10. Unity vs Robot Zombies - Part 1
This is the tenth article in the series From Particles to Angels. If you are interested in this article you should read the previous articles in the series in order, beginning with the first (On Happiness).
In the article The Origin of Religion we considered how the human being could be considered to be a biological machine driven by deterministic causes, so that there seems to be no place for the soul. In this article and its sequel then, we consider that assertion; that is, we consider the place of the human soul in nature. We consider the subject by means of the following three loosely formulated assertions, and using a series of short, illustrative vignettes.
The next day the man is walking barefoot along a lonely beach with a companion. The last sliver of the sun has just moments before sunk below the stark horizon of the empty ocean. The heat and glare is replaced by warmth and soft light and a cool breeze rolls onto the beach with the soothing sound of crashing waves. He sees three smooth, rounded black stones a few feet apart, half embedded in the smooth damp sand. The thought pops into his head idly that the three stones form a triangle. He knows that any three objects cannot help but form a triangle, so that he is not much impressed with his insight. But then he asks himself: whether the triangle they form can be considered to be real or not real.
When the ancients stared at the stars in the heavens, they grouped them into what are now called "constellations", and imagined they were the figures of gods, monsters or heroes: such as Orion the hunter, Aries the ram, Sagittarius the archer, etc. The stars comprising the constellation were joined with imaginary lines, turning separate, unrelated objects into a single object. We can call this mental process of using the imagination to turn separate objects into a single object: "constellating".
So that the man now standing idle on the beach watching the stones to the puzzlement of his companion now thinks that the triangle formed by the stones is an object of his imagination, having no more reality than the constellations in the night sky. The triangle they form is not real. But then it occurs to him from his deep understanding of physics that the three pebbles are each composed of atoms. Each atomic nucleus and electron is suspended in the air at a great distance from its immediate neighbours, at least on the scale of the particles themselves. So that the atoms composing each pebble seem like the stars in the night sky, tiny points in a large void. When we look at the stone we imagine it to be a solid, single object, much like the optical illusion of pink on the poster of the Asian air hostess, and much like the movement seen in a changing movie image.
So he wonders whether he can consider the stone to be a real object, or just a figment of his imagination, a convention formed in his mind. There is one difference, between the stone and the triangle. If he picks up one of the stones, the others will not come with it, because the three stones are not physically joined to each other. Whereas if he picks up part of one of the stones, the rest of the stone comes with it, because the stone is "one" body, what is called a "rigid body". When one part moves, all the parts move. But then he thinks of three jet fighters flying in formation. As one of the fighters banks left, so do the others. As one rises, so do the others. They are not a rigid body, but they behave as if they are, through coordinated action as each pilot keeps one eye on what the other two pilots are doing. We learned in Mysteries of Light - Part 2 that the electromagnetic force that makes objects solid is communicated by photons, light. So that a solid object is solid due to communication by means of light between the separate atoms, so that they coordinate their movement in rigid transformations.
The man on the beach knows that his own body is also composed of atoms, and so is his brain. He has the kind of unity a rigid body has, allowing for some elasticity and fluidity, and for the fact that the cells of his body are routinely shed and replaced with new ones. But he starts to get a feeling of personal unreality as he stands there on the darkening gold beach. He starts to think: "Where am I exactly?" in amongst all those floating atoms and void. He starts to wonder whether he has more reality than the constellations in the night sky. He feels sure he does, but how does he account for it, and find it? The triangle and the constellations are formed by the constellating process in the mind of someone looking at them. Solid objects appear solid by the same process, as when Conan looks at the iron of his axe head and imagines it a single continuous substance. But how does he himself have unity? He does not reside in the individual atoms of his body, and he is not merely a sum of his parts. He is a collective entity. He is a relationship of parts. But what physical reality does a relationship between parts have? When he looks out on the world, he perceives relationships there, by means of his insight. He identifies them, labels them, in a sense forms them. He sees that A leads to B and B leads to C, and so, that A is related to C.
When we look out over the countryside: at hills and valleys, mountains, rivers, lakes and seas; we draw imaginary lines across the landscape, forming countries, districts, shires, localities. An area with a preponderance of buildings and few trees we call "a town". An area with a preponderance of trees and few buildings we call "a forest". And between them we define a border, sharp or fuzzy, defining where one ends and the other begins. We define an arbitrary time to mark the border between "night" and "day", an arbitrary day to mark the end of winter and the beginning of spring. We divide our bodies into "head", "torso", "limbs"; circulatory system, gastrointestinal system, nervous system; cells, atoms. We draw imaginary borders around objects and define everything inside the border to be part of the object, such as "a man", and everything outside the border to be not the object, such as "the room" and "the universe". Do we count the air in our lungs as part of our body? Do we count the blood in our veins?
Looking at the coffee mug, bowl and spoon on the kitchen table I draw an imaginary line around them and call them: "things on the dining table". When we count objects we draw a line around each and turn each into "a unit" (1). Then we count the number of units by drawing a line around them collectively and calling them "a collection of 7 units". We count "ten women" in the room; with ten heads, twenty hands, and one hundred fingers. When we abstract properties from objects we draw a line around the property alone: like "blueness" or "squareness". We don't draw the line in space, but in some other way. We can treat "blue itself" as if separate from any object. And then we can draw a line around "blue things" in space: like the sky, the ocean, a gemstone; that car. We draw a line around a variety of abstractions to form them: like justice, friendship, heat, and energy; by identifying all the properties, behaviours or things that belong to them; and then we group them to form new abstractions. We draw a line around ourselves and call it "I".
But does the conscious mind make itself real by drawing a line around itself, projecting unity onto itself, in a bootstrap process like a magician pulling himself out of his own hat?
But how does a molecule of air in Turkey know that it is part of a low pressure system and therefore that it should rise relative to the molecules of air in the cold body of air 200 miles away over the Black Sea? The answer is of course that it doesn't. The molecule of air only knows its local environment and its immediate causal interactions. It only knows it is part of a warm body of air in the sense that it and its neighbours have a lot of kinetic energy, forcing them to bounce around a lot, pushing each other away, so that the air expands becoming less dense. Molecules of air in the cold body of air are moving around less and are therefore closer together and part of a denser, heavier body of air. The molecules of air in the cold front making the 200 mile journey from the Black Sea to Turkey do not know they are part of a process to alleviate a pressure differential between the two distant regions. They only know that there are slightly more particles behind them than there are ahead. So that they are blocked when attempting to move north, but relatively free to move south. So each molecule of air in the cold front travels south in unison with countless others like it, forming the thing we call "wind".
Now consider a car starting. The driver turns the key in the ignition, and a spark ignites the gasoline vapour in the piston chamber, which forces down the piston, turning the crank shaft which spins the wheels. But the wheels don't know anything about the key, spark plug, gasoline or piston. All the wheels know about is the crank shaft because that is all they have immediate contact with. The spark plug doesn't know about the wheels or the key in the ignition, just the electric current it receives from the wire. In fact even parts of the spark plug don't know about other parts of the spark plug. One part of the spark plug receives a current (electrons), and passes it on to the next part of the spark plug. Then the next part passes it on to another part, and so on. The atoms in the spark plug only know about the other atoms in their immediate environment, just like the molecules of air in the cold front. The parts of the spark plug do not know they are part of a spark plug. Similarly, the parts of an atom do not know that they are parts of an atom. The electrons and nucleus are only aware of each other via the photons communicating the electromagnetic force between them. Presumably the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are only aware of each other via the gluons binding them. A question hangs over the unity of the protons and neutrons themselves, since the principle of confinement may imply that quarks are not particles at all.
