Does Consciousness Have Meaning?

The most familiar part of my personal world, my own consciousness, is also the most strange. How has inner experience emerged, radically emerged, from cosmic dust? Not just perceiving, but feeling inside. Not just thinking, but awareness inside. Call me obsessed with consciousness, but consciousness, I claim, characterizes our world, and consciousness demands explanation. That's why I keep pounding the problem. That's why I ask, is consciousness only an accident of biology, or does consciousness have further meaning? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and Closer to Truth is my journey to find out. Consciousness is a field of philosophy, but I did my doctorate in brain science. That's why I begin in Boston with philosopher Ned Block. Not all philosophers of mind give brain science primacy. Ned does. Ned, you've called consciousness a mongrel concept. What do you mean by that? Well, the important thing is to distinguish between the concept of consciousness and consciousness itself. Our concept is this mongrel that has many different parts, and those parts are concepts of quite different phenomena that, unfortunately, all get called by the same name, consciousness. Maybe a good place to start is with one of the traditional conundra, the inverted spectrum hypothesis, the hypothesis that things we both call red look to you the way things we both call green look to me, that looking, what we describe using the words looking red and looking green, express the contents of consciousness. In addition to those contents, there is the awareness of those contents. If you put the contents together with the awareness, you get the essence of consciousness. What we have to do is we have to just clearly distinguish the cognitive aspects of consciousness from the basic biological phenomenal aspects. So, for example, sometimes you will be having a conversation, and you'll notice at some point in the conversation that there's some background noise. But sometimes when you notice it, you also notice that you have been hearing it all along, and you realize that you've been hearing it all along and you haven't noticed it. Noticing it added something. Maybe it changed the phenomenology, but before you noticed it, there was a basic form of consciousness. That's what I think that the neuroscientists who study consciousness are mainly studying or trying to study. And the noticing is something else. It's a big problem in the understanding consciousness is to distinguish that noticing from what came before it, which is the primitive, basic, what I call phenomenal consciousness. Basic, primitive, phenomenal consciousness is something we share with lower animals, but the access to it, the cognitive access, is a much higher, later function. The primitive, phenomenal consciousness is really smack in the middle of biology, whereas the more cognitive aspects, like the rest of the cognitive mind, can be understood in a more functional, brain-independent way and studied by computer scientists. And when you say brain-independent, that means that you're interested in the function, per se. It doesn't matter the substrate on which it happens. It can be a wet piece of meat in our head or it can be a whole array of silicon in a computer. Exactly. We have reason to think that those functions can be reproduced in different creatures and there will be no significant mental difference between what goes on in the different creatures, whereas for the primitive, phenomenal consciousness, there we have a real problem. We have no reason to think that a computer can have it. To Ned, consciousness is complex and must be understood on different scales, content versus awareness, sensory versus cognitive, biological versus functional. He believes that mind is entirely the product of brain, yet he finds no reason to think that computers can ever become conscious. Why not, Ned? What's the insurmountable obstacle? Computing power is increasing exponentially and many scientists assert that computers will become conscious. That's why I go to MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where I meet its legendary founder, Marvin Minsky. To Marvin, consciousness is simple and not quite real. Marvin, you have called consciousness a suitcase word. What do you mean by that? Well, I think the word consciousness is a clever trick that we use to keep from thinking about how thinking works. And what we do is we take a lot of different phenomena and we give them all the same name and then you think you've got it. It's just so... So, packing a lot of separate stuff into a suitcase. Yes. Because if you look in a dictionary, you'll find things which... Descriptions saying a person is aware of themselves or something like that. But what does it mean to say you're aware of yourself and if you think in terms of the brain as a whole bunch of different kinds of machinery with various connections, then it's easy to see that it would be very hard for any one part of the brain to know what's happening in all the rest. There's just too much. So, in fact, each part of the brain has connections to some other parts of the brain and can get some idea. But there's no place that knows everything. It seems to me that when people talk about consciousness, they're talking about at least four or five major things and dozens of others. For example, if you ask, were you conscious that you touched your ear? You might say no. I didn't know I did that. You might say yes. If you say yes, it's because