Existence

The history of the world, as Daniel Quinn often likes to point out, is often told by our culture as if modern humanity were the sole product of all creation.  Such a narrative is propaganda that hinders our actions in many ways.  Yet this problematic understanding of the universe carries with it one unavoidable justification: we are, currently, the most intricate thing we have ever discovered.  And this intricacy has a consequence: we exist.  And we know it.
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We have theorized since the dawn of science what separates us from the animals among us.  Many once established answers have since been antiquated.  Even man-made computers have been able to recreate and surpass humans at activities once thought to be uniquely human.  After all of this development, research, and discovery, one trait remains stubbornly resistant to verifiable recreation.  Our species is the only set of things we consistently and firmly believe to be conscious.  We have taken millennia to develop tools adequate to begin to address what sort of thing consciousness is.  This post will delve into the rabbit hole this has led us towards, and assert that consciousness is fundamentally unexpected: it is tangential to everything else we even conceive of discovering in the universe. The cliche beginning here is Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”.  So let’s start there too.  Descartes constructed an impressively thorough investigation into the mind, by claiming to clear his assumptions completely and work only from this idea.  However, he ends up making some assertions about god that I simply cannot follow, leading to conclusions that are much stronger than his meager beginning would really allow.  Descartes was a brilliant, daring scientist, but still a product of his day and its technologies—the hot new tech of the day, hydraulics, was a large component in his theory of how the brain actually functions.  Essentially, Descartes thought the mind and body were fundamentally different.  This idea is called dualism.  While early machines and automatons made the mechanical functioning of the body plausibly explainable, the mind was so beyond the reach of even potential explanation by the tools of the day that he posited that it must be the work of some completely separate system, a non-physical one (and he asserted that these two main aspects of one’s being interact at the pineal gland, which is yet to be disproven [needs citation]).  You will see me make a similar, hopefully more convincing claim for a different style of dualism later in this post.  However, Descartes’ dualism—now called substance dualism—has a few immediate, intractable problems.  Firstly, as you may have noticed, his theorized method of interaction between the mind and body hasn’t held up.  And it’s turned out that it’s difficult to even theorize a reasonable means for a fundamentally non-physical, intangible, thing to interact with a wholly mechanical system.  A few methods have been proposed, but they are lost to history textbooks.  Second, this wholly extra-body understanding of thought was discarded quite readily once our tools advanced to the point where we could show first that parts of the brain could control the body, then that the brain seemed to be responsible for most if not all of the activity of the body.  We learned to trace the movements of limbs, the formation of memories, even wholly mental thoughts, to activity between neurons–sometimes even too well.

With these developments came new theories to describe how the mind fit in to the ever more complex system of the brain.  First came behaviorism—essentially the idea that one’s behavior is all that matters for studying the brain.  It is tempting both because it was immediately useful—it allowed for the creation of hypotheses and experiments absent reference to some kind of mystical soul—and not immediately wrong—our tools for analyzing the brain were not yet refined enough to present problematic evidence for this theory.  However, it is deeply unsatisfying, because it asserts not only that your thoughts are meaningless and inconsequential (a conclusion people often wrongly draw from determinism), but that they are not even real.  Unsurprisingly, it was quickly surpassed by physicalism, or identity theory, which contends that mental events are the physical state of the brain at a given moment.  This thesis explicitly provides space for thoughts, which is a massive improvement.  However, it isn’t as immediately useful.  In the early 20th century, tracking individual neurons was not hard, it was unthinkable.  So a theory which asserts that thoughts are the neuronal state of the brain does not allow for nearly as much easy experimentation as one which claims one can simply track behavior to gain a complete understanding of the functioning of an individual.  Early identity theory had large philosophical holes, as well.  For instance, two different people might claim to feel pain.  If their feeling is their brain state, unless their brains are identical, we would have to conclude that their feelings are distinct, and would have little means of comparing the two.  Such problems eventually led to token identity theory, which allows for two brain states to be separate tokens of the same mental identity.  This allows for some philosophical flexibility, but still leaves it unclear how two separate brain states might in fact be compared and contrasted.  To answer these sorts of questions, a combination of behaviorism and identity theory emerged and remains in use today.

