Hidden Assumptions About Consciousness

What, if anything, is "consciousness"?

This is a central question of Zen. I have recently taken a look at the more "Scientific" view on the question.

I just read Daniel Dennett's discussion of consciousness. There are lots of Dennett lectures online. He's articulate and entertaining.  Dennett is a philosopher so tends to dig himself into obscure debates about language, terminology and disputes with other philosophers. He borrows a lot of experimental results, but he's not really part of the Scientific culture. Sorry, philosophers, philosophy is not Science. As Robert Laughlin reminds us, scholars of the humanities talk about words; physicists talk about facts. Dennett is still well worth reading though.

Let me sketch out what I think he's talking about.

He seems to be arguing against the intuitive view of consciousness, best represented by what's called the Cartesian Theater. This pictures the mind as something sitting in a theater watching the world "through" the brain. The mind is something other than the brain, in other words, or possibly something very strange and wonderful "in" the brain, so far undiscovered.

The Cartesian Theater cannot be the way it is. It just leaves you asking how the "person" in the theater works, which is where you started. This is similar to the problem with the idea that God created the world. We are not supposed to ask where God came from. At least with respect to the mystery of how the world came to be, God doesn't help.

But what are the options with respect to consciousness? Dennett says, quite convincingly, that we can learn a lot about consciousness from the "outside", what he calls the 3rd person perspective. Submit the subject to experiments designed to probe the "inner workings" of consciousness, and record physical evidence, such as button pushes, speech acts of the subject and so on. In fact, you can learn a lot this way, but Dennett begs the question: what are you learning about? His hidden assumption seems to be that he is learning about what his opponents claim he's not learning about: what boils down to the mind, the soul or the self. Dennett loves to pepper his talks with interesting discoveries about the brain, which leaves the reader with the impression that the experimental discoveries about the "mind" are revealing what is really going on in the brain and nothing more.

Philosophers tend to carve up the Universe into camps and continually make the mistake of assuming that they have proven their own theory when they have discredited the (sometimes misrepresented) beliefs of the other camps. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle.

The discussion, as Dennett frames it, is that either (a) there is something about the "soul" that cannot be learned from 3rd person experiments on the brain or (b) we have no reason to think that such experiments will leave out anything important.

But does this cover all the possibilities? Isn't Dennett assuming that the results of his experiments give us data on the brain? If the "mind" and the "brain" are indeed different (which is, after all, the central issue), can we assume from the outset that our experiments involve only the brain of the subject and nothing else of importance? Shouldn't this be a hypothesis instead of an assumption?

Let me put on my system's analyst hat and look at one of the experiments Dennett presents so entertainingly and refers to every time he discusses consciousness. As a systems analyst (not a philosopher), I find his account crawling with entities that are so familiar as to be invisible to the casual listener. To put it simply, Dennett's accounts risk being considered as mere cartoons or "thought experiments".

• The whole idea is to somehow capture the "1st person" account of the subject and show how this spectacularly disagrees with what is "really" happening. Discrepancies reveal the "workings of the mind". The "1st person" account plus "3rd party" (experimenter) account of what is really happening is the "data" for Dennett's scientific study of consciousness.
• As is typical of psychological experiments, the "subject" is actually a statistical fiction. The "data" is about average responses, typical accounts etc. The goal of peeking inside one mind slips away (and, after all, this is what we want: insight into the feeling we all have of being unique - "me" - the 1st person perspective).
• What is referred to as "3rd person" or "observer accounts are obviously 1st person accounts from the experimenter. Or maybe these are averaged too. We somehow assume that the experimenter's point of view makes no difference, but this has been exposed as a huge mistake in Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We are asked to assume it is irrelevant in studies of consciousness. To Dennett's credit, he allows the public to become subjects in on-line experiments and appreciate a bit of the "raw data" Dennett is talking about. But Dennett is still "talking over the shoulder" of the subject and immediately providing his interpretation of what is important and/or significant.
• The "apparatus", the context and the overall experimental conditions are assumed to be irrelevant. This is a standard procedure when we try to learn about Nature. As much as possible, isolate the system studied from all other influences. It makes sense if you are studying gravity, but if you are trying to find out if the "mind" is actually confined to the brain, it amounts to an unstated assumption or (better) a hypothesis. It is impossible to study a "mind" on its own. In fact the business of the mind is to reflect context. No context, no mind.