Now consider you are looking at someone's face. When you look at their face, you see their face, and you recognise them. You do not see an eye, then another eye, then a nose, then a mouth and deduce that you are therefore looking at a face, although there may be some part of your brain that does this. But you see the whole face as a face. Now compare how a computer sees a face. There are a few ways a computer might "parse" a face image. A computer image file is composed of "pixels", dots of colour arranged in rows and columns. The computer is likely to read the image file starting with the first pixel in the upper-left corner of the image, then to read the second pixel on that row of pixels, then the third pixel and so on till it reaches the end of the first row; then it jumps to the first pixel on the second row. It reads the image row by row, left to right and top to bottom until it reaches the last pixel at the bottom-right corner of the image. At any particular time the computer will know about the particular pixel it is processing, but has no sense that it is looking at a face. For the computer to know that it is looking at a face we need facial recognition software. This software uses algorithms to compare different parts of the image for patterns of light and dark that suggest that the image might be of a face. The image is declared to be "of a face" if the examination assigns a score of certainty over some predefined threshold. But although the computer spits out a declaration that "this is a face", it still has no sense of the face it is looking at, because the computer does not treat bodies of data as wholes, but only as discrete steps. Just like the atom that only knows what it and its immediate neighbours are doing, the processor in a computer only knows about the current processing step it is involved in. A bit will be in state 1 or state 0, and depending upon its circumstance, it will either remain in the state it is in or it will change to the opposite state. That is as much as any part of the computer knows. It doesn't know anything about faces or trees or Shakespeare, just 1 or 0.
Now consider the human brain. A computer is composed of metal, plastic and silicon, and it uses a flow of electrons to process information. The human brain and nervous system is composed of organic molecules, and uses molecules called "neurotransmitters" to process information. Some neurotransmitters are chemical ions so that their signals are electrical. A chemical ion is an atom or molecule that has an electric charge because of an excess or deficiency of electrons. Although composed of different physical materials, the computer and the human brain are thought to operate in a comparable fashion. The computer processes information. The human brain processes information. The physical materials the processor is composed of does not matter. A transistor might be composed of silicon, or it might be composed of gallium arsenide. It does not matter. It only matters that it can do the job. What matters is the function that it performs. There is nothing intrinsically spiritual about organic molecules. They are just like chemicals in a beaker or test tube. In other words, the human brain is a machine, just as a computer is a machine. Neuroscience and computer science are inspiring each other, for instance with the neuroscience concept of "Hebbian Learning" implemented in computer science as "neural networks".
The brain and nervous system (spine and nerves) consist of specialised cells called "neurons". Neurons have a cell body with a nucleus like any cell, but they also have several or many branches coming off them called "dendrites". They also have one branch that is special and may be much longer than the others. It is called the "axon". Typically an axon of one neuron connects to a dendrite of another neuron. The connection is called a "synapse". The axon is the neuron's output, and the dendrite is the neuron's input. Chemicals pass from the axon to the dendrite to transmit a signal.
We can therefore treat the functioning of the human brain exactly as we did the functioning of the computer above. A single neuron only knows about itself and its immediate neighbours. If it receives a signal from a dendrite of one of its neighbours, it reacts accordingly depending on its own internal state. It may send a signal down its axon to other neighbouring neurons. The neuron itself does not know if it is involved in the process of reading a shopping list or composing a symphony, smelling a rose or running for its life from a tiger. Its processing is purely mechanical. In fact, as in the case of the wire in the spark plug, one part of the same neuron does not know what is going on in other parts of the neuron. Reception, transmission and processing of signals are chemical processes within the neuron. One chemical affects another, which affects another and so on. A particular molecule only knows about itself and its immediate neighbour molecules that interact with it. It doesn't know it is part of a neuron. So the question is, what is the part of the brain that knows things? The answer is, there isn't one.
The whole story of science is the story of how all the varied things we encounter in the universe are made up of a few simple elements. At one time, there was no such thing as a dog anywhere in all the universe. Then, one day, a bunch of atoms: protons, neutrons and electrons: arranged themselves into the form of a dog, and the very first dog came into existence. Once, there were no galaxies, no suns or planets, no rocks or fish or trees or people or thoughts or feelings. Science shows us how something can made of something else that is completely unlike it. A dog can be made out of what is not a dog (protons, neutrons and electrons). Warmth can be made out of what is not warmth. Colour and sound from what is not colour or sound. Water from what is not wet. A triangle from something that is not a triangle (3 points). A two-dimensional object (a triangle) from what has no dimensions (points). And, apparently, consciousness from what is not conscious. All this happens as a result of arrangements and motions: shapes formed by the simple elements.
We live in a rich and complex world full of many different kinds of things, all with different names. But the vast majority of these things do not exist in the absence of consciousness, because their existence is a result of the mind's "drawing a line around things" and perceiving them in a certain way. A chemical does not know if it is part of an animal, part of the soil or in a test tube. This is true for all the atoms and molecules in the universe. There is nothing in nature that says "this is where the animal ends that the atmosphere begins" because only consciousness makes that distinction. The animal may well behave as a rigid body, the atoms and molecules moving together, each tugged by the electromagnetic force emanating from their immediate neighbours, as will the animal with a thick layer of damp clay caked all over its body; but there is nothing that is taking a "big picture view" except a consciousness, and as we have seen, we cannot find a consciousness in the brain. If some dry leaves are caught in an eddy at the edge of a river, they might revolve around each other for a time, spinning like a rigid body before the current changes and they drift away from each other down the river. Such is the birth, life and death of an animal in nature. We can replace all the rich and varied names we have for things that exist and happen with just a few. Instead of saying "the leopard hunted in the bushes", or anything else, we can always just say: "protons, neutrons, electrons and photons moved around in space".
This implication of atomic theory was recognised immediately by its inventors: Leucippus and Democritus.
"By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: in reality atoms and the empty."
A couple of more recent statements by a modern scientist and a modern philosopher are as follows.
"The sense perceptions have been definitely eliminated from physical acoustics, optics, and heat. The physical definitions of sound, colour, and temperature are today in no way associated with the immediate perception of the respective senses, but sound and colour are defined respectively by the frequency and wavelength of oscillations, and temperature is measured theoretically on the absolute temperature scale corresponding to the second law of thermodynamics."
"A precise statement of the problem raised by the existence of sensory qualities must start from the fact that the progress of the physical sciences has all but eliminated these qualities from our scientific picture of the external world."
Philosophers much later than Democritus defined the distinction between what they called "primary qualities" and what they called "secondary qualities". Secondary qualities were merely "perceived" qualities, while primary qualities were actual in the physical world.
"I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated"
"... it must certainly be concluded regarding those things which, in external objects, we call by the names of light, color, odor, taste, sound, heat, cold, and of other tactile qualities ... that we are not aware of their being anything other than various arrangements of the size, figure, and motions of the parts of these objects which make it possible for our nerves to move in various ways, and to excite in our soul all the various feelings which they produce there."
"These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz., solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.... Secondly. Such qualities, which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e., by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colours, sounds, tastes, &c., these I call secondary qualities.... From whence I think it is easy to draw this observation, that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves.... The particular bulk, number, figure, and motion of the parts of fire or snow are really in them, whether anyone's senses perceive them or no; and therefore they may be called real qualities, because they really exist in those bodies. But light, heat, whiteness, or coldness, are no more really in them than sickness or pain is in manna. Take away the sensation of them; let not the eyes see light or colours, nor the ears hear sounds; let the palate not taste, nor the nose smell; and all colours, tastes, odours and sounds, as they are such particular ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their causes, i.e., bulk, figure, and motion of parts."