some part of your mind, the part that talks, has access to something that remembers what's happened recently with your arm and your ear. The reason you can say that is that you've made some sort of representation of the recent past. I think it's a very strange idea that there's some wonderful property of the brain that can do so many different things, such as to remember what you've been doing recently or remember who you are and why you're able to talk about yourself and just so many things like that. We use the word conscious, for example, when you know why you did something. Sometimes you just do something without even remembering that you did it or knowing a reason. We love the idea that some things are done deliberately and some things are done automatically because that's convenient for legal and ethical and other operations. So the word conscious is very valuable socially. It's all right to punish someone if they know what they did and perhaps why. Because what? Because they might be able to learn. If they have a representation of what caused that, then they might be able to change it. And so the idea of punishment or reward is valuable for things that people were, quote, aware of. But there are hundreds of kinds of awareness. There's remembering something as an image. There's remembering something as a string of words. There's remembering the tactile feeling of something. When a word has multiple meanings, that ambiguity is often very valuable. But if you're trying to understand those processes and you've put them all in one box, then you say, where in the brain is consciousness located? There's a whole society of scientists who are trying to find the place in the brain where consciousness is. But if it's a suitcase and it's just a word for many different processes, they're wasting their time. And they should try to find out how each of them work and how they're related. To Marvin, consciousness is an artificial word, overused and overrated. Consciousness is a suitcase word into which dozens of independent mental activities are packed. In short, to Marvin, consciousness is an illusion and hence has no deep meaning. I see consciousness with a different hue. I see consciousness weaving its magic on a larger tapestry. Seeking that larger consciousness brings me to Alvin Noe, part cognitive scientist, part philosopher. Though Alvin evokes nothing non-physical, he finds causes of consciousness outside of the brain. Consciousness outside the brain? How can that be? We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. That's what consciousness is. That's not an illusion. The way scientists have tended to approach consciousness, traditionally, is by asking, what is it inside of us that thinks, that feels, that experiences, that is conscious? Some people say, well, something inside of us must be conscious, so that thing must be non-physical, immaterial, spiritual, call it soul, call it mind. And that leads to all sorts of puzzles and mysteries. How does something immaterial, something which is not physical, interact with the physical? So other scientists come along, other thinkers come along and say, no, there is a thing inside of us which thinks and feels and judges and is conscious. It is the brain. The problem is that it turns out, after decades and decades of devoted work on this, that we actually have no better idea how the actions of cells in the head give rise to consciousness than we do how consciousness arises out of immaterial spiritual processes. Dualism is the view that the universe divides into two fundamental different kinds of things, the mental and the physical. The science is approaching a non-dualistic view. The brain is the mind. The problem is that they both share the common assumption that we should be looking for mind inside of us. That's, I think, the problematic assumption. We need instead to take seriously the possibility that consciousness isn't something that happens inside us, it's something that we ourselves do through, with our bodies and interacting with the world around us, exploring the environment. Consciousness doesn't depend only on what's going on inside my head, even if it does depend on what's going on inside my head. We occupy a place in the world, there's all sorts of things going on around us, and consciousness is that activity of keeping tabs, keeping touch, paying attention to, interacting with the world around us. Some would look to hallucinations, mirages, dreams. So doesn't that corroborate the idea that consciousness is something that is inside of us and not real? The fact that we're sometimes mistaken doesn't mean that everything is a mistake. The fact that one can experience a color in a dream doesn't mean that there's no difference between experiencing a color in a dream and out of a dream. One of the things that's interesting about experience is its density, its robustness in detail. I think that the brain probably isn't able, on its own, to generate all that detail. How then do we understand the essence of what consciousness is, and is it something that is just emerging within us in this illusory way that we think is real, but is really not? Consciousness isn't just a matter of events triggered inside us by things outside us, because things are triggered inside us all the time by all sorts of things outside of us and they don't rise to consciousness. So which are the things that we experience and which are the things that don't? A lot of it depends on our context, on our interests, on our understanding, on