claim that the brain produces consciousness. To understand how this is so, it’s easier to focus on basic conscious experiences like sound and light, rather than on “doing calculus” or feeling sad.
Vision is especially useful here, because scientists know quite a bit about it. And we know with certainty that visual experiences are produced by the brain (and not just the human brain, but even the brains of much “simpler” organisms. Do brain states of the visual cortex equate to our visual experiences? Yes—and yet also no. We see in the visual cortex a lot of the prep work the brain performs prior to creating our visual experiences; we see the dependencies of our visual experiences on that prep work—without it vision would not be possible.
And yet, how is the subjective experience of vision, for example the color red, produced? We don’t know. Worse, we can’t even imagine an example of what “knowing” how the brain produces a red sensation would look like. We can see the connection between brain states and visual experiences, but we can’t begin to imagine how a description of brain structure and brain chemistry could correspond to actual conscious experiences.
But scientists know why this is the case, why it is necessarily the case. Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt explained it coherently (and correctly, I would argue) in a Scientific American blog, Oct 17, 2018, “Unlocking the mystery of consciousness”. I strongly recommend reading it.
In a broader sense, the same “explanatory gap” exists between all scientific descriptions and natural phenomenon. We see it with natural phase changes, such as water freezing, or sudden lightning strikes. Because the supernatural worldview misunderstands science as distilling “truth” from the physical world, it misses the fact that there is always an explanatory gap between knowledge and the physical world.
That gap is doubled when we attempt to use knowledge of the brain (which is itself complex consciousness) to explain itself. Feinberg and Mallatt make it very clear why this gap is inevitable and entirely to be expected.
That the gap must exist is, in fact, a prediction of naturalism.
This is why there is nothing inconsistent with maintaining that consciousness is a product of brains. Nothing inconsistent, that is, under a natural worldview. But a supernatural worldview runs into trouble when considering the basic nature of consciousness.
How so?
The supernatural worldview relies on the notion of dualism, that consciousness (though it apparently has some inexplicable connection to the brain) has a non-physical source, a spiritual realm, etc. And this reliability on something non-physical might seem plausible when considering “high-up” complex examples of consciousness—human emotions, or doing calculus. But sounds, visual experiences, tactile sensations—consci0usness at its more basic level of sensation—do these benefit in any way from postulating a realm beyond the physical as their source?
If a pin prick creates a pain sensation in me (an example of basic consciousness) do I really require something outside my physical body, outside physical reality itself, in order to account for this experience? True enough, neuroscientists can’t explain exactly how my brain created my feeling of the pin prick, but does anyone really believe that we need a realm of non-physical existence outside of us in order to account for it?
The mystery of consciousness is right there in the most basic sensations of pain. How does the brain create qualia? How does it create a subjective experience? Well, we can’t explain it with science. More broadly, we can’t explain it with knowledge. We can’t explain it using the tools that the human brain has to work with.
There is nothing new here, really. We could say much the same about electricity, or about gravity, or about water freezing into ice. Human knowledge reveals nothing about the underlying nature of the physical world outside of us. Its tool set is focused somewhere else: on the object-infused, property-infused, information-infused simulacrum which our brain creates to “stand in” for that physical world outside us. And when we develop better knowledge about/within the brain-created simulacrum, knowledge which turns out to be useful (and not yet falsified) for us as organisms, we naively believe we have uncovered something about the underlying nature of the physical world which the simulacrum “stands in” for. But what we really have, instead, is a slightly more useful simulacrum.
The actual physical world around us remain essentially unknown and mysterious.
Well! If it’s unknown and mysterious, how do it we know that it is not in fact a spiritual world rather than a physical world? How do we know it is not also object-infused, property-infused, information-infused, mind-infused?
The reason for believing this is not the case is simple: if the world outside and around us was naturally infused with mind-stuff, there would have been no need for evolution to come up with a brain-created simulacrum infused with mind-stuff that “stands in” for it. We could simply know the world directly. We could interact with information in the world in situ, detect its properties directly, and so on. (This of course is the common myth: that we perceive the physical world directly, that our brains extract information from such “perceptions.” Until this myth is exploded, until it is understood as myth, dualism will hang around.)
There are actually a few general things that we can reliably say about the otherwise unknowable physical world around us and that we are part of.
(1) It exists (it’s not just a figment invented by brain or mind).
(2) It’s constantly changing.
(3) It doesn’t have the nature that knowledge has—it’s not naturally broken out into objects with properties—it is not informational. (Thus the inevitable mismatch between nature and knowledge that was perhaps first identified by Zeno of Elea.)
(4) The simulacrum created by our brains is a very useful “stand in” for it, whatever it is.
(5) For most purposes, it’s harmless if we conflate the simulacrum we experience with the physical world itself (we evolved to make this conflation, after all). But when it comes to understanding neuroscience, consciousness, relationships between knowledge and world, ourselves as observers, and so on, conflation becomes a source of deep confusion.
Notes:
- Nicolas Humphrey’s book, Seeing Red, a study in consciousness (2006) is a good introduction to vision consciousness.
- For more on the crucial concept of the simulacrum, see The Basics and Mind is the Brain Improving Itself and Do We Live in a Simulation?
- Don’t forget to read Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt’s Scientific American blog from Oct 17, 2018, “Unlocking the mystery of consciousness”.
Pingback: Mind is the Brain Improving Itself | Atheology