"For the rays, to speak properly, are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that colour."
Particles move around, they stick together and they break apart. And that is all they do. All the phenomenon of nature that we assign such a multiplicity of names to, all reduces down to some combination of particles moving around, sticking together or breaking apart. What we experience as colour is photons of a particular frequency and corresponding wavelength. We see an object as "red" if it has a chemical structure such that "red" photons bounce off it, while photons of other "colours" are absorbed by it. The "red" photons that bounce off the "red" object then pass through the pupil of the human eyeball and strike the retina at the back of the eye. There are specialised cells in the retina called "cone" cells that respond to photons of different frequencies. There are three kinds of cone cell, that respond to particular frequencies of light: red, green and blue. Light of one frequency will cause a chemical reaction in a particular cone cell, while light of another frequency will not. When a cone cell reacts to photons, an electrochemical signal is sent along the optic nerve to the brain which assembles the whole image.
When vibrating molecules of air strike the human eardrum, an electrochemical signal is sent to the brain. The phenomenon we call "heat" is particles with a lot of kinetic energy moving fast, and "cold" is particles with relatively little kinetic energy moving slow. So that all the phenomenon of nature can be reduced particles moving around or staying put. So that primary qualities consist solely of distributions of matter in space, a "shape" that may be static or moving. Some philosophers even started casting doubt on the primary qualities. Given the realisation that everything but objects moving in space and time was mere illusion, it was probably only a matter of time before someone suggests that these are too.
"It is even possible to demonstrate that the ideas of size, figure and motion are not so distinctive as is imagined, and that they stand for something imaginary relative to our perceptions as do, although to a greater extent, the ideas of color, heat, and the other similar qualities in regard to which we may doubt whether they are actually to be found in the nature of the things outside of us."
"Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)—no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible."
It is relatively easy to describe information processing in terms of particles moving around or staying put. That is how computers work. But the computer does what it does without knowing what it is doing. A computer can show a movie, but it is only the person looking at the computer screen who knows it is a movie. The computer can display text of the screen, but it is only the person looking at it who knows that it is the answer to a question. The computer can play chess or perform a statistical analysis or pretend to have a conversation. It can perform logical deduction and inference, or generate an abstract design. It can "perceive" sound and light. It can move robot arms. But the individual parts of the computer do not know what they are a party to, and neither do the parts of the human brain that are similarly involved in processing "information", or the human body that acts on the brain's instructions. More recently, the problem of "secondary qualities" has been generalised to become the problem of "emergent properties". An "emergent property" refers to any whole composed of parts, and the behaviours or qualities distinctive of it.
With the invention of computers, the word "intelligent" is now no longer a clearly distinguishing feature of human beings. The usual hallmarks of intelligence: the ability to remember the capital cities of all the countries in the world, play chess, perform difficult mathematical calculations, quote from impressive philosophical texts and listen to and answer questions, are now all things machines can do. So the question of whether there is such a thing as "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) is easy to answer. "Yes" machines can behave intelligently. But they do all these things mechanically, without consciousness.
So we need to be clear. There is no problem with accounting for any kind of "information processing" in the brain. Hearing music, remembering and playing music. Analysis, deduction, conversation, creativity. Even feelings can be reduced to chemical processes. Fear is an increased heart rate and the release of adrenalin, and associated behaviours of avoidance. An expression of fear on the face is a behaviour. But all of these chemical and physical reactions do not refer to a conscious experience of "being afraid", but are pure information processing and mechanical action. "Feelings" from a biological point of view are a behavioural bias with associated chemical reactions. We are behaviourally inclined towards things we "like" and away from things we "don't like".
"Thinking" is an ambiguous term. When we say the word "thinking" do we mean unconscious information processing, or the consciousness of thinking about something? The same applies to the words "mind" and "mental". So if we are referring to the phenomenon of consciousness, we need to use the word "consciousness" to avoid confusion. A term that is frequently used now in philosophy of mind is "qualia" (individual instances of subjective, conscious experience (singular "quale")). The qualia of "seeing the colour red" is different to the responses of cones in the retina to photons of a certain frequency and the subsequent information processing by neurons in the brain. I will use the phrase "information processing" to refer to unconscious information processing.
It seems that every conscious experience has associated with it an instance of information processing, but that every instance of information processing does not necessarily have a conscious experience associated with it. The neurons of the brain process the "colour" red, and we have the conscious experience (qualia) of seeing the colour red. Our brain processes a fear response and we consciously experience fear. Our brain figures out the answer to a difficult mathematical problem, and we have the conscious experience of having figured it out or remembered it. We have now immersed ourselves deeply in the problem of the philosophy of mind. If the above assertion that: "Our brain processes a fear response and we consciously experience fear" refers to two different, distinct things and not one thing; seems intuitive to you, then we are on the same page, and philosophically you are probably what is called a "dualist", making a distinction between body and mind (consciousness). But if you think "our brain processing the fear response" IS "the conscious experience of fear"; that is, they are just two descriptions of the same thing, then you are probably what used to be called a "behaviourist" and which is now (with a slightly different definition) called a "physicalist". According to the physicalist, conscious experience just "is" the processing of information in the brain. Physicalist theories under the wing of neuroscience are tending to dominate recent philosophy of mind. Ultimately the consciousness problem partly reduces to the unity problem. In what sense can a whole composed of parts be said to exist.
"When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right-hand glove and a pair of gloves.... Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd; but, it must be noticed, the argument will not show that either of the illegitimately conjoined propositions is absurd in itself. I am not, for example, denying that there occur mental processes. Doing long division is a mental process and so is making a joke. But I am saying that the phrase 'there occur mental processes' does not mean the same sort of thing as 'there occur physical processes', and, therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two."
Mind is to information processing in the brain, as a cold front is to individual molecules of air, as a pair of gloves is to a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove. We can draw a line around a portion of the brain and say "this is involved in the perception of a face", but none of the neurons involved know that. To use a computing metaphor, consider a "register" in the brain, by this I mean a slot in the brain, let's say a particular neuron. This neuron can either be activated or not. Let's say it can be in the state "1" for activated, or the state "0" for inactive.
Whenever the eyes of the person receives an image identified as a large tiger running towards them, this neuron is activated. And whenever this neuron is activated, it sets in motion the behavioural response of running away very fast. Therefore, this neuron can be considered the part of the brain that has realised: "Oh my god, there's a tiger coming at me! I'm outta here!" But from the point of view of the neuron itself, it just got a signal and responded the way it always does when it gets a signal like that. It doesn't know what the signal means. Although there are parts of the brain that assemble data and coordinate a response, there is no part of the brain that puts it all together into a "meaningful" whole. That neuron is the closest thing in the brain to something which "recognises the situation and what to do about it". The response has grown up over the course of biological evolution as a mechanical response: "if you see this, do this". But consciousness has no role in any of it.
The "1" in the registry is the "result" of a unique combination of causes, and can therefore be said to "represent" those causes. But looking at the 1 by itself there is nothing about it that tells us what caused it. In what sense therefore can it be said to "contain" that information? What we require is some manner of unity that sits across the various pieces of the brain to create a consciousness, something that combines the 1 with its causes or consequences into an actual whole that attributes meaning. Phrases like "unifying concept" are easy to write when philosophising, but what in reality does the phrase actually refer to?
If someone lays out stones on the beach of a tropical island to spell the word "Help!" for passing aircraft, as far as the beach itself is concerned, it's just a bunch of scattered rocks. It is only to an observing consciousness that the rocks embody information, have meaning. "Information" in a computer is the same. It is only information to an observing consciousness that is using the computer. The computer itself doesn't know if all the 1s and 0s in it are a sonnet by Shakespeare or pornography. It is the same for neurons in the brain. As far as nature is concerned, a book is paper with ink stains, no more meaningful than the water stains on the wall of an old house.