our knowledge. For instance, I can walk into a room and there's a piece of maybe offensive graffiti on the wall. If it's in a language that's foreign to me, I'll take no offense. I may not even notice it as words. But if it's in a language that I know, boom, I may be shocked. I may actually be affected emotionally by what jumps out at me. So consciousness isn't a matter of having a feeling. It isn't a matter of a momentary occurrence. It's a kind of an ongoing grappling with things, making use of background knowledge, such as the meanings of the words, the language in question. Consciousness is no illusion. The illusion comes from thinking that consciousness is this internal, autonomous something which is detached from the rest of our biological involvement with life. To Alva, a brain alone cannot be conscious. What's also needed is intimate interaction with an external world. But wait, mustn't an external world be represented in the brain? Consciousness is being in touch with the world around us, Alva says. But the brain approach, he adds, is not going anywhere. To most brain scientists, those are fighting words. But should scientists and philosophers monopolize this consciousness business? What about artists? Art engages the mind, liberates it, consumes it. How might an artist view consciousness? I go to San Francisco's Exploratorium, a cathedral of creativity, to meet Jaron Lanier. Jaron's an avant-garde computer scientist, composer, and writer who popularized the term virtual reality. Consciousness is hard to talk about because almost all the vocabulary that you might want to use has been colonized by people who think it doesn't exist. Fundamentally, what I think is that we know very little about this world we find ourselves in, and that the process of doing science is best served by humility. Until we can explain this subjective experience of experience thing, I think we should accept it as being there. And I think it's more honest simply to say, well, our understanding is incomplete. Now, of course, it's perilous to do that. There's an army of people with particular superstitions who might get comfort from that. So, as soon as you say, well, I think there's something funny about consciousness, and maybe we're not just all computers. As soon as you say that, then people with various superstitions or religious agendas might seize upon it. And that's an unfortunate side effect. Yeah, but our job is to be completely honest to ourselves. Whatever is real, and if other people misappropriate, they misappropriate. I can give you a variety of arguments that consciousness, in the sense I'm speaking of it, exists. But ultimately, you can't prove it to someone. They either feel it or they don't, which is what's so peculiar about it. Here's another one. The sense of time. The same people who don't like consciousness tend to not like non-determinism. Because if there's non-determinism, then there's some spooky thing that causes the future to be the way it is. So, they tend to like determinism. But if we live in a deterministic world, if it's like a big, let's say, a multidimensional sculpture, a four-dimensional sculpture that we could step outside of hypothetically and see the future and the past as one fully realized whole, if that's possible, then how is it possible that we can identify what moment we're in? Like, what makes now now? The fact that there's a now indicates there's some marker that makes this now now, you know? And that's consciousness. This is the importance of consciousness. It affects our sense of time. It affects our sense of free will. It is a concept that pervades a lot of the important aspects of existence. Now, of course, the real drama of the question of consciousness is this other thing, which I have absolutely no insight on, which is the possibility of an afterlife or something like that. And that's the name of the game for a lot of people who think about this, understandably. The one thing I can say about it is that I think the scientific community ought to not tread on that territory unless it has something constructive to say. I think to have scientists sort of be in the position of telling people, don't believe in that, don't have any hope, don't have any faith, is simply dumb because it's not something we really have evidence about. This kind of hard attack on soft faith will backfire and is destructive and ultimately isn't honest because I think a lot of us do feel this consciousness thing inside, and a lot of us wonder what it's all about at some larger level. We just don't have the tools to do anything but wonder. To Jaron, consciousness is no illusion, and he links consciousness to a future where our choices are free and non-determined. That would be real meaning. But Jaron worries that superstitions or religious agendas might hijack its meaning. And then there's life after death, which often energizes debates about consciousness. But seeking meaning in consciousness would itself be without meaning if we'd never know how consciousness really happens. If there is meaning to be found in consciousness, the mechanisms of consciousness should provide clues. Clues, that's what I seek from the British philosopher Colin McGinn, who famously finds great mystery in explaining consciousness. There's always been the question, what's the most basic thing in the universe? Is it the mind, or is it things outside the mind? So, idealism is the view that the reality is through and through mental, and what we think of as material things are just