The whole idea of 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person is a linguistic convenience and the kind of thing philosophers love to dispute over. But they certainly don't exclude the possibilities, especially when the subject of discussion is the human imagination or the "mind's eye". What I mean by "me" is the whole question.

• 1st person refers to the way I describe my own experience. It's the perspective that Dennett seems to regard as an illusion. He's not alone in this, but "illusion" over-states the issue. You can't get around the fact that it feels like something to be me, no matter how much you learn about what's happening in my brain to make me feel like that.
• 2nd person is "you", the reader of this post, for example. Speaking of "you" involves an assumption by "me", commonly referred to as a "theory of mind", that you have a mind like mine and experience the world more or less like I do.
• 3rd person is "they", not me or "you" but objects in the world. When these objects are human, "theory of mind" applies.

To my knowledge, this exhausts the possibilities built into language, although fine distinctions can be made about the gender, social status or personal relationship of the individuals involved. But there are lots of other "persons" that we talk about routinely.

• The "observer" in Relativity is a god-like entity whose only attribute seems to be a location in "space time". The observer mixes the attributes of "I" and "me", seeing the world from his unique perspective even though he/she is always referred to in the 3rd person. The Relativistic observer has been stripped of all human attributes or capabilities apart from those useful to the theory of Relativity itself. This "observer" is capable of visiting places and times that would be inaccessible to humans (such as inside a black hole or just after the Big Bang), so "theory of mind" hardly applies. The Relativistic observer really only "knows" things. He"observes" and measures.
• The "apparatus" is operated by a close relative of the Relativistic observer in Quantum Mechanics. This observer can "know" only what the apparatus (like a Geiger counter) tells him. In Quantum Mechanics, neither the observer nor the Universe exist separately. Einstein intuitively thought that the world had properties that didn't depend on observation but was proven wrong. This has left us with a huge problem, in particular, it has left us scratching our heads about what counts as an "observer" in Quantum Mechanics. Not surprisingly, different Relativistic Observers can get different results from straightforward Quantum experiments, such as counting the number of protons in a box.
• The story teller has a long tradition in human thought. We are so used to stories beginning "Once upon a time" that we forget to ask who is telling the story. The story teller adopts an omniscient point of view, knowing even the inner thoughts and motives of the humans in the story. Steeped in stories like this, it is easy for us to imagine God a celestial story teller, even though we know that all stories are ultimately told by a story teller from a 1st person perspective. Accounts of Scientific experiments often slip into this perspective as if God were taking notes, reading minds and revealing what is "really" going on.

The issue of "person" - human perspective - is right at the middle of the discussion of consciousness and we need to be very careful about who is who in the stories we hear about experiments supposedly "about" consciousness. Whose consciousness?

Milgram's Obedience Experiments

The point can be illustrated from a famous series of experiments conducted by Miligram, which claimed to provide a peek into one small aspect of the human mind, specifically our tendency to inflict cruel punishment on other humans when ordered to do so by authority figures.

Milgram's experiments and his analysis crawl with the same demons that inflict Dennett's. Milgram is tryies to sort out the effect of context on the subject's decision to be cruel. If so, his conclusions and extensive discussions about how subjects "feel" need to be set aside.

