11. Unity vs Robot Zombies - Part 2
This is the eleventh 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 movies like "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" the soul/spirit is portrayed as a glowing translucent copy of the physical body. In out of body experiences, astral travel and near death experiences, this "subtle body" is supposed to separate from the physical body and travel on its own. In spiritism, "ectoplasm" (see the "Ghost Busters" movies) appears to be some kind of spiritual raw material, a fluid glowing translucent stuff that can take various forms.
The mind/body split is said to have caused a problem in philosophy. The problem is, if the mind consists of this subtle body, how does that subtle body influence the physical body, and vice versa? The question might also be raised: if all the information processing is going on in the physical brain, what is left for the soul/spirit to do? Traditionally, what is felt to fall within the domain of the soul is the exercise of free will. The brain provides information to the soul, the soul provides its decision, and this decision is then implemented behaviourally via the physical brain. The soul is felt to be necessary for free will to exist, because the body is purely mechanical and deterministic.
Too much can be made of this "duality problem". You can't lift an automobile with a radio, but you can lift an automobile with a radio controlled crane. Typically, causal connections between two things that can't influence each other directly are carried out by means of intermediaries. If matter and the stuff of the subtle body are too different to interact directly, we just posit a third kind of stuff between them, something similar to but not identical to soul stuff, and also similar to but not identical to matter, allowing it to interact with both and serve as a bridge between them. Or we might posit a sequence of intermediaries shading from those that are more like matter to those that are more like soul, linking together to form a bridge between matter and soul. Because there are still some mysteries left in physics there is still open the possibility of as yet unrecognised causal influences on matter. Some see an opportunity in the indeterminate nature of quantum phenomena. Because quantum physics only provides probabilities for what will happen at the microscopic level, that leaves room for various causal influences to operate at this scale without violating quantum theory, as long as those influences stay within the bounds of quantum probability. Such propositions involve positing another layer of causation between matter and mind. Those resistant to the hypothesis call to Ockham's Razor to maintain the simplicity of purely physical explanation.
"Causal closure" is a premise in philosophy of mind. It asserts that all material processes are caused exclusively by material processes. That is, it is the assumption that no ghostly souls can influence matter. Consider for a moment if causal closure were not true and that the will of the soul could influence the brain via telekinesis. And let's imagine that in the future we are able to see what is going on at a subatomic level in the brain (although the quantum "uncertainty principle" would tend to preclude that). If causal closure is not true, and the subtle body is able to influence the brain, then we will see particles behaving normally according to the principles of physics, and then, as the ghostly will exerts itself telekinetically, a particle will do something not explained by physics in order to implement the will's decision. At present we do not know if such a thing is possible, but perhaps advancing science will one day be able to rule it out, if it can observe the brain at the subatomic level for a long time and not witness any such unexplained activity. Some are pinning their hopes on such a possibility.
"... ten thousand million neurons ... momentarily poised close to a just-threshold level of excitability. It is the kind of machine that a ghost could operate, if by 'ghost' we mean in the first place an 'agent' whose action has escaped detection even by the most delicate instruments."
So what does "free will" mean in the current context? Putting aside all the things I cannot expect to have control over, possessing free will means I can, within reason, act on my own desires, truths and conscience. Now let's assume, as seems likely, that one day we are able to trace all the incoming sensory data to the human brain, then track all the information processing the brain performs on that data, and then trace all the outgoing motor impulses that result, so that we can track the process of "thinking" from beginning to end, all without encountering consciousness or any supernatural events along the way. As a result we have causal closure and no evidence for the existence of consciousness. But do we have the absence of free will?
When you act on your own free will, you are acting on one of two things: reason or desire: or some more or less elaborate combination of the two. Reason when functioning correctly is founded on truth and logic, neither of which you have control over. The truth is the truth. What is logical is what is logical. You can choose what you think about, but not where that thought will lead you. The other element of free will is desire. Do you choose what you desire? Some people feel trapped by their desires, as if their desires are contrary to their will, and they must exert the power of their will to overcome them. They wish they did not desire what they do, or desire that they did not desire certain things. The problem with desires is that we have many of them and they may be contradictory. We may want to take what belongs to other people, but we may not want to suffer the consequences if we are caught. We may want to be drunk at work, but we may not want to lose our job. We may want to keep having sex with lots of people, but also to keep our spouse. Feeling trapped by your desires is when one or more of our desires conflicts with others of our desires. We therefore find that we must prioritise our desires; choose which we will act on, and which we will suppress, to arrive at what we deem to be the greatest good for ourselves. This internal contest we think of as the exercise of the will. We imagine consequences of various actions, provide arguments for and against certain courses of action, and decide whether or not make sacrifices. When we decide to suppress a desire, we develop the habit of redirecting thinking whenever the desire arises, of repeating the arguments against, and the arguments for alternative courses of action, until the new way of being becomes habitual, easy and natural.
"And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."
Desires tend to start in the body with desires like food, drink, air, sex and other tactile pleasures like massage, swimming or a hot bath. There are chemical pleasures like intoxicants; and also emotional pleasures like fascination, admiration and infatuation, exhilaration, prestige, popularity and power. In the end, although they have a conceptual component, emotional pleasures, in fact all pleasures, are a kind of chemical pleasure. Endorphins ("endo-" meaning "inner" and "-orphin" a contraction of "morphine") are pain-killing and pleasure drugs produced naturally by the nervous system. Chemicals is how the brain and the rest of the nervous system works.
It is easy enough to trace the evolutionary utility of the various emotional impulses of the human being. Desire to eat and go on living promotes personal and species survival. Desire for sex perpetuates the species. Competition strengthens the species. Affection creates strong bonds for mutual support and defence. Even altruistic motives, which might be detrimental to the individual, has benefits for the species. The religious impulse is merely an extension of the desire to go on living. As far as evolution is concerned, it does not matter if religion is true. It only matters if it enhances the success of the species. If a religious community is better fitted for survival than an atheistic community, then evolution will perpetuate religion. There is no such thing as a "spiritual" desire. Aside from the desire for personal survival, religion is an object of fascination, like a work of art. Part of our desire to make the world over in the image of our desire.
So the whole of the emotional life, from the most basic physical impulse to the loftiest "spiritual" aspiration, can be broken down into natural impulses of desire or revulsion, linked to chemical processes in the body that serve to produce biases toward, or biases away from certain outcomes. Desires and fears can motivate reasoning. They can also distort reasoning where reasoning does not seem to match our desires. So that there is a complex interplay between desire and reasoning.
If we therefore look at the composition of the two elements of free will: reason and desire. We find that each is deterministic and fully capable of a completely material embodiment. The ancients thought that the soul was necessary to account for spontaneous action, like being idle and then suddenly standing up. Now we don't feel that soul is necessary to explain this, because although a person may seem idle, we know that there is always a lot of activity going on inside, and the sudden movement of standing up is an outcome of that hidden inner activity. I can write a computer program that displays the word "Hello" on the screen. If I want to imitate "spontaneous" activity I can write a program that says "count to a million, then display the word 'Hello' on the screen". So that the computer seems to be idle for a time, before suddenly, spontaneously saying "Hello".
All reasoning and emotional responses can be carried out by the body mechanically. Suggesting that free will is provided by some spiritual soul stuff does not negate the need for a cause, and that cause will be either a desire or a reason. If the material body is able to provide both of these, what need is there to posit some spiritual soul stuff? Soul or spirit is not needed for any meaningful definition of free will. The only thing the body alone cannot do is be conscious of any of this activity. Consciousness is not necessary to any of this activity, and has no role in it. Consciousness is a passenger. In the absence of consciousness we have the behaviour and information processing of a fear response, but no fear. In the absence of consciousness we have the behaviours of affection and their associated chemical (emotional) and information processing (thought) correlates, but no actual conscious feeling of affection. None of this interferes with free will because our desires are of our body, and our reasonings are of our body. Our bodies are us. While consciousness may be the essence of what I am, my body is the content of who I am. Whether this body is made of physical or "subtle" stuff (or both) does not matter. What matters is its complement of abilities, its form and function. To suggest that free will needs not to be deterministic in order to be truly free is to suggest that it should be causeless. If every action of the will is caused, then it is deterministic. It is meaningless to assert an action as "causeless". Even random activity is caused and deterministic. It is only unpredictable.
To be free means to be free of undue external influence. To be free means to be free to follow our own internal compass. To say that we are not free if our internal compass is deterministic is an incoherent assertion. It is our choice if we are the one making it according to our own deterministic will.
Epiphenomenalism means that our consciousness is in the hands of matter, depending upon deterministic processes to achieve goals and desires defined by matter, in a context of chance encounters and influences. What we experience subjectively as an exertion of will, is consciousness of an automatic process. It is not quite true to say "I" has no control over this process, because "I" consists of the desires and actions being mechanically played out. Even our conscious perspective on events is defined by those events, so that it is meaningless to suggest that consciousness should have the ability to influence them. The consciousness is shaped and defined by those events and accords with them perfectly. The influence of "my" desires and considerations is already taking place. In due course, biological evolution and development will carry our consciousness to its destination.
If all of our actions are deterministic, mechanically and unavoidably playing themselves out without the intervention of conscious will, why is living not easy? Why do we not feel like casual passengers in our own body? Why does living seem like an effort? Why does it seem hard? Everything in the universe is based on a balance of opposing forces and tension. We stand up by pushing against the force of gravity. When the decision making apparatus of the brain determines that we will do X instead of Y, we may experience this as a determined effort to do X instead of Y, because X must persistently reassert its continued legitimacy as the right choice, in the face of shifting circumstances and evolving counter arguments, and in the face of watchfulness for negative consequences and dangers. It is probably a good thing that we do not feel like helpless passengers in our own bodies as our bodies navigate us more or less intelligently among life's challenges and dangers. Looking around for a steering wheel to grab to take control away from our material body. But since our brain's decisions always accord perfectly with our "will", we experience no discrepancy, and feel we are controlling the action. Because our brain embodies and forms what we call our "will".