It's possible to build a robot that can do all the things a person can do, and to imitate human emotion. Two robots can hug each other and give supportive statements to each other after a hard day. In modern philosophy of mind, such thought experiments typically use "zombies", people who appear to be normal people in every way except that they have no conscious experience, no qualia. Theoretically there is not any kind of behaviour or any kind of information processing that we can conceive of that cannot be performed in the absence of consciousness. You will sometimes see the phrase "conscious behaviours", and we think of certain behaviours as being necessarily conscious because we only see conscious beings doing them. But now with computers and robots we are realising that consciousness is a completely unnecessary and useless add-on to these behaviours.
From the point of view of nature, any behaviour carried out consciously is identical to the same behaviour carried out in the absence of consciousness. Consciousness therefore stands outside of evolutionary processes. There is no reason for evolution to create, favour or maintain consciousness, nor seemingly any way in which it could. Consciousness seems to be a free gift of the universe, providing us with the ability to be aware of and enjoy existing, instead of just existing as mindless machines. But this leaves the mystery of how consciousness came to be there.
"Functionalist" theories of mind highlight that the state of our "Oh my god, there's a tiger coming at me! I'm outta here!" neuron is given "meaning" by its functional context, a "Representationalist" theory that it represents something, but these theories and the new and optimistically labelled "non-reductive materialism" ultimately describe mind in terms that have no meaning in the material world, and then simply assert afterwards that the things referred to are identical to the material activities. The physicalist argument is an ancient one. In the following quote, Plato presents the physicalist argument against the immortality of the soul.
"That one could say the same about harmony and a harp with strings; that the harmony is invisible and bodiless and all-beautiful and divine on the tuned harp; but the harp itself and the strings are bodies and bodily and composite and earthy and akin to the mortal. So when someone breaks the harp, or cuts and bursts the strings, suppose he should maintain by the same argument as yours that it is necessary the harmony should still exist and not perish."
When an argument has been going for this long and in essentially the same form, it is tempting to think there is some difference in psychology at work. For some people the notion that "neurons exchanging chemicals" is "the same as" my "experience of affection for my spouse" seems intuitive. For other people, two clearly very different things are being described, and therefore any correlation between them needs to be accounted for. If someone affirms forcefully that: "The actress Natalie Portman is identical to the planet Jupiter", how do we mount a counter-argument if the obvious differences are not in themselves sufficient to persuade them otherwise? Several anti-physicalist arguments consist of efforts to create thought experiments to show the absurdity of the physicalist argument; but the physicalist merely responds that the thought experiment is either incomplete or not absurd.
Consciousness is in the habit of grouping and labelling things in all sorts of ways. Atoms are also chemicals are also flesh and bone are also a person, are also a tall Caucasian person are also a doctor are also a husband and father and a member of the community and inhabitant of the planet Earth. We apply all of these different labels by grouping and associating the things referred to in various ways. Consciousness does this, but matter does not. Matter only has direct, immediate causal connections. It does not step back and look at the big picture. But we can step back and see larger patterns formed by these many discrete events. And these many discrete events may lead to a single, predictable outcome that some choose to call a "perception" or "cognition" of the event as a whole. Wherever we have a confluence of causes we have meaning. Consciousness can make a pair of gloves from a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove. But as far as nature is concerned, the two gloves sitting on the table a few centimetres apart, between an ashtray and a candle, bear no relation to each another, and do not together comprise anything. Some terms used by physicalists refer to causal connections in matter, while others refer to conscious experiences, and by crossing the line between the two wantonly in the course of an argument, the brain is effectively anthropomorphised. Of course dualists do this in the course of an argument as well, but it is only fatal to the argument of the physicalist. In the end, physicalism is the anthropomorphisation of the human body, and the instinct to anthropomorphise is as old as man himself. Such a thing is not jarring because we all assume the human body is inhabited by a consciousness, so "it just is" works for many. Many an engineer thinks an automobile is alive because it is warm and purrs.
It is this habit of consciousness to group and label the elements of shapes in various ways that accustoms us to the idea that we can equate two seemingly quite different things. Water (H2O) is hydrogen and oxygen. In most cases this process is harmless and leads to the idea that materialism can be non-reductive if it takes account of the relevant organisation of matter. To say that a person is "just atoms" is reductive, but to say that a person is "just atoms organised in the appropriate way" is supposed to be non-reductive. This may be true in cases where we are referring merely to a shape. But consciousness is not a shape.
Any shape can be envisaged in the absence of consciousness. A square can exist without anyone being conscious of its existence; so too can a tree or a rock; so too can a person. But in the case of a person it is supposed by a physicalist that even if no-one else is conscious of the person's existence, the person themselves will be conscious of their own existence, merely by virtue of their being person shaped; that is, if the matter of their body has all the structure and behaviours of a person so that all the appropriate labelling can be applied to it.
If a psychological difference is at work here, we might seek to employ that most egalitarian of principles: "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" and suggest the two parties have in mind the same thing without realising it, and are approaching some common goal from different sides. When a dualist says "soul" and the physicalist says "behaviour" they both have in mind a kind of unity. Therefore each concept is haunted.
By refining the response characteristics of the detector we can make it sensitive to more specific phenomena. For instance, by fitting it with a camera and image analysis software it can possess ideas like "tree", "dog" and "sunshine" etc. If a particular neuron or set of neurons in the brain are only activated together in response to a particular stimulus, they can be taken as representing that stimulus in the brain. They are the idea of that stimulus in the brain. This of course says nothing about the conscious experience of having the idea.
Let's take a break here. The discussion of consciousness will conclude in Unity vs Robot Zombies - Part 2.
Any comments welcome.
In the article The Origin of Religion we considered how the human being could be considered to be a biological machine driven by deterministic causes, so that there seems to be no place for the soul. In this article and its sequel then, we consider that assertion; that is, we consider the place of the human soul in nature. We consider the subject by means of the following three loosely formulated assertions, and using a series of short, illustrative vignettes.
- In the absence of consciousness there is no such thing as a unity anywhere in nature.
- Consciousness is not a shape.
- Everything else is a shape.
Wholes
A tired man in a suit stands on the railway platform in the noisy subway, waiting to go home. He stares blankly at a large poster on the wall, opposite the train tracks. It is advertising a holiday in Asia. Looking closely at the poster he sees that the image is composed of small dots of coloured ink on a white background. The soft pink of the cheek of the air hostess is composed of tiny neat red circular dots on the white background. The pink is an optical illusion created by distance, a blurring together in the mind of the coloured elements and the white background. Similarly, a movie is composed of a sequence of still images. The mind creates a link between each still image, blurring them together, creating movement out of change.The next day the man is walking barefoot along a lonely beach with a companion. The last sliver of the sun has just moments before sunk below the stark horizon of the empty ocean. The heat and glare is replaced by warmth and soft light and a cool breeze rolls onto the beach with the soothing sound of crashing waves. He sees three smooth, rounded black stones a few feet apart, half embedded in the smooth damp sand. The thought pops into his head idly that the three stones form a triangle. He knows that any three objects cannot help but form a triangle, so that he is not much impressed with his insight. But then he asks himself: whether the triangle they form can be considered to be real or not real.
When the ancients stared at the stars in the heavens, they grouped them into what are now called "constellations", and imagined they were the figures of gods, monsters or heroes: such as Orion the hunter, Aries the ram, Sagittarius the archer, etc. The stars comprising the constellation were joined with imaginary lines, turning separate, unrelated objects into a single object. We can call this mental process of using the imagination to turn separate objects into a single object: "constellating".