• Milgram's "discoveries" turn out to be heavily influenced by his interpretation. In other words, they are 1st person accounts of records of events, exactly in the spirit of Dennetts (in fact, Milgram's experiments are some of the first of this kind). Milgram cannot subtract himself from the experiment. Most obviously, Milgram was struggling to understand the Holocaust and how such cruelty could be inflicted by supposedly ordinary people. He imagined he got the answers to the questions he posed. Other questions were set aside. In this case, Milgram adopts the God-like "person" of the story teller.
• It turns out that it makes a big difference who the "subject" is. "Results" are actually statistical and convey information (if at all) for a rather small set of specific subjects. It makes no sense to speak of what, say, 100 people are thinking "on average", yet this is precisely what Milgram is trying to do.
• It makes a difference who the "tester" is (the person giving instructions). Varying the tester (by giving him a lab coat or not) makes a difference. This is an invisible 3rd party in Milgram's stories. Correctly interpreted, Milgram's results are about situations not just decisions.
• Culture and history make a difference. The "self" of individual subjects depends on where they were born and the culture they belong to.
• The physical setup (the Quantum "apparatus") makes a difference. To get results similar to Migram's you need to exactly replicate his experimental setup. That's standard Scientific practice, but the practice again emphasizes that the conclusions are about the specific situation, not about the inner workings of the mind.

It's reasonable to expect that a successful theory of consciousness, like any Scientific theory (Evolution, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics) will force us to abandon the "obvious" and draw us into new ways of thinking. It seems to me that consciousness poses an even bigger challenge than the problems tackled and overcome in the 20th century. Is it possible to glimpse what a new theory might look like? Maybe.

• Consciousness is accompanied by a non-local pattern of activity in the brain over time. Large areas of the brain are involved. It's clear that there is no single area "in control". This looks to me like a field phenomenon.  For example, in quantum mechanics, it makes little sense to talk about where particles are or imagine a bunch of tiny billiard balls whizzing around. The world is best described in terms of variations in a field over time. So my guess is that consciousness is a whole-brain kind of phenomenon. At least.
• In quantum mechanics, there is a mysterious process known as "collapse of the wave function". Quantum fields are wave-like probability distributions, which tell you the probability that an event will happen at any given time and location, should you introduce an apparatus to detect it. The events that the apparatus detects are actual, "real" events.  Is the experience of consciousness a similar "collapse" of the field-like activity in the brain? This idea is getting quite a lot of serious attention (Google it). The idea is that collective "chatter" between neurons "collapses" into a specific perception or "thought". Dennett's experiments illustrate the idea, where the perception magically seems to shift as the subject "sees" the same scene in a different way. I am skeptical about attempts of mystics to co-opt Quantum theory directly into a theory of mind. I think Quantum theory gives us clues about how a theory of mind might look like, but the "field" in question is quite a different sort of thing.
• It's worth asking about the boundaries of the "self" under examination. Quantum wave functions are "about" a system of particles and tell you about, say, the probability that an atom (a system of particles) will emit a photon  of a given wavelength. Psychological experiments involve a "subject" along with everyone and everything that has ever influenced the subject, including the specific setup surrounding the situation of the experiment. Is it correct to assume that the "brain" of the subject is identical to the "mind" that produces the data? The Zen way of looking at it would be to ask, is the "mind" not a product of the whole Universe? Are the distinctions the result of the way the brain works? Is the "illusion" a matter of feeling that the mind is exclusively happening to "me"?
• Robert B. Lauglin's "emergence" is probably a better paradigm to work with than Daneil Dennett's reductionism if only for the reason that emergence seems to be a better paradigm for everything. Reductionism in Science is on its way out.

ZOMBIES

There is an entirely different issue going on in Dennett's presentations. The idea of the "philosophical zombie".

Theoretically, a Zombie is physically identical to a human being but lacks a "mind". The Zombie will perform exactly the same as a real human in any experiment. Philosophers love to dream up ways that you could tell if the Zombie really has an "inner experience" or is just faking it. Of course, you can't by definition, but what the Hell, it's publish or perish.