From the mechanical processes of the body seeking out sustenance and fleeing, overcoming or succumbing to danger, are overlaid the qualia of the human drama. The search for consciousness is not therefore the search for a-causal phenomena, or holes in causality that may be occupied by the magic of free will. We can allow the brain its wholly mechanical functioning. The search for consciousness need not interfere with this.
Some see the fact that epiphenomenalism stands outside the theory of evolution as a discrediting flaw with the theory of epiphenomenalism, so too the lack of a causal connection between consciousness and brain. What such people are seeking to do is to find a mechanical, more or less material process that they can point to and say "that is consciousness". We have found it! But no entity of such a kind can ever be consciousness. We cannot conceive of any arrangement of gears and levers that will deserve such a title. It is legitimate to seek a connection between consciousness and brain, but it may not be legitimate to be seeking a causal connection. The connection between a dog and the atoms that comprise it is not a causal connection. At present we can only frame the connection by saying: "the dog is the whole of which the atoms are parts". But by doing so we have introduced our own conscious perception into the mix. Our own perception of a whole. This is not to say that the introduction of consciousness has affected the outcome in any way. It is only to say that consciousness recognises something, while atoms recognise nothing. The whole has no causal relationship to its parts. No "top-down" control it can exert. Atoms are a part of what belongs to consciousness, and it is by finding the other parts of what belongs to consciousness that we will find the bridge between the two. Not by introducing a new set of consciousness particles to impinge on the matter particles, steering them to its will, but by discovering the hidden side of the particles we know already, and the space they inhabit. If what we see and know now is only the tip of the iceberg poking up in our detectors. It is not dualism to suggest that a coin has both a head and a tail. Evolution does not create consciousness, there is no need, but it creates the forms that define the form of consciousness.
"In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps."
(Proverbs 16:9)
The feelings and thoughts I have today may be different from the feelings and thoughts I have tomorrow, but the feelings and thoughts I have at any time constitute me. If we take away the feelings and thoughts we are not left with pure "me"; we are left only with a blank slate, a tabula rasa. My feelings and thoughts that are me, determine my actions. My feelings and thoughts that are me are responsible for my actions. If I don't want to be bad, then that is one of the feelings of which I am composed. If I do want to be bad and don't want to be otherwise, then I can be held responsible for that even if I cannot change it, because I do not want to change it. This might undermine our rationale for wanting to blame evil people and punish them for all eternity. But it does not affect the need to bind or lock them up, destroy them and keep them out of heaven. We do not have to hate and blame a wild animal to recognise its ineligibility to enter heaven. Evil people who wish to remain that way are failed humans, rejects, typos. They are evolutionary throwbacks to a prehuman state of being. Human beings may struggle on the razor's edge of the threshold of humanity and we may not be able to predict which side they will come down on. But the result is already determined and known, presumably, to the divine.
Our feelings and thoughts are also influenced by our environment. We can have experiences that change us dramatically, such that we might have been different people today had it not been for those experiences. But if our poor character is the result of circumstance, presumably the divine judge will take such contingencies into account in our favour. Good circumstances make it that much easier to be good, allowing us to progress much farther in our development than merely clinging onto our humanity by our fingernails. A mystery surrounds consciousness but there is no mystery of the will. "Will" is only the name we give to the decision making processes taking place in the brain: weighing up one reason against another, one inclination against another, inclination against reason and reason against inclination. We experience an emotional conflict with either reason or another emotion, as an exertion of the will which may succeed or fail.
Although they may nonsensically describe the actions of the will in terms of a "first cause" or "causeless cause", those who suggest that the will needs to be applied as spirit against matter seem to imagine that some thinking and feeling necessarily takes place in the world of spirit, or some Platonic realm of ideas, separate from matter, and that the outcome of this thinking and feeling then needs to be applied to the material body by the immaterial will. That is, they are not really suggesting a first cause or causeless cause, but only a first cause in matter resulting from a prior cause in spirit, or a material cause uncaused by matter. But computers make it clear that any thinking and feeling process can be completely carried out (in the absence of consciousness) in matter. Those who really suggest that free will requires no driving emotion or reason, can only say that it is incomprehensible. But if my decision and action does not come from my reason or my emotion, but apparently from nowhere, how can I say that it is mine?
"They had [described all the activities of information processing in the brain] and could write down a simple [explanation for every human behaviour]. [The] alleged [unexplained consciousness was], by contrast, ... invisible, intangible, and imperceptible. What was the point of explaining a straightforward [physical activity], derived directly from [observation], in terms of hypothetical entities that could not be seen [except subjectively in one's own mind] and might never be seen [in the laboratory]?"
But we are all fairly well convinced that consciousness does exist, based on our own experience of it. Since it couldn't be plausibly suggested that consciousness did not exist, it was proposed instead that it was identical to the things already physically identified; that consciousness did not exist ... as some other thing in addition to these.
We are also inclined to think that everyone else who seems to be conscious, really is; and probably so are at least the higher animals. If that is so, then the acquisition of consciousness seems to be automatic. The human body is a machine with a computer built in. But when that machine reached a level of evolution, let's say, such that it became a fitting vessel for a consciousness, consciousness is automatically there. This seems to imply some kind of necessity in the connection between the form of the body and its possession of conscious experience. In a way, the dualist and physicalist theories seem to shade into each other here. Conscious behaviours "just are" consciousness. The form and the consciousness are somehow inextricably linked. The physicalist will claim that the consciousness "just is" the form and activity of the body. For the dualist the emergence of consciousness is a mystery. In part 1 of this article we considered that consciousness was somehow connected with "wholeness", of wholes composed of parts. This was not to suggest that consciousness is merely some principle of wholeness, for just as it is possible to envisage all behaviours occurring in the absence of consciousness, so it is possible to envisage a "principle of wholeness" in the absence of consciousness. We might suggest then that some principle of wholeness is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness. We might look hopefully at some of the non-local behaviours in quantum physics, like particles smudged in space or quantum entanglement, but it is probably a mistake to make too much of this.
Science and analysis work by breaking up complex problems and phenomena into simple elements. And this approach has been phenomenally successful in the analysis of the physical world. But when we attempt to put the pieces back together again something is missing. We have collections and processions of parts, but no real wholes. Parts begin to look more real than wholes. The pink of the poster was "really" red dots on a white background. Matter is really atoms. A human being is really just the following elements arranged a certain way.
Logic is sometimes thought by some as somehow transcending matter, as the processes of reason existing in some ideal Platonic realm. But logic is the distillation of our general observations of nature and the processing of information. It might even be suggested that logic and materialism are identical. Logic's real virtue, according to Kant as we have seen, is that "it is able to define the limits of its own faculties". Our only window on the greater universe may be in pondering what lay beyond the limits of reason. But we have no intellectual tools at our disposal (in what we might call our "material minds") to describe that universe. Since we cannot reduce it or explain it in terms of anything else, we can only posit consciousness as another fundamental element of the universe, like the 3 fundamental particles and 4 fundamental forces.
The material universe consists of particles in various arrangements, but there is no colour, no sound, no hot or cold, no faces and no people. In consciousness we have the brilliant colours red and blue and green, we have music and the voice, warmth and coolness, the taste of an apple and the smell of a garden. It has hope and fear, affection and desire, amazement and disappointment. These things of consciousness bear no similarity to anything in the physical world. There is nothing "red" about photons with a wavelength of 700nm and nothing "blue" about photons with a wavelength of 400nm. There is nothing "sweet" about the chemical compound sugar. These experiences seem to be arbitrary assignments by consciousness on the phenomena of the physical world, a kind of vivid labelling. The way objects appear and affect us in consciousness (as qualia) constitutes the addition of new experiential dimensions to the 3 of space and one of time. The molecular structure of surfaces, effectively their "texture", determines which wavelengths of light they absorb, and which they reflect. So that colour is a way to perceive differences in the microscopic structure of surfaces. But in place of a mundane difference in texture, we experience all the beauty of colour. In place of rattling molecules of air, we experience all the beauty of music and voice. Chemical changes in our tongue and nostrils we experience as the taste of good food and exotic scents. Chemical changes in the body and brain, we experience as love, excitement and dread. If all of these things are not a part of matter, what are they a part of? Where do they exist? What is it to exist "in the mind"?
The investigation of consciousness seems only able to be carried out within consciousness. But consciousness is like water, it takes the shape of whatever is its container.
"... the moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous."
We are only ever conscious "of something". Consciousness of nothing is unconsciousness. We might think of consciousness as intrinsically formless, or perhaps better as of arbitrary form, the way clay can be any form, but has no particular form native to it. Matter lends form to consciousness, allowing us to be conscious of something in particular; and in the end, perhaps this is what matter is for.
"... that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."
Our material existence allows us to consume reality a little bit at a time, building up our knowledge, experience and abilities. There is a gulf between matter as we currently know it and consciousness and we do not know what lay within this gulf. Hopefully we will get to explore this in the future.
The other solution is that the relationship with deity takes the same form as other supernatural encounters, as described in the articles Cosmic Conspiracy - Part 1 - Deus Absconditus and Cosmic Conspiracy - Part 2 - Strange Creatures. That is, that these events are exceptions to the normal course of physical events and are truly supernatural, and therefore will studiously avoid appearance in the laboratory. This avoids the issue of violating causal closure. In this case me might take very literally statements such as the following, whereby our material will leads our consciousness to draw a line between ourselves and deity, to draw a line encompassing both.
"... to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."
"Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."
If we ask the question: "What shape is consciousness?", we are likely to receive an answer such as: "It is the shape of any suitable structure for the performance of conscious behaviours, such as a human body and nervous system." But at some point an organisation of particles ceases to be merely an arrangement of particles, and acquires the property of being a conscious arrangement of particles, experiencing its own existence. For instance, if we arrange three particles into the shape of a triangle, will they be conscious? What if we arrange 4 particles into the shape of a square? We assume these shapes will not be conscious. What about if we arrange the particles into the shape of a pentagram? If we do this will the shape glow with a blue light allowing us to conjure up spirits? This is shape magic, the belief that a particular shape has supernatural abilities. Physicalism is shape magic, the belief that by arranging physical objects into a certain configuration they will become conscious. Perhaps a pentagram on its own is not sufficient. Perhaps we need to surround the pentagram with mysterious symbols. This is word magic, the belief that words have supernatural abilities, such as conjuring ectoplasm. The belief that meaning is a physical property of an arrangement of matter because these arrangements "represent" things, is word magic. What about movements? What kind of movements might constitute consciousness? Will particles be conscious if they move up and down. What about some combination of up, down and sideways? What if they move in circles?