So that the man now standing idle on the beach watching the stones to the puzzlement of his companion now thinks that the triangle formed by the stones is an object of his imagination, having no more reality than the constellations in the night sky. The triangle they form is not real. But then it occurs to him from his deep understanding of physics that the three pebbles are each composed of atoms. Each atomic nucleus and electron is suspended in the air at a great distance from its immediate neighbours, at least on the scale of the particles themselves. So that the atoms composing each pebble seem like the stars in the night sky, tiny points in a large void. When we look at the stone we imagine it to be a solid, single object, much like the optical illusion of pink on the poster of the Asian air hostess, and much like the movement seen in a changing movie image.
So he wonders whether he can consider the stone to be a real object, or just a figment of his imagination, a convention formed in his mind. There is one difference, between the stone and the triangle. If he picks up one of the stones, the others will not come with it, because the three stones are not physically joined to each other. Whereas if he picks up part of one of the stones, the rest of the stone comes with it, because the stone is "one" body, what is called a "rigid body". When one part moves, all the parts move. But then he thinks of three jet fighters flying in formation. As one of the fighters banks left, so do the others. As one rises, so do the others. They are not a rigid body, but they behave as if they are, through coordinated action as each pilot keeps one eye on what the other two pilots are doing. We learned in Mysteries of Light - Part 2 that the electromagnetic force that makes objects solid is communicated by photons, light. So that a solid object is solid due to communication by means of light between the separate atoms, so that they coordinate their movement in rigid transformations.
The man on the beach knows that his own body is also composed of atoms, and so is his brain. He has the kind of unity a rigid body has, allowing for some elasticity and fluidity, and for the fact that the cells of his body are routinely shed and replaced with new ones. But he starts to get a feeling of personal unreality as he stands there on the darkening gold beach. He starts to think: "Where am I exactly?" in amongst all those floating atoms and void. He starts to wonder whether he has more reality than the constellations in the night sky. He feels sure he does, but how does he account for it, and find it? The triangle and the constellations are formed by the constellating process in the mind of someone looking at them. Solid objects appear solid by the same process, as when Conan looks at the iron of his axe head and imagines it a single continuous substance. But how does he himself have unity? He does not reside in the individual atoms of his body, and he is not merely a sum of his parts. He is a collective entity. He is a relationship of parts. But what physical reality does a relationship between parts have? When he looks out on the world, he perceives relationships there, by means of his insight. He identifies them, labels them, in a sense forms them. He sees that A leads to B and B leads to C, and so, that A is related to C.
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| "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte", by Georges-Pierre Seurat (1884-1886) |
(This image is taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte
where it is available as "in the public domain".)
where it is available as "in the public domain".)
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Details of "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte"
(a zoom that has become known as the "Ferris Bueller shot" ("Ferris Bueller's Day Off", movie (1986)))
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When we look out over the countryside: at hills and valleys, mountains, rivers, lakes and seas; we draw imaginary lines across the landscape, forming countries, districts, shires, localities. An area with a preponderance of buildings and few trees we call "a town". An area with a preponderance of trees and few buildings we call "a forest". And between them we define a border, sharp or fuzzy, defining where one ends and the other begins. We define an arbitrary time to mark the border between "night" and "day", an arbitrary day to mark the end of winter and the beginning of spring. We divide our bodies into "head", "torso", "limbs"; circulatory system, gastrointestinal system, nervous system; cells, atoms. We draw imaginary borders around objects and define everything inside the border to be part of the object, such as "a man", and everything outside the border to be not the object, such as "the room" and "the universe". Do we count the air in our lungs as part of our body? Do we count the blood in our veins?
Looking at the coffee mug, bowl and spoon on the kitchen table I draw an imaginary line around them and call them: "things on the dining table". When we count objects we draw a line around each and turn each into "a unit" (1). Then we count the number of units by drawing a line around them collectively and calling them "a collection of 7 units". We count "ten women" in the room; with ten heads, twenty hands, and one hundred fingers. When we abstract properties from objects we draw a line around the property alone: like "blueness" or "squareness". We don't draw the line in space, but in some other way. We can treat "blue itself" as if separate from any object. And then we can draw a line around "blue things" in space: like the sky, the ocean, a gemstone; that car. We draw a line around a variety of abstractions to form them: like justice, friendship, heat, and energy; by identifying all the properties, behaviours or things that belong to them; and then we group them to form new abstractions. We draw a line around ourselves and call it "I".
But does the conscious mind make itself real by drawing a line around itself, projecting unity onto itself, in a bootstrap process like a magician pulling himself out of his own hat?
What is it like to be a particle?
Imagine you are looking at a weather forecast. There is a low pressure system over Turkey, and a high pressure system over the Black Sea, with a cold front coming down from the Black Sea into Turkey. The low pressure system results from warm air rising, the high pressure system from cold air sinking, and the cold front from the cold air of the high pressure system moving into the space left by the rising warm air of the low pressure system.But how does a molecule of air in Turkey know that it is part of a low pressure system and therefore that it should rise relative to the molecules of air in the cold body of air 200 miles away over the Black Sea? The answer is of course that it doesn't. The molecule of air only knows its local environment and its immediate causal interactions. It only knows it is part of a warm body of air in the sense that it and its neighbours have a lot of kinetic energy, forcing them to bounce around a lot, pushing each other away, so that the air expands becoming less dense. Molecules of air in the cold body of air are moving around less and are therefore closer together and part of a denser, heavier body of air. The molecules of air in the cold front making the 200 mile journey from the Black Sea to Turkey do not know they are part of a process to alleviate a pressure differential between the two distant regions. They only know that there are slightly more particles behind them than there are ahead. So that they are blocked when attempting to move north, but relatively free to move south. So each molecule of air in the cold front travels south in unison with countless others like it, forming the thing we call "wind".
Now consider a car starting. The driver turns the key in the ignition, and a spark ignites the gasoline vapour in the piston chamber, which forces down the piston, turning the crank shaft which spins the wheels. But the wheels don't know anything about the key, spark plug, gasoline or piston. All the wheels know about is the crank shaft because that is all they have immediate contact with. The spark plug doesn't know about the wheels or the key in the ignition, just the electric current it receives from the wire. In fact even parts of the spark plug don't know about other parts of the spark plug. One part of the spark plug receives a current (electrons), and passes it on to the next part of the spark plug. Then the next part passes it on to another part, and so on. The atoms in the spark plug only know about the other atoms in their immediate environment, just like the molecules of air in the cold front. The parts of the spark plug do not know they are part of a spark plug. Similarly, the parts of an atom do not know that they are parts of an atom. The electrons and nucleus are only aware of each other via the photons communicating the electromagnetic force between them. Presumably the protons and neutrons in the nucleus are only aware of each other via the gluons binding them. A question hangs over the unity of the protons and neutrons themselves, since the principle of confinement may imply that quarks are not particles at all.