Functionalism, which maintains physicalism’s focus on the brain while exploiting the explanatory power of behaviorism, has become the go-to theory for modern scientists across disciplines.  It essentially copies identity theory, except that brain states are separated by their function instead of their physical representation.  This results in a much stronger, more applicable theory.  Scientists no longer determine whether an animal is in pain by its actions (as behaviorism would claim), nor by measuring whether its brain state is physically identical to a previous pain state (as identity theory requires); instead, an animal is in pain if its brain functions as if it is in pain.  This claim is both more robust than the other two, and more useful.  It allows neuroscientists to truly study the brain and deliver meaningful, inter-individual and even inter-species conclusions.  It avoids the philosophical worries that mental states have been ignored, or that brain states have been so specifically assigned that they no longer carry meaning.  On the whole, it seems like a fruitful and sturdy theory, which is exactly why it has remained for so long.
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But none of these theories are without problems, functionalism included.  Functionalism specifically has led to the Chinese room and Chinese brain objections, among many others.  These raise strange scenarios in which one wouldn’t expect mental states to exist, but functionalism seems to claim that they do.  These criticisms have in turn led to specific replies and recipes for solutions.  But I won’t focus on these here.  I do not intend to specifically attack functionalism or any other physical theory.  Rather, I intend to eliminate this entire class of theory from legitimate consideration.

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Despite appearances, none of these theories truly address our own experience of thinking or consciousness.  While older theories could grant great freedoms to the mysterious thing which was the soul, in modern theories, the brain is the obvious physical cause of our physical actions.  No extra explanatory system needed.  In that case, our conscious selves are left to irrelevance.  Consciousness might be performing separate, unrelated processing, nothing at all (it could not exist), or it could correlate or equate to specific states in the brain.  Each of these alternatives is deeply unnerving.  No matter how you deal with it, once the physical system explains everything that occurs, no other system can be significant.  There is nothing left to happen.  We are removed from our own selves.  Two criticisms are typically used to represent this point, and they do a reasonable job of displaying the problems with these physical theories.  The first is D.J. Chalmers’ (yep) philosophical zombie argument.  Imagine a being that behaved physically (both externally and internally) exactly like a normal human, except they had no feelings or consciousness.  Essentially, that worry that you’re the only real person in a world of sheeple: imagine that it’s true.  In imagining it, you have demonstrated that there is a potential separation between brain function and mental existence.  Note that you haven’t shown that there’s a potential way to create such separation, merely that these concepts are not one and the same.  This thought alone is grounds to dispel both physicalism and functionalism.  The second is Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room argument, in which a brilliant scientist named Mary studies the brain, in an entirely black and white room, until she understands completely—down to the neuron—the physical mechanisms that produce sight.  She then emerges from the room and sees red for the first time.  Does she learn something new—the experience of seeing red?  If she does, we have again demonstrated the separation between physical and mental.  They cannot be the same thing.  A moment of neuron activity, even if it correlates perfectly to the act of seeing red, is not the same as the feeling of seeing red.  These are fundamental problems with these physical theories, that cannot be fixed with slight tweaks.  They demand a deep reconstruction of our understanding of the brain.
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But I doubt I’ve convinced you.  The scientific community certainly isn’t convinced.  It’s a strange thing to understand.  I think Chalmers himself puts it best:

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience, but the question of why it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

D.J. Chalmers

There is something it is like to be.  There is something it is like to exist.  The more you consider it, the more unavoidable it becomes.  Yet the theories above treat consciousness as ignorable or literally equal to mental states.  That is ludicrous.  Look them up if you don’t believe me, but that’s how they work.  And, as we saw above, there seems to be no other way for a deterministic mental theory to treat conscious experience.  And there’s fair reason for this.  Conscious experience is a deeply unexpected phenomenon.  That is, if I were to describe to you exactly how the universe worked, leaving out the concept of consciousness, there’d not seem to be anything amiss.  It is a feature of our world that seems unnecessary, extra, and thus irrelevant.  This makes true consciousness inherently difficult to fit convincingly into a respectable scientific or philosophical theory.  The failure of these theories to properly address experience is not coincidental; it was necessary for the theories to hold any merit with the scientific community of the time.

Further, this failure is not a merely semantic problem.  It is one that affects our daily lives in nearly every way.  How we eat, vote, care for others, and raise our children: all of these things are closely related to our beliefs about the consciousness of other humans and other species.  Consciousness is what we care about—not the information processing or life sustaining ability of others.  We want to know if they feel happy when we do them well, and feel pain if we do them wrong.  That is what drives our day to day morality at nearly every level.  Let me say that again.  We don’t care about life.  We kill billions of bacteria without a second thought.  We care about consciousness.  We care about the experience of living—the raw feeling inexplicably attached to our lives.  So, no, this is not a problem with semantics.  This an effort to begin to resolve some of the most difficult yet common problems of humanity.