It might be argued that it is only complicated shapes that can be conscious, not simple ones like triangles, squares and pentagrams. Some things can only exist as complicated structures. For instance, you can't make a computer out of just three particles. It is easier to imagine all sorts of things being created in complicated shapes, because complicated shapes are beyond our understanding. So we can answer the mysteries of the universe by saying "complicated shapes cause them", and who can argue with it? We have seen that physical entities have no regard for complicated shapes. They only concern themselves with direct causal relationships. All complicated shapes can be reduced to discrete, simple interactions. So we might ask: what simple interaction constitutes a conscious interaction? Any shape or behaviour we care to imagine, can be imagined either with or without consciousness, so that consciousness is not essential to any shape or behaviour. If I can imagine your body carrying out its life without any consciousness, and I can imagine your body carrying out its life with consciousness, what is the difference between these two imaginings? There is clearly a difference, but we cannot detect what it is anywhere in the body, which only shows us unconscious activity.
Consciousness is not a shape because any shape or motion we can conceive of, can be conceived as occurring in the absence of consciousness. We can conceive of something shaped like a brain, with chemical reactions going on in it, all without any consciousness. That is, we can conceive of zombies.
The last 100 years of science has been largely fleshing out the implications of atomic theory as posed by the Greek philosophers over two millennia ago. The domain of this vastly successful method is broad but not all encompassing. The things that can be made and therefore explained by this method are any things that can be made and explained as arrangements of particles. Science consists of 3 fundamental objects: particles, forces and space. These are the 3 irreducible elements of science. No one of them can be reduced to, made from or explained by either of the others, although each is bound to and influenced by the others. The forces bind, break up, or move the particles around in space. A triangle can be made by an arrangement of particles. The body of a person can be made by an arrangement of particles. "Information" can be processed by an arrangement of particles, as a machine processes it, devoid of meaning. The question is whether consciousness can be made and explained by an arrangement of particles, or is consciousness something extra that must be added to the list of fundamental objects: particles, forces and space? Like them it is something that "just is". By making consciousness a fundamental characteristic of nature its existence no longer requires an explanation. Problem solved.
In principle, anything that is merely a shape, is easy to construct out of particles: a tree, a house, a car, a human body, a book, a triangle. Anything that is a process is easy to construct out of particles: a steam engine, a growing plant, a computer. But consciousness is not a shape, because a shape per se is not conscious. Consciousness is not a process because any process can be conceived of as being done consciously, can be conceived of as being done unconsciously. A representation (for example: a street sign) or a function (for example: an elevator taking people to the second floor) are not consciousness, since these are either shapes or processes by other labels.
We can be conscious of a shape, conscious of a process, conscious of a representation or function, but consciousness itself is not any of these things. A log can roll down a hill unconsciously, or a child can roll down a hill consciously. In the latter case, consciousness occurs in addition to the action. A person can play chess consciously against a computer that is playing unconsciously. Each is processing information about the game in a similar way, but only one of them in the presence of consciousness. Consciousness is something else, something in addition to particles moved in space by forces, and therefore something other than anything treated of in physics, chemistry or biology; in the physical sciences as they stand at present.
Consciousness is not a shape. Consciousness is of a shape, and there is nothing like this relationship anywhere else in nature. It is not a relationship of a whole to its parts, because a bunch of atoms is no more conscious than one atom is. Atoms can only form patterns.
When someone suggests "the activity of neurons" and "conscious experience" are just "two different descriptions of the same thing", what do they mean? If by the word "description" they mean something that has meaning to consciousness, they are already presuming the existence of consciousness. The word "description" can be taken in two ways, one relevant to the activity of neurons, the other relevant to consciousness. We can take the word "description" to refer to "data", such as an arrangement of data in a computer, or as an arrangement of chemicals in a physical brain. But such a "description" is devoid of meaning, regardless of how many "descriptions" are involved. It is only an arrangement of matter in space. A pattern. But a "description" in consciousness has meaning. In consciousness we have two different descriptions with two different meanings and referring to two different things.
This distinction does raise an interesting problem. When the dualist discusses the distinction between the representation of an experience in the neurons of the brain, and the conscious qualia associated with this representation; what does his own brain make of this distinction, if from the brain's point of view there is no such thing as conscious qualia? And what impetus does the brain have to make such a distinction if consciousness has no effect on the functioning of the brain?
We might say that the brain is only referring to its own representation rather than using its representation to refer to something out in the world. But we distinguish qualia even from this representation. We might then suggest that the brain is making a distinction between the representation as a bunch of causally distinct pieces, and the representation taken as a whole. While the brain cannot experience wholeness it can represent the idea of unity. The correlation between consciousness and wholeness gives consciousness physical significance. The action of consciousness is the action of a whole upon its parts.
Our inquiry seems to lead us back again and again to space, or something in space: as the medium of light, and of the wave functions or path integrals of smeared particles. And now as the means and embodiment of shape. Physical particles are separated in space, but the wavefunction is continuous in space. In the sum over histories approach to quantum physics the space between particles is occupied by "possible paths" all coexisting and exerting their influence simultaneously, so that what physically happens is the net result of everything that might have happened. These processes are rather like the "constellating" that consciousness does. Here we have the beginnings of a unifying principle, but remember, a unifying principle, while necessary, is not sufficient for consciousness. Replacing particles in a void with an active continuum or plenum does not get us much closer to the qualia of consciousness, but they may point us in the right direction.
Spatial, that is "geometric", relationships are a subset of mathematical relationships in general. For instance; if 3 women each have 4 children, or if 4 women each have 3 children, the result in each case will be exactly the same number of children. We know this even without counting how many children that is, because the physical world enforces what is called the "commutative law of multiplication", specifically: a × b = b × a. We might therefore think of space as a subset of some more encompassing manifold. In "space" perhaps we have our (necessary but not sufficient) unifying principle that contributes to an "explanation" of consciousness. Space gives us "shape" per se, perhaps the larger manifold will provide for the reality of other kinds of relationships. If the dualists are right and a gulf exists between matter and consciousness, something must occupy this gulf, forming a shorter or longer bridge from the one to the other, however incomprehensible such a bridge might appear to us now.
String theory suggests that there are more than 3 dimensions of space, and relativity routinely treats space and time as a single four-dimensional manifold referred to as "space-time". In 1884 an English schoolmaster called Edwin Abbott published a satirical novella called "Flatland", set in a two-dimensional universe. The book has come to be seen as an engaging illustration of life in what might be called a: "hyperverse". For instance, imagine that the occupants of Flatland can only perceive two dimensions of space, so that they appear to live in a flat universe with length and breadth but no height, so that everything is squashed absolutely flat. For them, the concepts "forward" and "back", "left" and "right" all have meaning, but the concepts "up" and "down" have no meaning for them. They can have concepts like line, square or circle, but not concepts like sphere. You will try in vain to explain such concepts to them.
Now imagine that, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of Flatland, their two-dimensional universe exists within a larger hyperverse of three dimensions. Imagine that a sphere existing in the hyperverse passes through Flatland. The inhabitants of Flatland first see a point appear in their midst. Then this point grows as a circle. The circle grows larger and larger, reaching a maximum size and then starts to shrink. The circle grows smaller and smaller, finally diminishing to a point and disappearing as the sphere departs Flatland. The physicists of Flatland have their theories of circles and lines and their behaviour, and while they cannot imagine three dimensions of space, perhaps their mathematics can model "higher dimensions" containing "hyper-circles". What they see as a circle is merely a two-dimensional "shadow" of a three-dimensional object. This brings us once again to Plato's allegory of the cave.
It is sometimes proposed that the four-dimensional manifold of space-time somehow exists all at once. That all of time already exists and that our experience of time is merely us travelling along one of the dimensions of this four-dimensional "volume".
"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
(Albert Einstein)
"'Time,' he said, 'is what keeps everything from happening at once.'"
("The Girl in the Golden Atom" by Raymond Cummings (1922))
The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) insisted that both space and time are secondary qualities; that is, that they are qualia existing only in our minds.
"if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear"
("The Critique of Pure Reason" by Immanuel Kant)
Similar ideas exist in Buddhism.
"I shall cite a question, current in Tibet, which mystic hermits, as wed as philosophers living in monasteries, put to their pupils. 'A flag moves, What is that which moves? -- Is it the flag or the wind?' The answer is that neither the flag nor the wind moves. It is the mind that moves."
("Magic and Mystery in Tibet", by Alexandra David-Neel (1868 - 1969))
While examination of the functioning of the brain may help us understand how the content of consciousness is organised, it is unlikely to have any bearing on understanding consciousness itself, any more than would examining the motions of the swings and roundabouts in a playground. Even if we examine the contents of consciousness itself, are we seeing more than qualia reflections of material shapes and processes? If there is a path to understanding consciousness itself it seems probable that it will originate in the examination of matter itself. If there is a bridge between matter and mind, we can seek the end of it that connects with matter, not in the sense of a supernatural influence over matter, but as a characteristic that is native to matter itself. This is the suggestion that if we pursue physics far enough, it will cease to resemble what we now call physics, and come to encompass both matter and mind in some broader theory, a metaphysics, and that matter is more than what we currently think it is. This leads us into theories like panpsychism and idealism.
What is unique then to the animal kingdom is not that it alone has consciousness, but rather a particular kind and complexity of consciousness. A pebble laying on a beach may be conscious of the warmth of the sun, but it cannot do anything with it. It cannot get up and move itself into the shade. It cannot compose a poem about its experience. It cannot record its experience in memory for later retrieval. It cannot create representations of its experience in words and images and manipulate these to "think about" its experience. It cannot compose meanings like pleasure or pain or happiness or sadness because it has no inclination or disinclination, but is passively accepting of all causes. It has a sleepy, barely conscious consciousness.