Now consider you are looking at someone's face. When you look at their face, you see their face, and you recognise them. You do not see an eye, then another eye, then a nose, then a mouth and deduce that you are therefore looking at a face, although there may be some part of your brain that does this. But you see the whole face as a face. Now compare how a computer sees a face. There are a few ways a computer might "parse" a face image. A computer image file is composed of "pixels", dots of colour arranged in rows and columns. The computer is likely to read the image file starting with the first pixel in the upper-left corner of the image, then to read the second pixel on that row of pixels, then the third pixel and so on till it reaches the end of the first row; then it jumps to the first pixel on the second row. It reads the image row by row, left to right and top to bottom until it reaches the last pixel at the bottom-right corner of the image. At any particular time the computer will know about the particular pixel it is processing, but has no sense that it is looking at a face. For the computer to know that it is looking at a face we need facial recognition software. This software uses algorithms to compare different parts of the image for patterns of light and dark that suggest that the image might be of a face. The image is declared to be "of a face" if the examination assigns a score of certainty over some predefined threshold. But although the computer spits out a declaration that "this is a face", it still has no sense of the face it is looking at, because the computer does not treat bodies of data as wholes, but only as discrete steps. Just like the atom that only knows what it and its immediate neighbours are doing, the processor in a computer only knows about the current processing step it is involved in. A bit will be in state 1 or state 0, and depending upon its circumstance, it will either remain in the state it is in or it will change to the opposite state. That is as much as any part of the computer knows. It doesn't know anything about faces or trees or Shakespeare, just 1 or 0.
Now consider the human brain. A computer is composed of metal, plastic and silicon, and it uses a flow of electrons to process information. The human brain and nervous system is composed of organic molecules, and uses molecules called "neurotransmitters" to process information. Some neurotransmitters are chemical ions so that their signals are electrical. A chemical ion is an atom or molecule that has an electric charge because of an excess or deficiency of electrons. Although composed of different physical materials, the computer and the human brain are thought to operate in a comparable fashion. The computer processes information. The human brain processes information. The physical materials the processor is composed of does not matter. A transistor might be composed of silicon, or it might be composed of gallium arsenide. It does not matter. It only matters that it can do the job. What matters is the function that it performs. There is nothing intrinsically spiritual about organic molecules. They are just like chemicals in a beaker or test tube. In other words, the human brain is a machine, just as a computer is a machine. Neuroscience and computer science are inspiring each other, for instance with the neuroscience concept of "Hebbian Learning" implemented in computer science as "neural networks".
The brain and nervous system (spine and nerves) consist of specialised cells called "neurons". Neurons have a cell body with a nucleus like any cell, but they also have several or many branches coming off them called "dendrites". They also have one branch that is special and may be much longer than the others. It is called the "axon". Typically an axon of one neuron connects to a dendrite of another neuron. The connection is called a "synapse". The axon is the neuron's output, and the dendrite is the neuron's input. Chemicals pass from the axon to the dendrite to transmit a signal.
We can therefore treat the functioning of the human brain exactly as we did the functioning of the computer above. A single neuron only knows about itself and its immediate neighbours. If it receives a signal from a dendrite of one of its neighbours, it reacts accordingly depending on its own internal state. It may send a signal down its axon to other neighbouring neurons. The neuron itself does not know if it is involved in the process of reading a shopping list or composing a symphony, smelling a rose or running for its life from a tiger. Its processing is purely mechanical. In fact, as in the case of the wire in the spark plug, one part of the same neuron does not know what is going on in other parts of the neuron. Reception, transmission and processing of signals are chemical processes within the neuron. One chemical affects another, which affects another and so on. A particular molecule only knows about itself and its immediate neighbour molecules that interact with it. It doesn't know it is part of a neuron. So the question is, what is the part of the brain that knows things? The answer is, there isn't one.
Shapes
The question is sometimes posed: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" This question does not pose a paradox. It has a clear and obvious answer. The answer is: "No". If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it does not make a sound. Its falling does however cause vibrations in the air, but in the absence of any creature with an ear connected to a brain, there is nothing to convert these vibrations in the air into a sound.The whole story of science is the story of how all the varied things we encounter in the universe are made up of a few simple elements. At one time, there was no such thing as a dog anywhere in all the universe. Then, one day, a bunch of atoms: protons, neutrons and electrons: arranged themselves into the form of a dog, and the very first dog came into existence. Once, there were no galaxies, no suns or planets, no rocks or fish or trees or people or thoughts or feelings. Science shows us how something can made of something else that is completely unlike it. A dog can be made out of what is not a dog (protons, neutrons and electrons). Warmth can be made out of what is not warmth. Colour and sound from what is not colour or sound. Water from what is not wet. A triangle from something that is not a triangle (3 points). A two-dimensional object (a triangle) from what has no dimensions (points). And, apparently, consciousness from what is not conscious. All this happens as a result of arrangements and motions: shapes formed by the simple elements.
We live in a rich and complex world full of many different kinds of things, all with different names. But the vast majority of these things do not exist in the absence of consciousness, because their existence is a result of the mind's "drawing a line around things" and perceiving them in a certain way. A chemical does not know if it is part of an animal, part of the soil or in a test tube. This is true for all the atoms and molecules in the universe. There is nothing in nature that says "this is where the animal ends that the atmosphere begins" because only consciousness makes that distinction. The animal may well behave as a rigid body, the atoms and molecules moving together, each tugged by the electromagnetic force emanating from their immediate neighbours, as will the animal with a thick layer of damp clay caked all over its body; but there is nothing that is taking a "big picture view" except a consciousness, and as we have seen, we cannot find a consciousness in the brain. If some dry leaves are caught in an eddy at the edge of a river, they might revolve around each other for a time, spinning like a rigid body before the current changes and they drift away from each other down the river. Such is the birth, life and death of an animal in nature. We can replace all the rich and varied names we have for things that exist and happen with just a few. Instead of saying "the leopard hunted in the bushes", or anything else, we can always just say: "protons, neutrons, electrons and photons moved around in space".
This implication of atomic theory was recognised immediately by its inventors: Leucippus and Democritus.
"By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: in reality atoms and the empty."
(Democritus (c.460 – c.370 BC), Fragment 9)
A couple of more recent statements by a modern scientist and a modern philosopher are as follows.
"The sense perceptions have been definitely eliminated from physical acoustics, optics, and heat. The physical definitions of sound, colour, and temperature are today in no way associated with the immediate perception of the respective senses, but sound and colour are defined respectively by the frequency and wavelength of oscillations, and temperature is measured theoretically on the absolute temperature scale corresponding to the second law of thermodynamics."
("A Survey of Physics" by Max Planck (1925))
"A precise statement of the problem raised by the existence of sensory qualities must start from the fact that the progress of the physical sciences has all but eliminated these qualities from our scientific picture of the external world."
("The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology" by F. A. Hyek (1952))
Philosophers much later than Democritus defined the distinction between what they called "primary qualities" and what they called "secondary qualities". Secondary qualities were merely "perceived" qualities, while primary qualities were actual in the physical world.
"I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we locate them are concerned, and that they reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated"
("The Assayer" by Galileo Galilei (1623))
"... it must certainly be concluded regarding those things which, in external objects, we call by the names of light, color, odor, taste, sound, heat, cold, and of other tactile qualities ... that we are not aware of their being anything other than various arrangements of the size, figure, and motions of the parts of these objects which make it possible for our nerves to move in various ways, and to excite in our soul all the various feelings which they produce there."
("Principles of Philosophy" by Rene Descartes (1647))
"These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz., solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.... Secondly. Such qualities, which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e., by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colours, sounds, tastes, &c., these I call secondary qualities.... From whence I think it is easy to draw this observation, that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas existing in the bodies themselves.... The particular bulk, number, figure, and motion of the parts of fire or snow are really in them, whether anyone's senses perceive them or no; and therefore they may be called real qualities, because they really exist in those bodies. But light, heat, whiteness, or coldness, are no more really in them than sickness or pain is in manna. Take away the sensation of them; let not the eyes see light or colours, nor the ears hear sounds; let the palate not taste, nor the nose smell; and all colours, tastes, odours and sounds, as they are such particular ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their causes, i.e., bulk, figure, and motion of parts."