This image gets a lot of popular exposure in movies about "strong AI" and in Ray Kursweil's idea that we could eventually migrate our "selves" entirely into a machine, leaving our biological bodies behind. This idea if fundamentally "dualistic", assuming that the "mind" is something other than the brain and could be implemented on an entirely different (presumably better) technology (Why not Heaven?). Both ideas depend on the widening experience of people with computers, which seem to be getting "smarter" all the time. Is it not just a matter of time before they become conscious?

As one who has lived with computers since they started to proliferate, my guess is that a computer, no matter how sophisticated, will have no more "inner experience" than a cuckoo clock. But this is not obvious to others and this keeps the zombie concept alive and well. Real AI research gives us a practical way to build "real" zombies and, as a byproduct, explore what it is to be human.

Kursweil's invites us to think seriously about zombies. The last thing Kursweil would admit to is Dualistic ideas(soul apart from brain), but that's exactly what he's assuming.

Kursweil's bottom line is that we could (a) build a computer that is functionally identical to a human mind (Zombie) and (b) we could migrate our biological mind into such a machine and thereby become an immortal non-Zombie and (c) if a machine thinks it's me, it's me. It should be noted that the movie "Singularity", based directly on Kursweil's idea, (a) and (b) are assumed but (c) is challenged as well as any serious idea may be discussed in a Hollywood movie. 

If we assume both (a) and (b) of Kursweil's Science Fiction, we are left with some questions. What do we do with my biological body after my mind has migrated to a better home? Presumably that body still thinks of itself as "me". Recycle? Scrap? Keep as backup? Once "I" am safely ensconced in my computer home, why not clone me? Would both clones be "me"? Check out Oblivion.

These are what Dennett refers to as "Imagination Pumps": questions that force us to think about old issues in new ways. Kursweil's zombies are ideal test subjects for Dennett's thought experiments. Whatever we figure out, it's certain to be a big surprise.

See also:

Zen and Outside-In Mind
Re-Thinking Mind and Soul
What, If Anything, Is Reality?
What, If Anything, Is the Self?

Emergence - A Different Universe - Robert B. Laughlin

Authority: The Core of Religion

There are many reasons why humans are attracted to the idea of a spirit-filled Universe.

"Theory of mind", which gives he brain a perception (not just a "theory") that other beings are conscious and act with intent just as we do. These days, we see this as a brain function that does not reflect reality, just as the illusion that things get smaller as they move away from us. Even our modern, scientifically-trained minds make us see life where there is movement.

Another consequence of they way we are built is a survival strategy that involves manipulation of the environment (tool use being the most obvious aspect of it). We expect to control the world around us and we are frustrated at the limitation of our power to do so. It is easy to imagine that the world can be (or actually is) controlled by a mind and a mind can be persuaded to help us do things we can't do for ourselves.

The illusion of time is strong in the human brain. We don't remember the past as well as we think but we're pretty good at using what we do remember to sharpen our survival skills. Almost by accident, in combination with our language skills, this gives us a "racial memory" that we fill with a mythical past that stretches beyond what we remember as individuals.

We are also dimly aware of the future, which is full of peril, especially to our own lives, which seem to be pre-ordained to end as mysteriously as they began. Quite naturally, we think about this a lot and wrap our thoughts with myths and stories.

Finally, language us a curse as well as a blessing. Language is unable to effectively describe its own limitations. We are always susceptible to the fallacy of confusing words with the things they stand for or, in the big picture, confusing stories with life itself.

But all this doesn't explain the role of what we refer to as a "religion". It doesn't explain the idea of "heresy" or our willingness to kill those who tell different stories, perceive different spirits behind reality and expect a different future. What I have said about human psychology is far from controversial, yet "religion" uniquely sets itself against Science, vigorously and sometimes violently defending the view that the alternate reality it constructs is not a mere product of human creativity but an account of reality itself. To the "believer", the world we live in is the illusion.