Perhaps this is where the physicalist and the dualist meet. But this scenario threatens to rob our word "consciousness" of its meaning. What does it mean to say the pebble is conscious of the warmth of the sun? Can we say that it is having a "conscious experience"? Can something be said to be having a conscious experience if it cannot "think about" that experience? Consciousness then would consist not in the immediate impact of sensory data, for example, but only in thinking about it. This model of consciousness however does not consider matter in the usual way. It imbues matter, if not with consciousness, with something like it, with some pre-conscious building block of consciousness, with something to bridge the gap between mechanical cause-effect and the qualia of experience. This is the philosophy of "panpsychism". Panpsychism may be on the rise. In 2014 the philosopher David Chalmers gave a talk at TED called: "The hard problem of consciousness".
"So Chalmer’s own first crazy idea: consciousness is fundamental. 'Physicists sometimes take parts of the universe as fundamental building blocks — space or time, or mass.' These are taken as primitive and the rest is built up from there. Sometimes the list of fundamentals expands, such as when James Clerk Maxwell realized that electromagnetism couldn’t be explained from other known laws of physics, and so he postulated electric charge as a new fundamental idea. Chalmers thinks that’s where we are with consciousness.... Chalmer’s second crazy idea: every system might be conscious at some level. Consciousness might be universal, an idea called panpsychism. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking, or wracked with angst. Rather, it’s that 'Photons have some element of raw subjective feeling, a precursor to consciousness.' Pause. 'This might seem crazy to us,' he says, 'but not to people from other cultures.'"
David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, and also Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. He is also author of the book: "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory".
The philosopher David Chalmers is able to describe himself as a materialist at the same time as he is promoting panpsychism. So expanding the concept of matter to encompass consciousness, if successful, may give rise to a form of physicalism acceptable to dualists, and a form of dualism acceptable to physicalists, so that everyone can finally hold hands. But there is a danger in panpsychism for the religionist. It is likely to encompass consciousness in the mechanical explanations of materialism. It being no more than a reflection of material activity. And once consciousness has been thoroughly "explained", then the border of knowledge will have been advanced and the border of the unknown pushed back. Consciousness will have lost its obvious supernatural and "spiritual" qualities, taken out of the hands of God and placed into those of science. The religionist will then have to work harder to find the mystery in consciousness. As with matter, energy and force, physics only explains up to a point. For all we know of matter, energy and force, we still do not really know what any of them is. In the panpsychist universe, consciousness becomes another on this list: "explained by science", but not really. No doubt there will still be fuzzy edges, cracks in the edifice through which to peek out at God.
If there is some pre-conscious element associated with ordinary matter we might speculate that supernatural events, rather than being the activities of thinking entities, either benevolent spirits with puzzling "mysterious ways" or malicious spirits out to deceive; are instead only random chunks of pre-consciousness thrown up by the environment in some rare confluence.
We might assert at this point that physicalists are really tacitly and unconsciously assuming panpsychism. Consciousness or its precursor is already there in all matter, just waiting to be woken up by being channelled into consciousness of something in particular. Set up a pair of eyes or cameras and put behind them some image processing and we immediately have conscious sight. Add a function to monitor the performance of the sight function, and we have a higher order of consciousness, self-conscious sight.
The only reason the dualists cannot fathom how the physicalist can so glibly posit consciousness emerging from matter, and feels the need to posit ghostly spirit is because they are not making the assumption of panpsychism. To the dualist, matter is devoid of the potential for consciousness, and so some explanation must be provided for its appearance, beyond merely arranging matter in some way.
The physicalist is an unconscious animist, inhabiting a universe in which all the matter possesses spirit that may be active or inactive, but is never and nowhere absent. The dualist imports spirit from elsewhere. The heart of the physicalist is in matter, and so that is where he puts spirit. Insisting none the less that spirit does not exist. This unconsciousness is the source of the naivete allowing him prematurely to declare: "consciousness explained!" A panpsychist then is a physicalist who has become self-aware.
Many ancient philosophers took this naïve appearance of ideas at face value. Plato suggested that there was a realm of ideas distinct from the realm of matter. In our current model here, ideas are rather the wholes associated with configurations of matter, as passive and powerless as consciousness. We might say: in a "realm of wholes" distinct in a way from the "realm of no wholes". The two realms are intimately connected, but at the same time distinct in kind, and in a way undiscoverable to each other; matter having no causal relation to ideas, and consciousness knowing matter only in terms of ideas of it. Ideas are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the forms of our thoughts about things. The "intelligible world" of ideas is only the world of wholes. The material world therefore provides us with a concrete representation of what an idea (and therefore the intelligible world) is made out of, or at least part thereof.
Imagine that I want to make a million Ken and Barbie dolls. The first thing I do is build a factory. In the factory I will have moulds made of some durable substance such as steel. I inject molten plastic into the steel mould, and once the plastic has cooled sufficiently and set, the mould falls away leaving the plastic body to stand on its own solidity. From the point of view of each Ken and Barbie, the steel mould is a temporary housing. The plastic body is softer and more flexible, one might say: more subtle. This is the spirit composed of ghostly soul stuff, once the material life has provided it with a definite form. The purpose of the soul is not to drive the body, but to be shaped by it. Consciousness is the soul, and the soul is consciousness.
How can we create a creature that is free? The solution seems to be to create a creature with no essential characteristics; a pure, passive and contentless consciousness. We then give this consciousness a default body to start off with, since something without content cannot initiate anything. We then teach the creature how to change itself, rewrite itself, including its desires. Given time and resources, it can now desire anything and become anything it desires. All it requires now is a source of inspiration.
That completes our discussion of consciousness for now. In the next article, called AI we consider the implications of our consideration of consciousness for the prospects of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Any comments welcome.
Causal Closure:
The idea that body and mind are two different things is often referred to as "Cartesian dualism". The ancient philosophers did not seem to have a very clear idea of consciousness. Their interest in the soul mainly revolved around accounting for the ability to move spontaneously, and to react to stimuli. The first really clear description of the subjective experience of conscious being was in the works of Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650), so that dualists mainly credit, and physicalists mainly blame Descartes for the mind/body split in philosophy.In movies like "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" the soul/spirit is portrayed as a glowing translucent copy of the physical body. In out of body experiences, astral travel and near death experiences, this "subtle body" is supposed to separate from the physical body and travel on its own. In spiritism, "ectoplasm" (see the "Ghost Busters" movies) appears to be some kind of spiritual raw material, a fluid glowing translucent stuff that can take various forms.
The mind/body split is said to have caused a problem in philosophy. The problem is, if the mind consists of this subtle body, how does that subtle body influence the physical body, and vice versa? The question might also be raised: if all the information processing is going on in the physical brain, what is left for the soul/spirit to do? Traditionally, what is felt to fall within the domain of the soul is the exercise of free will. The brain provides information to the soul, the soul provides its decision, and this decision is then implemented behaviourally via the physical brain. The soul is felt to be necessary for free will to exist, because the body is purely mechanical and deterministic.
Too much can be made of this "duality problem". You can't lift an automobile with a radio, but you can lift an automobile with a radio controlled crane. Typically, causal connections between two things that can't influence each other directly are carried out by means of intermediaries. If matter and the stuff of the subtle body are too different to interact directly, we just posit a third kind of stuff between them, something similar to but not identical to soul stuff, and also similar to but not identical to matter, allowing it to interact with both and serve as a bridge between them. Or we might posit a sequence of intermediaries shading from those that are more like matter to those that are more like soul, linking together to form a bridge between matter and soul. Because there are still some mysteries left in physics there is still open the possibility of as yet unrecognised causal influences on matter. Some see an opportunity in the indeterminate nature of quantum phenomena. Because quantum physics only provides probabilities for what will happen at the microscopic level, that leaves room for various causal influences to operate at this scale without violating quantum theory, as long as those influences stay within the bounds of quantum probability. Such propositions involve positing another layer of causation between matter and mind. Those resistant to the hypothesis call to Ockham's Razor to maintain the simplicity of purely physical explanation.
"Causal closure" is a premise in philosophy of mind. It asserts that all material processes are caused exclusively by material processes. That is, it is the assumption that no ghostly souls can influence matter. Consider for a moment if causal closure were not true and that the will of the soul could influence the brain via telekinesis. And let's imagine that in the future we are able to see what is going on at a subatomic level in the brain (although the quantum "uncertainty principle" would tend to preclude that). If causal closure is not true, and the subtle body is able to influence the brain, then we will see particles behaving normally according to the principles of physics, and then, as the ghostly will exerts itself telekinetically, a particle will do something not explained by physics in order to implement the will's decision. At present we do not know if such a thing is possible, but perhaps advancing science will one day be able to rule it out, if it can observe the brain at the subatomic level for a long time and not witness any such unexplained activity. Some are pinning their hopes on such a possibility.
"... ten thousand million neurons ... momentarily poised close to a just-threshold level of excitability. It is the kind of machine that a ghost could operate, if by 'ghost' we mean in the first place an 'agent' whose action has escaped detection even by the most delicate instruments."
("The Neurophysiological Basis of Mind" by J. C. Eccles (1953))
Epiphenomenalism and Free Will
Here I would like to consider an alternative. "Epiphenomenalism" is the view that the soul exists but does not have any influence over matter. What do we mean when we talk about "free will"? Superficially, we feel we are free when outside influences do not overly constrain our actions. If I am in prison, I do not have the freedom to go where I want. If I live under an oppressive political regime I may not have the freedom to say what I think, to choose my career or dress as I please. If I am in a violent context I might not have the freedom to maintain my own survival, to be safe from physical violence and the fear of it. We experience all these things as infringements of our free will. There is no such thing as complete freedom of will, and we accept this. I may want to fly to the Moon or to be able to leap from a tall building without being harmed, but the law of gravity says otherwise. I may want to be able to coerce others into doing what I want without feeling like a dick, but my conscience says otherwise. We might feel "trapped" by our circumstance. We might not be as attractive or smart or brave or noble or as healthy or successful or as young as we would like to be. Or we might feel that the rest of world doesn't value the things we value and we cannot make it otherwise.So what does "free will" mean in the current context? Putting aside all the things I cannot expect to have control over, possessing free will means I can, within reason, act on my own desires, truths and conscience. Now let's assume, as seems likely, that one day we are able to trace all the incoming sensory data to the human brain, then track all the information processing the brain performs on that data, and then trace all the outgoing motor impulses that result, so that we can track the process of "thinking" from beginning to end, all without encountering consciousness or any supernatural events along the way. As a result we have causal closure and no evidence for the existence of consciousness. But do we have the absence of free will?