("An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" by John Locke, pp.85-7 (1690))
"For the rays, to speak properly, are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this or that colour."
("Optics" by Isaac Newton (1721))
Particles move around, they stick together and they break apart. And that is all they do. All the phenomenon of nature that we assign such a multiplicity of names to, all reduces down to some combination of particles moving around, sticking together or breaking apart. What we experience as colour is photons of a particular frequency and corresponding wavelength. We see an object as "red" if it has a chemical structure such that "red" photons bounce off it, while photons of other "colours" are absorbed by it. The "red" photons that bounce off the "red" object then pass through the pupil of the human eyeball and strike the retina at the back of the eye. There are specialised cells in the retina called "cone" cells that respond to photons of different frequencies. There are three kinds of cone cell, that respond to particular frequencies of light: red, green and blue. Light of one frequency will cause a chemical reaction in a particular cone cell, while light of another frequency will not. When a cone cell reacts to photons, an electrochemical signal is sent along the optic nerve to the brain which assembles the whole image.
When vibrating molecules of air strike the human eardrum, an electrochemical signal is sent to the brain. The phenomenon we call "heat" is particles with a lot of kinetic energy moving fast, and "cold" is particles with relatively little kinetic energy moving slow. So that all the phenomenon of nature can be reduced particles moving around or staying put. So that primary qualities consist solely of distributions of matter in space, a "shape" that may be static or moving. Some philosophers even started casting doubt on the primary qualities. Given the realisation that everything but objects moving in space and time was mere illusion, it was probably only a matter of time before someone suggests that these are too.
"It is even possible to demonstrate that the ideas of size, figure and motion are not so distinctive as is imagined, and that they stand for something imaginary relative to our perceptions as do, although to a greater extent, the ideas of color, heat, and the other similar qualities in regard to which we may doubt whether they are actually to be found in the nature of the things outside of us."
("Discourse on Metaphysics" by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1686))
"Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)—no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible."
("Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics" by Immanuel Kant (1783))
It is relatively easy to describe information processing in terms of particles moving around or staying put. That is how computers work. But the computer does what it does without knowing what it is doing. A computer can show a movie, but it is only the person looking at the computer screen who knows it is a movie. The computer can display text of the screen, but it is only the person looking at it who knows that it is the answer to a question. The computer can play chess or perform a statistical analysis or pretend to have a conversation. It can perform logical deduction and inference, or generate an abstract design. It can "perceive" sound and light. It can move robot arms. But the individual parts of the computer do not know what they are a party to, and neither do the parts of the human brain that are similarly involved in processing "information", or the human body that acts on the brain's instructions. More recently, the problem of "secondary qualities" has been generalised to become the problem of "emergent properties". An "emergent property" refers to any whole composed of parts, and the behaviours or qualities distinctive of it.
Consciousness
We need to be careful now with our terms here. Issues of consciousness can tend to be described using ambiguous terms. For instance, the question of whether machines can be conscious is sometimes framed as the question of whether machines can be "alive". But "alive" is an easy criteria to satisfy. Potted plants and bacteria are alive, although they do no thinking. The definition of life is controversial, but usually involved is the ability to grow and reproduce, to adapt to the environment and respond to stimuli, and to actively maintain a stable internal state (homeostasis) and take in nutrients from outside. The definition of "life" may also include elements that specifically and arbitrarily exclude artificial life, such as the requirement that living things are composed of organic cells.With the invention of computers, the word "intelligent" is now no longer a clearly distinguishing feature of human beings. The usual hallmarks of intelligence: the ability to remember the capital cities of all the countries in the world, play chess, perform difficult mathematical calculations, quote from impressive philosophical texts and listen to and answer questions, are now all things machines can do. So the question of whether there is such a thing as "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) is easy to answer. "Yes" machines can behave intelligently. But they do all these things mechanically, without consciousness.
So we need to be clear. There is no problem with accounting for any kind of "information processing" in the brain. Hearing music, remembering and playing music. Analysis, deduction, conversation, creativity. Even feelings can be reduced to chemical processes. Fear is an increased heart rate and the release of adrenalin, and associated behaviours of avoidance. An expression of fear on the face is a behaviour. But all of these chemical and physical reactions do not refer to a conscious experience of "being afraid", but are pure information processing and mechanical action. "Feelings" from a biological point of view are a behavioural bias with associated chemical reactions. We are behaviourally inclined towards things we "like" and away from things we "don't like".
"Thinking" is an ambiguous term. When we say the word "thinking" do we mean unconscious information processing, or the consciousness of thinking about something? The same applies to the words "mind" and "mental". So if we are referring to the phenomenon of consciousness, we need to use the word "consciousness" to avoid confusion. A term that is frequently used now in philosophy of mind is "qualia" (individual instances of subjective, conscious experience (singular "quale")). The qualia of "seeing the colour red" is different to the responses of cones in the retina to photons of a certain frequency and the subsequent information processing by neurons in the brain. I will use the phrase "information processing" to refer to unconscious information processing.
It seems that every conscious experience has associated with it an instance of information processing, but that every instance of information processing does not necessarily have a conscious experience associated with it. The neurons of the brain process the "colour" red, and we have the conscious experience (qualia) of seeing the colour red. Our brain processes a fear response and we consciously experience fear. Our brain figures out the answer to a difficult mathematical problem, and we have the conscious experience of having figured it out or remembered it. We have now immersed ourselves deeply in the problem of the philosophy of mind. If the above assertion that: "Our brain processes a fear response and we consciously experience fear" refers to two different, distinct things and not one thing; seems intuitive to you, then we are on the same page, and philosophically you are probably what is called a "dualist", making a distinction between body and mind (consciousness). But if you think "our brain processing the fear response" IS "the conscious experience of fear"; that is, they are just two descriptions of the same thing, then you are probably what used to be called a "behaviourist" and which is now (with a slightly different definition) called a "physicalist". According to the physicalist, conscious experience just "is" the processing of information in the brain. Physicalist theories under the wing of neuroscience are tending to dominate recent philosophy of mind. Ultimately the consciousness problem partly reduces to the unity problem. In what sense can a whole composed of parts be said to exist.
"When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunctive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right-hand glove and a pair of gloves.... Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd; but, it must be noticed, the argument will not show that either of the illegitimately conjoined propositions is absurd in itself. I am not, for example, denying that there occur mental processes. Doing long division is a mental process and so is making a joke. But I am saying that the phrase 'there occur mental processes' does not mean the same sort of thing as 'there occur physical processes', and, therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two."
("The Concept of Mind" by Gilbert Ryle (1949), p.23)
Mind is to information processing in the brain, as a cold front is to individual molecules of air, as a pair of gloves is to a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove. We can draw a line around a portion of the brain and say "this is involved in the perception of a face", but none of the neurons involved know that. To use a computing metaphor, consider a "register" in the brain, by this I mean a slot in the brain, let's say a particular neuron. This neuron can either be activated or not. Let's say it can be in the state "1" for activated, or the state "0" for inactive.
Whenever the eyes of the person receives an image identified as a large tiger running towards them, this neuron is activated. And whenever this neuron is activated, it sets in motion the behavioural response of running away very fast. Therefore, this neuron can be considered the part of the brain that has realised: "Oh my god, there's a tiger coming at me! I'm outta here!" But from the point of view of the neuron itself, it just got a signal and responded the way it always does when it gets a signal like that. It doesn't know what the signal means. Although there are parts of the brain that assemble data and coordinate a response, there is no part of the brain that puts it all together into a "meaningful" whole. That neuron is the closest thing in the brain to something which "recognises the situation and what to do about it". The response has grown up over the course of biological evolution as a mechanical response: "if you see this, do this". But consciousness has no role in any of it.