Religion is a byproduct of "civilization". We generally date the rise of civilization (literally, people living in cities) from the approximately 4000 BC, where we start to see fortified towns, kings, armies and writing to tell us what was going on. For thousands of years, the story of civilization is a chronicle of endless war and destruction as the number of "civilizations" dwindled and their power grew, along with the destructive power of their armies. People started dying in these wars by the tens of thousands. Hereditary Kings started to loot their neighbors to increase the wealth and power of their families.

But still, the people in these city-states had the same psychological needs as they had had for at last 30,000 years. They still saw their fortunes controlled by spirits, often the local god of a city or town. Sometimes the spirit behind natural forces (such as the storm or the sea).  Reading the Old Testament, perhaps the oldest volume of ancient history in popular use, we see a new role of God: He is responsible for victory in war (along with the slaughter of the enemy) and, conversely, defeat in war is when we fail to please God by following priestly law. This is a neat equation that keeps the priests in business no matter what happens.

In this context, what was going on in the mind of the citizen - a mind that has not changed since the days when "philosophy" was stories you shared with close relatives around a fire?

"Theory of Mind" has evolved into a complex system of theology.  The alternate universe is populated with an "official" pantheon, including gods who need to be flattered into sponsoring human activity by paying a new class of citizen: the priesthood. Vocabulary expands, the stories are written down and assume the status of what we would now call "history" and "Science". Cultural "memory" is collapsed and simplified, creating the illusion that current mythology is what it has been "forever", obscuring the role of human creativity.

Ability to control the world has expanded in some ways but narrowed in others. Weapons of war have improved to the point where they are more of a threat to the average citizen than a guarantee of survival. While agriculture has provided more calories per person, it has also made the city-state far more vulnerable to natural forces, such as drought and flood. Concentration of wealth has made the city-state attractive plunder for neighbors. Plundering neighbors has become an attractive alternative to finding new "raw" agricultural land. And yet, the illusion of control along with the expectation of control has grown. The fortunes of the city state seem to be in the hands of Kings and Priests. Compared to the freedom of the hunter-gatherer, the control of the individual over his own life has been reduced to the vanishing point.

In these civilizations, we begin to see an alliance between the priesthood and the Kings, which ties the political fortunes of the ruling class to the mythology of the culture. Failure to observe religious rites becomes treason. Acceptance of priestly authority becomes equivalent to acceptance of Kingly authority. For dissenters, it is no longer possible to just pack up and leave, since the whole world is chopped up into territory controlled by Kings.  Challenge to this arrangement is relatively recent. It dominated world politics for the last 2,000 years at least, but the system is still with us. A visit to 21st century Saudi Arabia will provide a modern experience of this kind of culture. No time machine is required.

But the strange thing is that the ordinary citizen has lost his natural relationship with the "spirit world". He still craves some measure of control. He still has a deep urge to influence the future and is still in full possession of the illusion that the spirits may be bribed or flattered into bending he normal course of history. How can this urge be satisfied? Well, you go to the experts: those who claim to know the mind of God. Those who know the rituals that are effective to bend the sympathy of God your way. Why just one God? The reason is simple. More than one God would imply competition for the priests. Even so, minor competition is allowed through the proliferation of thousands of local "saints", who stand in for the ancient Gods who ruled the territory of a single city. You can pick your Saint to make your case before the "one" God. If you can't shake your instinct to plead your case before an idol, you can still get your "fix" by praying to the saint of your choice. Donations appreciated of course.

But how does this work? Why do people accept the dry formulae and wordy constructions as substitutes for their in-bred passion for spiritual experience? The simple answer is "authority". They go to someone who is guaranteed to have the right answer. Not surprisingly, this authority will make sure that you distrust your own judgment, even convincing you that following your own mind is a mortal sin. Priesthood is not a good choice for a small business start-up.

Where does the priest get his authority? The answer (ludicrous as it may seem) is that he got it by "laying on of hands" by priests who had the authority, who got it from other priests, going all the way back to Peter, who got is authority from Jesus. Assuming that "being right" can be passed on like a virus this way, we are left with the obvious question of why we should think Jesus was definitely right about everything.