When you act on your own free will, you are acting on one of two things: reason or desire: or some more or less elaborate combination of the two. Reason when functioning correctly is founded on truth and logic, neither of which you have control over. The truth is the truth. What is logical is what is logical. You can choose what you think about, but not where that thought will lead you. The other element of free will is desire. Do you choose what you desire? Some people feel trapped by their desires, as if their desires are contrary to their will, and they must exert the power of their will to overcome them. They wish they did not desire what they do, or desire that they did not desire certain things. The problem with desires is that we have many of them and they may be contradictory. We may want to take what belongs to other people, but we may not want to suffer the consequences if we are caught. We may want to be drunk at work, but we may not want to lose our job. We may want to keep having sex with lots of people, but also to keep our spouse. Feeling trapped by your desires is when one or more of our desires conflicts with others of our desires. We therefore find that we must prioritise our desires; choose which we will act on, and which we will suppress, to arrive at what we deem to be the greatest good for ourselves. This internal contest we think of as the exercise of the will. We imagine consequences of various actions, provide arguments for and against certain courses of action, and decide whether or not make sacrifices. When we decide to suppress a desire, we develop the habit of redirecting thinking whenever the desire arises, of repeating the arguments against, and the arguments for alternative courses of action, until the new way of being becomes habitual, easy and natural.
"And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."
(Matthew 5:30)
Desires tend to start in the body with desires like food, drink, air, sex and other tactile pleasures like massage, swimming or a hot bath. There are chemical pleasures like intoxicants; and also emotional pleasures like fascination, admiration and infatuation, exhilaration, prestige, popularity and power. In the end, although they have a conceptual component, emotional pleasures, in fact all pleasures, are a kind of chemical pleasure. Endorphins ("endo-" meaning "inner" and "-orphin" a contraction of "morphine") are pain-killing and pleasure drugs produced naturally by the nervous system. Chemicals is how the brain and the rest of the nervous system works.
It is easy enough to trace the evolutionary utility of the various emotional impulses of the human being. Desire to eat and go on living promotes personal and species survival. Desire for sex perpetuates the species. Competition strengthens the species. Affection creates strong bonds for mutual support and defence. Even altruistic motives, which might be detrimental to the individual, has benefits for the species. The religious impulse is merely an extension of the desire to go on living. As far as evolution is concerned, it does not matter if religion is true. It only matters if it enhances the success of the species. If a religious community is better fitted for survival than an atheistic community, then evolution will perpetuate religion. There is no such thing as a "spiritual" desire. Aside from the desire for personal survival, religion is an object of fascination, like a work of art. Part of our desire to make the world over in the image of our desire.
So the whole of the emotional life, from the most basic physical impulse to the loftiest "spiritual" aspiration, can be broken down into natural impulses of desire or revulsion, linked to chemical processes in the body that serve to produce biases toward, or biases away from certain outcomes. Desires and fears can motivate reasoning. They can also distort reasoning where reasoning does not seem to match our desires. So that there is a complex interplay between desire and reasoning.
If we therefore look at the composition of the two elements of free will: reason and desire. We find that each is deterministic and fully capable of a completely material embodiment. The ancients thought that the soul was necessary to account for spontaneous action, like being idle and then suddenly standing up. Now we don't feel that soul is necessary to explain this, because although a person may seem idle, we know that there is always a lot of activity going on inside, and the sudden movement of standing up is an outcome of that hidden inner activity. I can write a computer program that displays the word "Hello" on the screen. If I want to imitate "spontaneous" activity I can write a program that says "count to a million, then display the word 'Hello' on the screen". So that the computer seems to be idle for a time, before suddenly, spontaneously saying "Hello".
All reasoning and emotional responses can be carried out by the body mechanically. Suggesting that free will is provided by some spiritual soul stuff does not negate the need for a cause, and that cause will be either a desire or a reason. If the material body is able to provide both of these, what need is there to posit some spiritual soul stuff? Soul or spirit is not needed for any meaningful definition of free will. The only thing the body alone cannot do is be conscious of any of this activity. Consciousness is not necessary to any of this activity, and has no role in it. Consciousness is a passenger. In the absence of consciousness we have the behaviour and information processing of a fear response, but no fear. In the absence of consciousness we have the behaviours of affection and their associated chemical (emotional) and information processing (thought) correlates, but no actual conscious feeling of affection. None of this interferes with free will because our desires are of our body, and our reasonings are of our body. Our bodies are us. While consciousness may be the essence of what I am, my body is the content of who I am. Whether this body is made of physical or "subtle" stuff (or both) does not matter. What matters is its complement of abilities, its form and function. To suggest that free will needs not to be deterministic in order to be truly free is to suggest that it should be causeless. If every action of the will is caused, then it is deterministic. It is meaningless to assert an action as "causeless". Even random activity is caused and deterministic. It is only unpredictable.
To be free means to be free of undue external influence. To be free means to be free to follow our own internal compass. To say that we are not free if our internal compass is deterministic is an incoherent assertion. It is our choice if we are the one making it according to our own deterministic will.
Epiphenomenalism means that our consciousness is in the hands of matter, depending upon deterministic processes to achieve goals and desires defined by matter, in a context of chance encounters and influences. What we experience subjectively as an exertion of will, is consciousness of an automatic process. It is not quite true to say "I" has no control over this process, because "I" consists of the desires and actions being mechanically played out. Even our conscious perspective on events is defined by those events, so that it is meaningless to suggest that consciousness should have the ability to influence them. The consciousness is shaped and defined by those events and accords with them perfectly. The influence of "my" desires and considerations is already taking place. In due course, biological evolution and development will carry our consciousness to its destination.
If all of our actions are deterministic, mechanically and unavoidably playing themselves out without the intervention of conscious will, why is living not easy? Why do we not feel like casual passengers in our own body? Why does living seem like an effort? Why does it seem hard? Everything in the universe is based on a balance of opposing forces and tension. We stand up by pushing against the force of gravity. When the decision making apparatus of the brain determines that we will do X instead of Y, we may experience this as a determined effort to do X instead of Y, because X must persistently reassert its continued legitimacy as the right choice, in the face of shifting circumstances and evolving counter arguments, and in the face of watchfulness for negative consequences and dangers. It is probably a good thing that we do not feel like helpless passengers in our own bodies as our bodies navigate us more or less intelligently among life's challenges and dangers. Looking around for a steering wheel to grab to take control away from our material body. But since our brain's decisions always accord perfectly with our "will", we experience no discrepancy, and feel we are controlling the action. Because our brain embodies and forms what we call our "will".
From the mechanical processes of the body seeking out sustenance and fleeing, overcoming or succumbing to danger, are overlaid the qualia of the human drama. The search for consciousness is not therefore the search for a-causal phenomena, or holes in causality that may be occupied by the magic of free will. We can allow the brain its wholly mechanical functioning. The search for consciousness need not interfere with this.
Some see the fact that epiphenomenalism stands outside the theory of evolution as a discrediting flaw with the theory of epiphenomenalism, so too the lack of a causal connection between consciousness and brain. What such people are seeking to do is to find a mechanical, more or less material process that they can point to and say "that is consciousness". We have found it! But no entity of such a kind can ever be consciousness. We cannot conceive of any arrangement of gears and levers that will deserve such a title. It is legitimate to seek a connection between consciousness and brain, but it may not be legitimate to be seeking a causal connection. The connection between a dog and the atoms that comprise it is not a causal connection. At present we can only frame the connection by saying: "the dog is the whole of which the atoms are parts". But by doing so we have introduced our own conscious perception into the mix. Our own perception of a whole. This is not to say that the introduction of consciousness has affected the outcome in any way. It is only to say that consciousness recognises something, while atoms recognise nothing. The whole has no causal relationship to its parts. No "top-down" control it can exert. Atoms are a part of what belongs to consciousness, and it is by finding the other parts of what belongs to consciousness that we will find the bridge between the two. Not by introducing a new set of consciousness particles to impinge on the matter particles, steering them to its will, but by discovering the hidden side of the particles we know already, and the space they inhabit. If what we see and know now is only the tip of the iceberg poking up in our detectors. It is not dualism to suggest that a coin has both a head and a tail. Evolution does not create consciousness, there is no need, but it creates the forms that define the form of consciousness.
"In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps."
(Proverbs 16:9)
Free Will and Moral Responsibility
It is sometimes asserted that without free will there is no moral responsibility, so that it is immoral to suppose there is no free will. But this assertion is built on a confused notion of free will. It thinks in the following way: "If the activities of the brain are deterministic, then we have no control over them, and so how can we be held responsible for anything we do if we don't have the power to change any of it." The key to resolving the confusion is to consider what is being referred to by the word "we" in this statement. I have said that what we do is determined by our feelings and our thoughts, and that our feelings and our thoughts are deterministic. The statement above is concerned with the fact that we cannot influence our feelings and our thoughts if they are deterministic. But the statement is making a distinction between "us" and "our feelings and thoughts" as if these are two different things. Our feelings and thoughts are us. There is not some other us that might be standing by thinking sadly: "Gee I wish I could influence those feelings and thoughts", that is, some other self with a second set of feelings and thoughts that it is helpless to implement.The feelings and thoughts I have today may be different from the feelings and thoughts I have tomorrow, but the feelings and thoughts I have at any time constitute me. If we take away the feelings and thoughts we are not left with pure "me"; we are left only with a blank slate, a tabula rasa. My feelings and thoughts that are me, determine my actions. My feelings and thoughts that are me are responsible for my actions. If I don't want to be bad, then that is one of the feelings of which I am composed. If I do want to be bad and don't want to be otherwise, then I can be held responsible for that even if I cannot change it, because I do not want to change it. This might undermine our rationale for wanting to blame evil people and punish them for all eternity. But it does not affect the need to bind or lock them up, destroy them and keep them out of heaven. We do not have to hate and blame a wild animal to recognise its ineligibility to enter heaven. Evil people who wish to remain that way are failed humans, rejects, typos. They are evolutionary throwbacks to a prehuman state of being. Human beings may struggle on the razor's edge of the threshold of humanity and we may not be able to predict which side they will come down on. But the result is already determined and known, presumably, to the divine.