configurations of that spiritual mental realm. And then, at the other extreme, there's the idea there's only the material world, and consciousness is just an illusion. There's no such thing as consciousness to begin with. And then there are positions at every stage between those two extremes. So, panpsychism is the view that consciousness is an ingredient of every entity in the world, including elementary particles. And then you've got views that say that consciousness and matter are equal ontological entities. Then you've got the idea that consciousness is real, but it depends completely on the material world, particularly on the body and on the brain. And then you've got the view that not only does the consciousness depend on the brain, but also it's completely reducible to the brain. That's more the materialist view. And then you've got interactionism like Descartes, where consciousness does depend on the brain, but it also causes events in the brain, a two-way causal interaction. And the great difficulty is that all these positions seem defensible from its own point of view. My view is that consciousness is reducible to something about the brain, which is not itself consciousness, but we don't know what that thing is about the brain that it reduces to. So I hold out the possibility that consciousness is rooted wholly in the material world, the body and the brain, but its basis in that world is something which exceeds our cognitive limit. You talk about a hidden form of consciousness. What's that all about? Well, the idea of the hidden structure of consciousness, as I call it, is there's a surface to consciousness which is apparent to you in introspection. And then far beneath that, there's the brain. Between those two levels, you've got a structure of consciousness which mediates between the two. So we normally think that everything real about consciousness is presented to us introspectively. I'm questioning that idea and suggesting that consciousness itself, intrinsically to it, possesses an articulation which links it to the brain. And without that kind of articulation, it would be a miracle that the brain and consciousness were connected at all. So now, what progress can we make in understanding that hidden level? Well, that's where I think we don't make very much progress at that hidden level. It's really a point about where the mystery is located. It's located at that hidden level. There are two possible positions. One position would be the missing properties that we don't know about belong to the brain and not to consciousness, but they explain consciousness. I think the trouble with that view is there has to be something about consciousness itself which links it to the brain. So I suggest instead the hidden properties are actually hidden properties of consciousness so that there's more to consciousness than meets the eye. And those hidden properties, if we knew what they were, maybe we can't know what they are, they provide the explanatory link between consciousness as we introspect it and the brain as we perceive it. And you're saying rather than being some special physical properties of the brain that we don't understand, maybe it's some properties about consciousness. What could even that possibly be like? You're looking at, say, color. Color looks very uniform and monotonous when you see a red surface or something. But if you're trying to understand the way color works, you have to postulate a very detailed fine structure in the surface, don't you? And it involves all of atomic theory and the theory of light and the theory of the spectrum and so on. The underlying reality of a simple red surface is a complex reality, but you need to postulate it, otherwise you can't really explain why a surface is uniformly red. So in the same way, you may have a sensation which is quite simple, a sensation that suddenly sticks a pin in you. It may be that there's a rather complex hidden structure in the sensation itself, the phenomenology of it, which links it to the basis in the neurons. That's the picture. There's a complicated thing, this consciousness. It's very complicated. You've got self-consciousness versus ordinary consciousness. You've got cognitive states, emotional states. There's a great variety there, and there may not be a single thing we can single out as the essence of all of them, something they all have in common. That doesn't mean we're not entitled to classify them all together. Maybe the truth is that we all know what consciousness is immediately anyway. We don't need a definition. Maybe it doesn't have a definition. How extraordinary the mystery of mind. Consider this. Very smart people have very opposite views of the meaning of consciousness. At one extreme, all is material or physical. At the other extreme, all is mental or spiritual. In the middle, both mental and physical are real, and perhaps also the spiritual. The spectacular progress of brain science has moved opinion toward materialism, the belief that only the physical is real and that the mind is just the output of the brain. Yet some philosophers assert that it is forever impossible for physical states alone to ever explain inner private awareness. As for me, I'm conflicted and I'm biased. On the one hand, my training in brain science. On the other, my lifelong desire to believe in God or something like God. So I allow myself only one certainty, that consciousness is key for coming closer to truth. For complete interviews and for further information, please visit closertotruth.com.