The "1" in the registry is the "result" of a unique combination of causes, and can therefore be said to "represent" those causes. But looking at the 1 by itself there is nothing about it that tells us what caused it. In what sense therefore can it be said to "contain" that information? What we require is some manner of unity that sits across the various pieces of the brain to create a consciousness, something that combines the 1 with its causes or consequences into an actual whole that attributes meaning. Phrases like "unifying concept" are easy to write when philosophising, but what in reality does the phrase actually refer to?
If someone lays out stones on the beach of a tropical island to spell the word "Help!" for passing aircraft, as far as the beach itself is concerned, it's just a bunch of scattered rocks. It is only to an observing consciousness that the rocks embody information, have meaning. "Information" in a computer is the same. It is only information to an observing consciousness that is using the computer. The computer itself doesn't know if all the 1s and 0s in it are a sonnet by Shakespeare or pornography. It is the same for neurons in the brain. As far as nature is concerned, a book is paper with ink stains, no more meaningful than the water stains on the wall of an old house.
It's possible to build a robot that can do all the things a person can do, and to imitate human emotion. Two robots can hug each other and give supportive statements to each other after a hard day. In modern philosophy of mind, such thought experiments typically use "zombies", people who appear to be normal people in every way except that they have no conscious experience, no qualia. Theoretically there is not any kind of behaviour or any kind of information processing that we can conceive of that cannot be performed in the absence of consciousness. You will sometimes see the phrase "conscious behaviours", and we think of certain behaviours as being necessarily conscious because we only see conscious beings doing them. But now with computers and robots we are realising that consciousness is a completely unnecessary and useless add-on to these behaviours.
From the point of view of nature, any behaviour carried out consciously is identical to the same behaviour carried out in the absence of consciousness. Consciousness therefore stands outside of evolutionary processes. There is no reason for evolution to create, favour or maintain consciousness, nor seemingly any way in which it could. Consciousness seems to be a free gift of the universe, providing us with the ability to be aware of and enjoy existing, instead of just existing as mindless machines. But this leaves the mystery of how consciousness came to be there.
"Functionalist" theories of mind highlight that the state of our "Oh my god, there's a tiger coming at me! I'm outta here!" neuron is given "meaning" by its functional context, a "Representationalist" theory that it represents something, but these theories and the new and optimistically labelled "non-reductive materialism" ultimately describe mind in terms that have no meaning in the material world, and then simply assert afterwards that the things referred to are identical to the material activities. The physicalist argument is an ancient one. In the following quote, Plato presents the physicalist argument against the immortality of the soul.
"That one could say the same about harmony and a harp with strings; that the harmony is invisible and bodiless and all-beautiful and divine on the tuned harp; but the harp itself and the strings are bodies and bodily and composite and earthy and akin to the mortal. So when someone breaks the harp, or cuts and bursts the strings, suppose he should maintain by the same argument as yours that it is necessary the harmony should still exist and not perish."
("Phaedo", by Plato (428 – 347BC))
When an argument has been going for this long and in essentially the same form, it is tempting to think there is some difference in psychology at work. For some people the notion that "neurons exchanging chemicals" is "the same as" my "experience of affection for my spouse" seems intuitive. For other people, two clearly very different things are being described, and therefore any correlation between them needs to be accounted for. If someone affirms forcefully that: "The actress Natalie Portman is identical to the planet Jupiter", how do we mount a counter-argument if the obvious differences are not in themselves sufficient to persuade them otherwise? Several anti-physicalist arguments consist of efforts to create thought experiments to show the absurdity of the physicalist argument; but the physicalist merely responds that the thought experiment is either incomplete or not absurd.
Consciousness is in the habit of grouping and labelling things in all sorts of ways. Atoms are also chemicals are also flesh and bone are also a person, are also a tall Caucasian person are also a doctor are also a husband and father and a member of the community and inhabitant of the planet Earth. We apply all of these different labels by grouping and associating the things referred to in various ways. Consciousness does this, but matter does not. Matter only has direct, immediate causal connections. It does not step back and look at the big picture. But we can step back and see larger patterns formed by these many discrete events. And these many discrete events may lead to a single, predictable outcome that some choose to call a "perception" or "cognition" of the event as a whole. Wherever we have a confluence of causes we have meaning. Consciousness can make a pair of gloves from a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove. But as far as nature is concerned, the two gloves sitting on the table a few centimetres apart, between an ashtray and a candle, bear no relation to each another, and do not together comprise anything. Some terms used by physicalists refer to causal connections in matter, while others refer to conscious experiences, and by crossing the line between the two wantonly in the course of an argument, the brain is effectively anthropomorphised. Of course dualists do this in the course of an argument as well, but it is only fatal to the argument of the physicalist. In the end, physicalism is the anthropomorphisation of the human body, and the instinct to anthropomorphise is as old as man himself. Such a thing is not jarring because we all assume the human body is inhabited by a consciousness, so "it just is" works for many. Many an engineer thinks an automobile is alive because it is warm and purrs.
It is this habit of consciousness to group and label the elements of shapes in various ways that accustoms us to the idea that we can equate two seemingly quite different things. Water (H2O) is hydrogen and oxygen. In most cases this process is harmless and leads to the idea that materialism can be non-reductive if it takes account of the relevant organisation of matter. To say that a person is "just atoms" is reductive, but to say that a person is "just atoms organised in the appropriate way" is supposed to be non-reductive. This may be true in cases where we are referring merely to a shape. But consciousness is not a shape.
Any shape can be envisaged in the absence of consciousness. A square can exist without anyone being conscious of its existence; so too can a tree or a rock; so too can a person. But in the case of a person it is supposed by a physicalist that even if no-one else is conscious of the person's existence, the person themselves will be conscious of their own existence, merely by virtue of their being person shaped; that is, if the matter of their body has all the structure and behaviours of a person so that all the appropriate labelling can be applied to it.
If a psychological difference is at work here, we might seek to employ that most egalitarian of principles: "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" and suggest the two parties have in mind the same thing without realising it, and are approaching some common goal from different sides. When a dualist says "soul" and the physicalist says "behaviour" they both have in mind a kind of unity. Therefore each concept is haunted.
What is an Idea? (1)
What is an idea in the brain? Imagine a mechanical detector standing on a hilltop. Depending on the design of the detector, certain phenomena will "set off" the detector, while other phenomena will not. For instance, let's say that a strong wind will set off the detector, or an animal brushing up against it, the branch of a tree falling on it, or a lightning strike. The detector then, let's say, has only two states. Either it is "set off" or it is "not set off". Let's represent these states respectively by the symbols "1" and "0". The detector then embodies a single "idea", the idea of "things that set off the detector". The detector inhabits a universe possessing only two possible states: 1 or 0. Notice that the "perception" and "thought" of the detector takes all the various complexity of the material world and reduces it to one of the two pure and absolute, possible states. It inhabits a simplified idealisation of reality. This purification and simplification of reality is a natural and inevitable characteristic of cognition and perception, of abstractions, and leads eventually to the elegant and useful theorems of mathematics, physics and logic.By refining the response characteristics of the detector we can make it sensitive to more specific phenomena. For instance, by fitting it with a camera and image analysis software it can possess ideas like "tree", "dog" and "sunshine" etc. If a particular neuron or set of neurons in the brain are only activated together in response to a particular stimulus, they can be taken as representing that stimulus in the brain. They are the idea of that stimulus in the brain. This of course says nothing about the conscious experience of having the idea.
Let's take a break here. The discussion of consciousness will conclude in Unity vs Robot Zombies - Part 2.
Any comments welcome.
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