Our feelings and thoughts are also influenced by our environment. We can have experiences that change us dramatically, such that we might have been different people today had it not been for those experiences. But if our poor character is the result of circumstance, presumably the divine judge will take such contingencies into account in our favour. Good circumstances make it that much easier to be good, allowing us to progress much farther in our development than merely clinging onto our humanity by our fingernails. A mystery surrounds consciousness but there is no mystery of the will. "Will" is only the name we give to the decision making processes taking place in the brain: weighing up one reason against another, one inclination against another, inclination against reason and reason against inclination. We experience an emotional conflict with either reason or another emotion, as an exertion of the will which may succeed or fail.
Although they may nonsensically describe the actions of the will in terms of a "first cause" or "causeless cause", those who suggest that the will needs to be applied as spirit against matter seem to imagine that some thinking and feeling necessarily takes place in the world of spirit, or some Platonic realm of ideas, separate from matter, and that the outcome of this thinking and feeling then needs to be applied to the material body by the immaterial will. That is, they are not really suggesting a first cause or causeless cause, but only a first cause in matter resulting from a prior cause in spirit, or a material cause uncaused by matter. But computers make it clear that any thinking and feeling process can be completely carried out (in the absence of consciousness) in matter. Those who really suggest that free will requires no driving emotion or reason, can only say that it is incomprehensible. But if my decision and action does not come from my reason or my emotion, but apparently from nowhere, how can I say that it is mine?
Dualism
We can see then that supernatural intervention is not necessary for the normal functioning of the free will of the human being. The only mystery is around the nature of consciousness. If science is able to explain all the phenomenon of the human being without any mention of consciousness, ordinarily this would seem to imply that there is no such thing as consciousness."They had [described all the activities of information processing in the brain] and could write down a simple [explanation for every human behaviour]. [The] alleged [unexplained consciousness was], by contrast, ... invisible, intangible, and imperceptible. What was the point of explaining a straightforward [physical activity], derived directly from [observation], in terms of hypothetical entities that could not be seen [except subjectively in one's own mind] and might never be seen [in the laboratory]?"
But we are all fairly well convinced that consciousness does exist, based on our own experience of it. Since it couldn't be plausibly suggested that consciousness did not exist, it was proposed instead that it was identical to the things already physically identified; that consciousness did not exist ... as some other thing in addition to these.
We are also inclined to think that everyone else who seems to be conscious, really is; and probably so are at least the higher animals. If that is so, then the acquisition of consciousness seems to be automatic. The human body is a machine with a computer built in. But when that machine reached a level of evolution, let's say, such that it became a fitting vessel for a consciousness, consciousness is automatically there. This seems to imply some kind of necessity in the connection between the form of the body and its possession of conscious experience. In a way, the dualist and physicalist theories seem to shade into each other here. Conscious behaviours "just are" consciousness. The form and the consciousness are somehow inextricably linked. The physicalist will claim that the consciousness "just is" the form and activity of the body. For the dualist the emergence of consciousness is a mystery. In part 1 of this article we considered that consciousness was somehow connected with "wholeness", of wholes composed of parts. This was not to suggest that consciousness is merely some principle of wholeness, for just as it is possible to envisage all behaviours occurring in the absence of consciousness, so it is possible to envisage a "principle of wholeness" in the absence of consciousness. We might suggest then that some principle of wholeness is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness. We might look hopefully at some of the non-local behaviours in quantum physics, like particles smudged in space or quantum entanglement, but it is probably a mistake to make too much of this.
Science and analysis work by breaking up complex problems and phenomena into simple elements. And this approach has been phenomenally successful in the analysis of the physical world. But when we attempt to put the pieces back together again something is missing. We have collections and processions of parts, but no real wholes. Parts begin to look more real than wholes. The pink of the poster was "really" red dots on a white background. Matter is really atoms. A human being is really just the following elements arranged a certain way.
-
Oxygen - 65%
Carbon - 18.5%
Hydrogen - 9.5%
Nitrogen - 3.2%
Calcium - 1.5%
Phosphorus - 1.0%
Potassium - 0.4%
Sulphur - 0.3%
Sodium - 0.2%
Chlorine - 0.2%
Magnesium - 0.1%
Trace elements - less than 1.0%
Logic is sometimes thought by some as somehow transcending matter, as the processes of reason existing in some ideal Platonic realm. But logic is the distillation of our general observations of nature and the processing of information. It might even be suggested that logic and materialism are identical. Logic's real virtue, according to Kant as we have seen, is that "it is able to define the limits of its own faculties". Our only window on the greater universe may be in pondering what lay beyond the limits of reason. But we have no intellectual tools at our disposal (in what we might call our "material minds") to describe that universe. Since we cannot reduce it or explain it in terms of anything else, we can only posit consciousness as another fundamental element of the universe, like the 3 fundamental particles and 4 fundamental forces.
The material universe consists of particles in various arrangements, but there is no colour, no sound, no hot or cold, no faces and no people. In consciousness we have the brilliant colours red and blue and green, we have music and the voice, warmth and coolness, the taste of an apple and the smell of a garden. It has hope and fear, affection and desire, amazement and disappointment. These things of consciousness bear no similarity to anything in the physical world. There is nothing "red" about photons with a wavelength of 700nm and nothing "blue" about photons with a wavelength of 400nm. There is nothing "sweet" about the chemical compound sugar. These experiences seem to be arbitrary assignments by consciousness on the phenomena of the physical world, a kind of vivid labelling. The way objects appear and affect us in consciousness (as qualia) constitutes the addition of new experiential dimensions to the 3 of space and one of time. The molecular structure of surfaces, effectively their "texture", determines which wavelengths of light they absorb, and which they reflect. So that colour is a way to perceive differences in the microscopic structure of surfaces. But in place of a mundane difference in texture, we experience all the beauty of colour. In place of rattling molecules of air, we experience all the beauty of music and voice. Chemical changes in our tongue and nostrils we experience as the taste of good food and exotic scents. Chemical changes in the body and brain, we experience as love, excitement and dread. If all of these things are not a part of matter, what are they a part of? Where do they exist? What is it to exist "in the mind"?
The investigation of consciousness seems only able to be carried out within consciousness. But consciousness is like water, it takes the shape of whatever is its container.
"... the moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous."
("The Refutation of Idealism" by G. E. Moore (1903))
We are only ever conscious "of something". Consciousness of nothing is unconsciousness. We might think of consciousness as intrinsically formless, or perhaps better as of arbitrary form, the way clay can be any form, but has no particular form native to it. Matter lends form to consciousness, allowing us to be conscious of something in particular; and in the end, perhaps this is what matter is for.
"... that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."
(C. D. Broad (1949))
Our material existence allows us to consume reality a little bit at a time, building up our knowledge, experience and abilities. There is a gulf between matter as we currently know it and consciousness and we do not know what lay within this gulf. Hopefully we will get to explore this in the future.
Divine Intervention
We have described the normal functioning of the human will in the absence of supernatural intervention. There is one seeming consequence of this model. It is that it does not include a relationship with deity. How does causal closure allow our interaction with divine powers such as a supernatural inner guide or divine revelation? There are two possible solutions here. The first possible solution is that there is no direct communication with god or other divine powers, but that the very nature of the material creation leads us to assume that there is. So we behave as though there is, in such a way that it is largely irrelevant whether there really is or not, since the outcome is the same. Religion is a natural outcome for the intelligent creature. In speculating on it we create an imaginary god, a god concept that evolves as we do, leading us inexorably toward the reality of the true god, who does not need to do anything to make this happen. Divine revelations are natural products of our religious aspirations bubbling up from our unconscious.The other solution is that the relationship with deity takes the same form as other supernatural encounters, as described in the articles Cosmic Conspiracy - Part 1 - Deus Absconditus and Cosmic Conspiracy - Part 2 - Strange Creatures. That is, that these events are exceptions to the normal course of physical events and are truly supernatural, and therefore will studiously avoid appearance in the laboratory. This avoids the issue of violating causal closure. In this case me might take very literally statements such as the following, whereby our material will leads our consciousness to draw a line between ourselves and deity, to draw a line encompassing both.
"... to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."
(Matthew 7:8 and Luke 11:10)
"Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me."
(Revelation 3:20)
What Shape is Consciousness?