For Jesus to be right about everything, he needs to be "divine", a God. For this to work, you need to believe in gods, specifically this god and particularly not other gods. That's a huge leap and, historically, it has been opposed literally as soon as it arose. It was heresy punishable by death in Judea (it's why Jesus was crucified) and the "Christians" were being put to death for treason and/or heresy for centuries. Eventually, the divine status of Jesus was decided by committee and enforced by the time-old alliance between the priesthood and the King (Roman Emperor Constantine in this case).

It is important to understand that Jesus needs to be divine so He can claim ultimate authority, not the other way around (i.e. Jesus is not "right" because he's God). Before the era of political religion, the Gods were much more fun. "Infallibility" was not among their powers.

A similar story can be told about Islam, where the authority of Mohammed comes directly from Allah, but requires frequent slaughter of dissenters to this very day.

What about Buddha, who is so innocently portrayed to Western readers as "just a man". Anyone serious about Buddhism will quickly discover that a "real" Buddhist or Zen master traces his authority all the way back to Buddha by a process that's not very different from laying on of hands. The "Dharma", the teachings of Buddha have been elaborated and expanded by these hereditary authorities to create enough variation to fit just about any lifestyle. The Dharma itself is claimed to be eternally true (i.e., not subject to discussion or verification), very much like the "Word" of the Gospel of John, which effectively claimed he teachings of Jesus to be on par with, say, the law of gravity. Buddhist masters don't tend to go around making war on dissenters, but they don't spare scorn for "Westernized" versions of Buddhism that sell books in the West. At least according to the Buddhist masters, heresy is still possible in Buddhism, even though Buddha himself told his followers to be skeptical of everything, including his own teachings.

But what if we reject "religion" wholesale? Are we then able to jettison the workings of our brains that make us see spirits behind every tree and impose "meaning" on every experience.

No.

Our propensity for religion is primary. We invented Gods to satisfy our need to make sense of the world and feel some slight measure of control. Especially for those not blessed with a creative mind, nation states, political leaders and political philosophy will do as well. Even Science can be twisted into a source of authority by those who say things like "the majority of Scientists agree ..." or "Science says ...".

In fact, "Science" only tells us what is not true. Science is perpetually in the business of overturning authority. Attempts to co-opt Science for political reasons tend to come to a bad end, as do political movements that systematically deny Science.

What Science has done is to shoot down all support for any particular version of "God" put up by endless defenders of the concept.  Beginning with the Greeks, philosophy has provided us with an impressive tool kit to defend ourselves against fallacy. We are now able to use language more carefully than ever before if we chose to do so. World Religions, based as they are on a vast tissue of fallacy, cannot survive logical analysis, let alone "real world" verification.

Perhaps for the first time in human history, we can enjoy a complete divorce between what we know about the real world and what is claimed by human authority, especially what is claimed by political authority. We are also more aware than ever about the difference between what we "know" and what is actually happening in the Universe. Paradoxically, this can free our creativity, enjoy our lives and deal with our fears without paying a tax to priests for the privilege. There is no longer a need to judge the fantasies of other people as "false" or worthy of suppression.

In spite of the official claim of Science to provide only negative information, it turns out that we know an incredible amount about the world. So much, in fact, that we are amused by the world view of the "ancients" who, somehow, are regarded as authorities on everything except what turned out to be observably false. What is noticeably different about what we know now is that our knowledge is so impersonal. It's not as useful or apparently relevant as what, for example, the authors of the Bible thought they knew about creation (Genesis is a moral fable. The Big Bang is disturbingly impersonal). For example, astrology pretends to tell us about ourselves and our future but astronomy is almost entirely irrelevant. This illustrates my point that we have divorced knowledge from human fantasy. We are no longer in a position to determine truth by decree or authority.

Truth is now discovered "out there", not in the mind of some creative theologian. But there is also a uniquely human "truth" about our shared hopes and experience. It's important to know and appreciate the difference.