Where would one begin to overturn decades of science and philosophy devoted to the brain?  The best opening moves have already been found by philosophers with much less to go on.  Ayn Rand, for example, uses “existence exists” as the only axiom necessary to derive her moral system.  And, as we have already discussed, Descartes used “cogito ergo sum” to establish centuries of theories in the philosophy of mind.  These philosophers were on to something.  One of our most trusted sources of information is our mind, our own mental experiences.  Many have argued that our own consciousness is the only information we can trust to be “real” (though I would disagree).  However, these current theories have all but excluded these experiences from informing their structure.  We seem to be at an impasse.  The brain leaves no room for the mind, but we cannot exist without it.  How does one come up with a cogent theory to resolve this?  I challenge you to try—try to see a way to understand the brain such that consciousness can meaningfully exist in the way that you experience it, while respecting our physical understanding of the function of the brain.  This is why David Chalmers calls this the “hard” problem of consciousness: it’s hard.

But there is a way out.  There has to be, or we couldn’t exist.  And scientists and philosophers alike are beginning to start down this path.  What lies ahead might be some of the most significant research and development ever done.  To move forward, one must face all of our evidence honestly and openly.  On the one side, we have the familiar, ever-increasing mountain of research into the physical function of the brain: how neurons work, how neural nets can “learn” higher-order ideas, research into the real-time functioning of everything from tiny zebrafish brains to human ones, detailed neuron-level mapping projects, and more.  On the other, we have our own existence and the reported consciousness (and convincing accompanying reports) of all of our peers (who are currently all human [needs citation]).  If we trust both of these sources of information, given that we have convincing reasons to trust both, we can create a new, more comprehensive theory of mind.  This theory is inherently going to be dualist, since we believe that neither of these systems are exactly equivalent to one another, but nevertheless hold that both are equally real.  That means the brain is made up of two systems that are fundamentally different.  This is dualism, but it is different from Descartes’ dualism.  It is property dualism, because we are not proposing a two substance system, where we are left to explain the magical interaction of two fundamentally unrelated substances; instead we are left with one brain, which operates both in the common neuron way and functions to create our conscious experiences.  These are two tangential properties of the same brain—thus, property dualism.  If Descartes’ worked out so poorly, why do I believe so strongly in this form of dualism?  Because there is no alternative.  Descartes proposed his dualist system because he didn’t understand enough about the power of computational systems to believe that so much processing power could be located in such a small space.  Or that non-humans could perform logical feats of any kind.  This was long the very definition of humanity.  So Descartes took the religiously expedient and scientifically reasonable route of proposing a two substance system.  This was not our process.  Though many like to cling to scientific advancement when these arguments are brought up–claiming that with just some more research, we might be able to “understand” why neurons lighting up a certain way feels like red—that isn’t how this research works.  When a theory fundamentally ignores an entire category of things, research based on this theory simply won’t have anything to do with it.  Current research into the brain remains incredible and fruitful, but it is severely limited by this philosophical barrier.  A dualist theory is the only way to solve this problem.
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Now, if this argument isn’t merely semantic, as I’ve claimed, a dualist theory should be able to yield new, meaningful results about the mind.  Well, it has.  It took some time before the scientific community would buy seriously into this type of theory, and the transition is still far from complete.  And this makes sense; a modern theory proposing that we should understand the mind in a non-physical way seems like a lot of mysticism to add to a quickly maturing scientific field.  I am indeed arguing that there is some sort of non-physical aspect to the brain that we should consider seriously enough to fund scientific investigations.  That’s a lot to swallow.  It takes some time.  But gradually, this sort of idea has gained traction.  And it has immediately proven itself to be quite promising in practical applications.  In the paper, “Consciousness: Here, There, and Everywhere”, two scientists lay down the groundwork for a convincing dualist theory of the mind, called integrated information theory, or IIT.  It’s certainly a major improvement over primitive theories like panpsychism, which claims that everything is a little bit conscious (including rocks—I mean everything) and humans are just really conscious, because reasons.  IIT (also described in this video) uses the mathematics of networks to describe and compare consciousnesses.  Not only does it align closely with our intuitions, it answers with ease several questions that previous theories of consciousness were not able to address, and makes further unproven yet significant claims.  For instance, the paper claims that no current computer has any conscious experience at all, and that fundamental changes need to be made to computers to create conscious ones (though it is theoretically possible).  It casually deals with strange scenarios like the Chinese brain criticism that plagued earlier physical theories of the mind.  It’s exactly the type of dramatic improvement one would expect if consciousness were truly a hard problem—the type of problem that necessitates attention.  We cannot take the next big step in understanding our own minds without admitting to the unique, unexpected properties of our own existence.  And I hope I’ve done my part to convince your mind of this, too.