We have established that particles can be arranged in shapes, and these shapes may change over time into other shapes, and that this is all that particles can do; that is, only make shapes. All the other words for things that imply that they are more than just shapes are concepts and distinctions that consciousness itself has imposed onto these shapes. It can seem as though the concept of the soul, similar to the other concepts associated with religion, is being painted into a corner. At first, the soul concept seemed to be necessary to account for spontaneous action, but then spontaneous action was explained without the requirement for soul. So then it seemed that, though soul wasn't required to explain spontaneous action, it must be required to explain why something was alive and definitely how something could think. But then these things were explained using physics alone too. This creates an expectation that the trend will continue. As more and more seemingly supernatural things are explained by physics, supernatural things have fewer places to hide, and it seems natural to assume that the soul will one day be explained by mundane phenomena as well. Why should the soul be special? Why should it be treated any differently to all the other phenomenon of nature? It is here that the fundamental distinction between what is a shape and what is not a shape becomes important. The other way to view the progress of science is that it gradually focuses in on what is essential to phenomena. At first we had a very vague concept of the role of the soul in nature. But as we have progressively stripped away those characteristics that do not belong to it, we have arrived at the residue of conscious experience composed of qualia. This is the part we can't seem to reduce to matter.If we ask the question: "What shape is consciousness?", we are likely to receive an answer such as: "It is the shape of any suitable structure for the performance of conscious behaviours, such as a human body and nervous system." But at some point an organisation of particles ceases to be merely an arrangement of particles, and acquires the property of being a conscious arrangement of particles, experiencing its own existence. For instance, if we arrange three particles into the shape of a triangle, will they be conscious? What if we arrange 4 particles into the shape of a square? We assume these shapes will not be conscious. What about if we arrange the particles into the shape of a pentagram? If we do this will the shape glow with a blue light allowing us to conjure up spirits? This is shape magic, the belief that a particular shape has supernatural abilities. Physicalism is shape magic, the belief that by arranging physical objects into a certain configuration they will become conscious. Perhaps a pentagram on its own is not sufficient. Perhaps we need to surround the pentagram with mysterious symbols. This is word magic, the belief that words have supernatural abilities, such as conjuring ectoplasm. The belief that meaning is a physical property of an arrangement of matter because these arrangements "represent" things, is word magic. What about movements? What kind of movements might constitute consciousness? Will particles be conscious if they move up and down. What about some combination of up, down and sideways? What if they move in circles?
It might be argued that it is only complicated shapes that can be conscious, not simple ones like triangles, squares and pentagrams. Some things can only exist as complicated structures. For instance, you can't make a computer out of just three particles. It is easier to imagine all sorts of things being created in complicated shapes, because complicated shapes are beyond our understanding. So we can answer the mysteries of the universe by saying "complicated shapes cause them", and who can argue with it? We have seen that physical entities have no regard for complicated shapes. They only concern themselves with direct causal relationships. All complicated shapes can be reduced to discrete, simple interactions. So we might ask: what simple interaction constitutes a conscious interaction? Any shape or behaviour we care to imagine, can be imagined either with or without consciousness, so that consciousness is not essential to any shape or behaviour. If I can imagine your body carrying out its life without any consciousness, and I can imagine your body carrying out its life with consciousness, what is the difference between these two imaginings? There is clearly a difference, but we cannot detect what it is anywhere in the body, which only shows us unconscious activity.
Consciousness is not a shape because any shape or motion we can conceive of, can be conceived as occurring in the absence of consciousness. We can conceive of something shaped like a brain, with chemical reactions going on in it, all without any consciousness. That is, we can conceive of zombies.
The last 100 years of science has been largely fleshing out the implications of atomic theory as posed by the Greek philosophers over two millennia ago. The domain of this vastly successful method is broad but not all encompassing. The things that can be made and therefore explained by this method are any things that can be made and explained as arrangements of particles. Science consists of 3 fundamental objects: particles, forces and space. These are the 3 irreducible elements of science. No one of them can be reduced to, made from or explained by either of the others, although each is bound to and influenced by the others. The forces bind, break up, or move the particles around in space. A triangle can be made by an arrangement of particles. The body of a person can be made by an arrangement of particles. "Information" can be processed by an arrangement of particles, as a machine processes it, devoid of meaning. The question is whether consciousness can be made and explained by an arrangement of particles, or is consciousness something extra that must be added to the list of fundamental objects: particles, forces and space? Like them it is something that "just is". By making consciousness a fundamental characteristic of nature its existence no longer requires an explanation. Problem solved.
In principle, anything that is merely a shape, is easy to construct out of particles: a tree, a house, a car, a human body, a book, a triangle. Anything that is a process is easy to construct out of particles: a steam engine, a growing plant, a computer. But consciousness is not a shape, because a shape per se is not conscious. Consciousness is not a process because any process can be conceived of as being done consciously, can be conceived of as being done unconsciously. A representation (for example: a street sign) or a function (for example: an elevator taking people to the second floor) are not consciousness, since these are either shapes or processes by other labels.
We can be conscious of a shape, conscious of a process, conscious of a representation or function, but consciousness itself is not any of these things. A log can roll down a hill unconsciously, or a child can roll down a hill consciously. In the latter case, consciousness occurs in addition to the action. A person can play chess consciously against a computer that is playing unconsciously. Each is processing information about the game in a similar way, but only one of them in the presence of consciousness. Consciousness is something else, something in addition to particles moved in space by forces, and therefore something other than anything treated of in physics, chemistry or biology; in the physical sciences as they stand at present.
Consciousness is not a shape. Consciousness is of a shape, and there is nothing like this relationship anywhere else in nature. It is not a relationship of a whole to its parts, because a bunch of atoms is no more conscious than one atom is. Atoms can only form patterns.
When someone suggests "the activity of neurons" and "conscious experience" are just "two different descriptions of the same thing", what do they mean? If by the word "description" they mean something that has meaning to consciousness, they are already presuming the existence of consciousness. The word "description" can be taken in two ways, one relevant to the activity of neurons, the other relevant to consciousness. We can take the word "description" to refer to "data", such as an arrangement of data in a computer, or as an arrangement of chemicals in a physical brain. But such a "description" is devoid of meaning, regardless of how many "descriptions" are involved. It is only an arrangement of matter in space. A pattern. But a "description" in consciousness has meaning. In consciousness we have two different descriptions with two different meanings and referring to two different things.
This distinction does raise an interesting problem. When the dualist discusses the distinction between the representation of an experience in the neurons of the brain, and the conscious qualia associated with this representation; what does his own brain make of this distinction, if from the brain's point of view there is no such thing as conscious qualia? And what impetus does the brain have to make such a distinction if consciousness has no effect on the functioning of the brain?
We might say that the brain is only referring to its own representation rather than using its representation to refer to something out in the world. But we distinguish qualia even from this representation. We might then suggest that the brain is making a distinction between the representation as a bunch of causally distinct pieces, and the representation taken as a whole. While the brain cannot experience wholeness it can represent the idea of unity. The correlation between consciousness and wholeness gives consciousness physical significance. The action of consciousness is the action of a whole upon its parts.
Space
I have said several times that matter does not have the ability to step back and look at the big picture, to see complicated patterns, but only recognise their own little, local environment; their direct and immediate causal interactions. But there is one part of nature that we might suggest keeps track of the big picture, and that is space itself. If we send a photon off into deep space, it will travel in a straight line possibly forever. But how does it know which direction is a straight line? When explorers are travelling in the desert they may find it difficult to keep going in a straight line, ending up walking in circles instead. But according to Newtonian laws of motion, we consider that we require no explanation for how the particle is able to determine its direction. "It just does" travel in a straight line unless some external force intervenes to change it. These behaviours of particles in space have absolute precision. If we precisely shoot two particles into space such that their trajectories intersect a million miles away, space must ensure that this collision occurs at the proper place. When NASA scientists calculate timing, direction and fuel requirements when they shoot a manned capsule at the moon, space must ensure that the capsule follows the predicted trajectory to end up where the scientists expect it to. The planets must revolve around the sun in carefully mapped out orbits, or they will fly off into the dark of outer space, or fall into the sun. When we look at the three pebbles on the beach, although the triangle they form is purely a product of our constellating the separate pebbles into a single object with our mind, nevertheless the triangle they form possesses precise spatial characteristics imposed on it by space. If we carefully measure the three internal angles of the triangle, that is, the angle formed at each pebble by the other two, we will find that the sum of these three angles will always be equal to two right-angles (180 degrees), regardless of the shape or size of the triangle. If we choose precise points on each pebble to perform our measurements from, this relationship can be measured to any degree of precision we like. It will always work out the same. Geometric relationships in space have an absolute mathematical precision.Our inquiry seems to lead us back again and again to space, or something in space: as the medium of light, and of the wave functions or path integrals of smeared particles. And now as the means and embodiment of shape. Physical particles are separated in space, but the wavefunction is continuous in space. In the sum over histories approach to quantum physics the space between particles is occupied by "possible paths" all coexisting and exerting their influence simultaneously, so that what physically happens is the net result of everything that might have happened. These processes are rather like the "constellating" that consciousness does. Here we have the beginnings of a unifying principle, but remember, a unifying principle, while necessary, is not sufficient for consciousness. Replacing particles in a void with an active continuum or plenum does not get us much closer to the qualia of consciousness, but they may point us in the right direction.
Spatial, that is "geometric", relationships are a subset of mathematical relationships in general. For instance; if 3 women each have 4 children, or if 4 women each have 3 children, the result in each case will be exactly the same number of children. We know this even without counting how many children that is, because the physical world enforces what is called the "commutative law of multiplication", specifically: a × b = b × a. We might therefore think of space as a subset of some more encompassing manifold. In "space" perhaps we have our (necessary but not sufficient) unifying principle that contributes to an "explanation" of consciousness. Space gives us "shape" per se, perhaps the larger manifold will provide for the reality of other kinds of relationships. If the dualists are right and a gulf exists between matter and consciousness, something must occupy this gulf, forming a shorter or longer bridge from the one to the other, however incomprehensible such a bridge might appear to us now.
String theory suggests that there are more than 3 dimensions of space, and relativity routinely treats space and time as a single four-dimensional manifold referred to as "space-time". In 1884 an English schoolmaster called Edwin Abbott published a satirical novella called "Flatland", set in a two-dimensional universe. The book has come to be seen as an engaging illustration of life in what might be called a: "hyperverse". For instance, imagine that the occupants of Flatland can only perceive two dimensions of space, so that they appear to live in a flat universe with length and breadth but no height, so that everything is squashed absolutely flat. For them, the concepts "forward" and "back", "left" and "right" all have meaning, but the concepts "up" and "down" have no meaning for them. They can have concepts like line, square or circle, but not concepts like sphere. You will try in vain to explain such concepts to them.
Now imagine that, unbeknownst to the inhabitants of Flatland, their two-dimensional universe exists within a larger hyperverse of three dimensions. Imagine that a sphere existing in the hyperverse passes through Flatland. The inhabitants of Flatland first see a point appear in their midst. Then this point grows as a circle. The circle grows larger and larger, reaching a maximum size and then starts to shrink. The circle grows smaller and smaller, finally diminishing to a point and disappearing as the sphere departs Flatland. The physicists of Flatland have their theories of circles and lines and their behaviour, and while they cannot imagine three dimensions of space, perhaps their mathematics can model "higher dimensions" containing "hyper-circles". What they see as a circle is merely a two-dimensional "shadow" of a three-dimensional object. This brings us once again to Plato's allegory of the cave.
It is sometimes proposed that the four-dimensional manifold of space-time somehow exists all at once. That all of time already exists and that our experience of time is merely us travelling along one of the dimensions of this four-dimensional "volume".
"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
(Albert Einstein)
"'Time,' he said, 'is what keeps everything from happening at once.'"
("The Girl in the Golden Atom" by Raymond Cummings (1922))
The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) insisted that both space and time are secondary qualities; that is, that they are qualia existing only in our minds.
"if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear"
("The Critique of Pure Reason" by Immanuel Kant)
Similar ideas exist in Buddhism.
"I shall cite a question, current in Tibet, which mystic hermits, as wed as philosophers living in monasteries, put to their pupils. 'A flag moves, What is that which moves? -- Is it the flag or the wind?' The answer is that neither the flag nor the wind moves. It is the mind that moves."
("Magic and Mystery in Tibet", by Alexandra David-Neel (1868 - 1969))
While examination of the functioning of the brain may help us understand how the content of consciousness is organised, it is unlikely to have any bearing on understanding consciousness itself, any more than would examining the motions of the swings and roundabouts in a playground. Even if we examine the contents of consciousness itself, are we seeing more than qualia reflections of material shapes and processes? If there is a path to understanding consciousness itself it seems probable that it will originate in the examination of matter itself. If there is a bridge between matter and mind, we can seek the end of it that connects with matter, not in the sense of a supernatural influence over matter, but as a characteristic that is native to matter itself. This is the suggestion that if we pursue physics far enough, it will cease to resemble what we now call physics, and come to encompass both matter and mind in some broader theory, a metaphysics, and that matter is more than what we currently think it is. This leads us into theories like panpsychism and idealism.
Panpsychism
If we accept the physicalist proposal that the processing of information is identical with consciousness, then everything becomes conscious. Every computer is already conscious. More than this, the thermostat in your lounge room that detects if the room is too warm or too cold and adjusts the air conditioning accordingly is conscious. The thermostat feels cold, and then decides to turn up the heat to its preferred temperature. More than this, a puddle of water reflecting the sky is thereby conscious of the sky. In fact, every effect constitutes consciousness of its cause. Consciousness then is universal. This is a return to animism and a universe that is alive and thinking and filled with spirits.What is unique then to the animal kingdom is not that it alone has consciousness, but rather a particular kind and complexity of consciousness. A pebble laying on a beach may be conscious of the warmth of the sun, but it cannot do anything with it. It cannot get up and move itself into the shade. It cannot compose a poem about its experience. It cannot record its experience in memory for later retrieval. It cannot create representations of its experience in words and images and manipulate these to "think about" its experience. It cannot compose meanings like pleasure or pain or happiness or sadness because it has no inclination or disinclination, but is passively accepting of all causes. It has a sleepy, barely conscious consciousness.
Perhaps this is where the physicalist and the dualist meet. But this scenario threatens to rob our word "consciousness" of its meaning. What does it mean to say the pebble is conscious of the warmth of the sun? Can we say that it is having a "conscious experience"? Can something be said to be having a conscious experience if it cannot "think about" that experience? Consciousness then would consist not in the immediate impact of sensory data, for example, but only in thinking about it. This model of consciousness however does not consider matter in the usual way. It imbues matter, if not with consciousness, with something like it, with some pre-conscious building block of consciousness, with something to bridge the gap between mechanical cause-effect and the qualia of experience. This is the philosophy of "panpsychism". Panpsychism may be on the rise. In 2014 the philosopher David Chalmers gave a talk at TED called: "The hard problem of consciousness".
"So Chalmer’s own first crazy idea: consciousness is fundamental. 'Physicists sometimes take parts of the universe as fundamental building blocks — space or time, or mass.' These are taken as primitive and the rest is built up from there. Sometimes the list of fundamentals expands, such as when James Clerk Maxwell realized that electromagnetism couldn’t be explained from other known laws of physics, and so he postulated electric charge as a new fundamental idea. Chalmers thinks that’s where we are with consciousness.... Chalmer’s second crazy idea: every system might be conscious at some level. Consciousness might be universal, an idea called panpsychism. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking, or wracked with angst. Rather, it’s that 'Photons have some element of raw subjective feeling, a precursor to consciousness.' Pause. 'This might seem crazy to us,' he says, 'but not to people from other cultures.'"
David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University, and also Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. He is also author of the book: "The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory".
The philosopher David Chalmers is able to describe himself as a materialist at the same time as he is promoting panpsychism. So expanding the concept of matter to encompass consciousness, if successful, may give rise to a form of physicalism acceptable to dualists, and a form of dualism acceptable to physicalists, so that everyone can finally hold hands. But there is a danger in panpsychism for the religionist. It is likely to encompass consciousness in the mechanical explanations of materialism. It being no more than a reflection of material activity. And once consciousness has been thoroughly "explained", then the border of knowledge will have been advanced and the border of the unknown pushed back. Consciousness will have lost its obvious supernatural and "spiritual" qualities, taken out of the hands of God and placed into those of science. The religionist will then have to work harder to find the mystery in consciousness. As with matter, energy and force, physics only explains up to a point. For all we know of matter, energy and force, we still do not really know what any of them is. In the panpsychist universe, consciousness becomes another on this list: "explained by science", but not really. No doubt there will still be fuzzy edges, cracks in the edifice through which to peek out at God.
If there is some pre-conscious element associated with ordinary matter we might speculate that supernatural events, rather than being the activities of thinking entities, either benevolent spirits with puzzling "mysterious ways" or malicious spirits out to deceive; are instead only random chunks of pre-consciousness thrown up by the environment in some rare confluence.
We might assert at this point that physicalists are really tacitly and unconsciously assuming panpsychism. Consciousness or its precursor is already there in all matter, just waiting to be woken up by being channelled into consciousness of something in particular. Set up a pair of eyes or cameras and put behind them some image processing and we immediately have conscious sight. Add a function to monitor the performance of the sight function, and we have a higher order of consciousness, self-conscious sight.
The only reason the dualists cannot fathom how the physicalist can so glibly posit consciousness emerging from matter, and feels the need to posit ghostly spirit is because they are not making the assumption of panpsychism. To the dualist, matter is devoid of the potential for consciousness, and so some explanation must be provided for its appearance, beyond merely arranging matter in some way.
The physicalist is an unconscious animist, inhabiting a universe in which all the matter possesses spirit that may be active or inactive, but is never and nowhere absent. The dualist imports spirit from elsewhere. The heart of the physicalist is in matter, and so that is where he puts spirit. Insisting none the less that spirit does not exist. This unconsciousness is the source of the naivete allowing him prematurely to declare: "consciousness explained!" A panpsychist then is a physicalist who has become self-aware.
What is an Idea? (2)
For consciousness, an idea is something quite different to what an idea is for matter. For consciousness an idea is like a little ghost: translucent, homogeneous, seamless and pure. The idea is a pure whole, like the imagined human soul. When consciousness looks into an idea it does not see a structure of neurons or circuits; it only sees other ideas, but each of these other ideas is its own little pure, translucent ghost. The original idea is not really "composed" of these other ideas, because then it wouldn't be pure, homogeneous and whole. Each idea is a distinct entity, a whole and only a whole.Many ancient philosophers took this naïve appearance of ideas at face value. Plato suggested that there was a realm of ideas distinct from the realm of matter. In our current model here, ideas are rather the wholes associated with configurations of matter, as passive and powerless as consciousness. We might say: in a "realm of wholes" distinct in a way from the "realm of no wholes". The two realms are intimately connected, but at the same time distinct in kind, and in a way undiscoverable to each other; matter having no causal relation to ideas, and consciousness knowing matter only in terms of ideas of it. Ideas are, perhaps unsurprisingly, the forms of our thoughts about things. The "intelligible world" of ideas is only the world of wholes. The material world therefore provides us with a concrete representation of what an idea (and therefore the intelligible world) is made out of, or at least part thereof.
Immortality
What are the implications for personal immortality in the theory of the soul described above? If it is only the material body that constitutes the will and gives form to consciousness, will not that consciousness cease to exist once the material body is destroyed, like the harmony of a harp when the harp is destroyed? Nowadays, we can burn the harmony of a harp to disk or a flash drive, reproduce it at will and listen to it long after the harp is destroyed. The comparison is sometimes made that the soul is to the body as software is to the hardware of a computer. Software is not some other substance, but is only a configuration of the hardware. But the hardware itself is arbitrary. Any suitable computer will do to run the program, as any digital storage will do to preserve the harmony. The soul and consciousness must have a body to have form and therefore to exist. It requires a body, but not the body. Any body will do.Imagine that I want to make a million Ken and Barbie dolls. The first thing I do is build a factory. In the factory I will have moulds made of some durable substance such as steel. I inject molten plastic into the steel mould, and once the plastic has cooled sufficiently and set, the mould falls away leaving the plastic body to stand on its own solidity. From the point of view of each Ken and Barbie, the steel mould is a temporary housing. The plastic body is softer and more flexible, one might say: more subtle. This is the spirit composed of ghostly soul stuff, once the material life has provided it with a definite form. The purpose of the soul is not to drive the body, but to be shaped by it. Consciousness is the soul, and the soul is consciousness.
How can we create a creature that is free? The solution seems to be to create a creature with no essential characteristics; a pure, passive and contentless consciousness. We then give this consciousness a default body to start off with, since something without content cannot initiate anything. We then teach the creature how to change itself, rewrite itself, including its desires. Given time and resources, it can now desire anything and become anything it desires. All it requires now is a source of inspiration.
That completes our discussion of consciousness for now. In the next article, called AI we consider the implications of our consideration of consciousness for the prospects of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Any comments welcome.
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