The following letter is a recent reply I wrote to a friend in an ongoing discussion we had on consciousness. In this reply, I was able to clarify many of my views on this topic - a topic which can be very difficult to communicate about.
Dear (friend),
Thank you for your thoughtful response on reddit, regarding consciousness. I always find your intellectual honesty refreshing in this world.
An underlying concern I have in our ongoing discussion on consciousness is that I know it can be difficult to keep in mind that even though supernatural explanations are not accessible to science, that does not mean other explanations - especially problematic explanations - can be logically deduced as a result of the supernatural possibilities being absent from the view of science.
This is not to say that available evidence can’t lead to inferences. You don’t need any lectures from me on science, but it’s been a while since we’ve delved deep into the topic and I want to make sure that I make clear my stance. I feel like sometimes people take liberties when it comes to consciousness. I’m saying it’s important to evaluate evidence on its own merits, not through a lens of necessity. The old saying, “necessity is the mother of invention” should be avoided as far as the science aspect of our discussion goes, because, I think we would probably agree, science is inductive and is not a list where options can be narrowed down to arrive at truth.
When looking for answers on the topic of consciousness, not everyone realizes the special place it holds in our sojourn of truth-seeking. It can’t be assumed to be “natural” - and is neither predicted nor accounted for in any naturalistic model of existence. Importantly, this should not be seen as a “gap” in naturalism, because calling it a gap supposes that a framework exists and that details just need to be filled in. That is false and in fact consciousness defies naturalist models.
With consciousness, we are not talking about a detail but the very substrate through which all our presumed knowledge comes, and which nothing is known to exist outside of. So powerful is this that it could even be a trump card logically, in that brain is not known to exist outside conscious experience. Of course, we both believe brain exists and for all practical purposes our discussion assumes brain exists. But the point stands that we are not dealing with an ordinary topic.
We have to be careful about unwarranted and unjustifiable assumptions about the way things “should” be, and attempt to analyze things the way they are. For instance, one correlation between brain and consciousness is that people don’t usually remember experiencing consciousness after a period of being “knocked unconscious.” I realize that your approach is able to predict this lack of memory, however I don’t think it is as powerful as one might suppose. Does a lack of memory show that consciousness did not exist during a given time? No. For example, a while ago a drunken man cried to me about the emotional pain he was in and we had a heartfelt talk, but the next day he didn’t remember any of the encounter. I naively assumed he would remember, because, after all, he experienced pretty painful emotions. Does the fact that he didn’t remember mean he had not felt those emotions? Of course not.
Whatever complexities surround consciousness, the fact we don’t know anything about the framework is cause for pause and humility and recognition of the fact that we can’t draw conclusions as we could in a closed system - i.e. because consciousness is not explainable in a system of knowledge available to us, it tells us there is more to reality than we are aware - and that quite plausibly it could be a lot. I realize that your approach seeks to minimize this by supposing that what is unknown is limited to details about the nature of matter. I don’t find that limitation to be warranted or sustainable. I hope to elucidate my reasoning in this response.
To begin with, I don’t think you have demonstrated that tension necessarily exists between correlations you cite and the belief that consciousness exists outside physical structures (for instance, I believe in spirits and a veil which prevents me from remembering eons of consciousness I experienced before my physical body. If the type of tension you seem to imply were actually necessary, I would have to reconcile my beliefs with the correlations - but no such tension exists - i.e. my religious beliefs do not contradict any scientific observation).
Which is all the more reason to just start with “consciousness exists” and from there talk, cautiously but thoroughly, about the implications of correlations.
While there is intractable tension between consciousnesses and naturalism, there seems to be no necessary tension if we hypothesize the relationship between brain and consciousness as similar to a glove and a hand. It doesn’t explain consciousness but it explains why we would expect correlations, i.e. consciousness, respected as a thing in its own right with potentially a framework unknown to science, allows us to postulate useful interaction between consciousness and brain - whereas treating consciousness as a physical structure of the brain does not allow for meaningful interaction between them (more on this in a bit).
A hand controls a glove, and a hand feels things through the glove, as they say, except the hand is not actually feeling anything either, and is itself being controlled. The hand is itself like a “glove,” for the brain, and the brain in turn takes on the role of the hand in this relay, but the question is, is the brain actually feeling anything either, or is it - like the hand - just another glove in the relay?
This is an example of where my opening statements are quite relevant. It’s important to keep in mind that just because science can’t explore certain options, it does not mean they are ruled out logically, and does not mean other ideas, especially intractable ones, can be deduced and advanced just because there is a dearth of options within the limited scope of science.
Our ability to observe the relay stops right after it is handed off to the brain, so we can’t really see what the brain does with it - we can’t watch the relay reach a conscious point, but we know it does. That’s a limitation of science, and it doesn’t mean we can assume the relay ends. It just means science doesn’t know how the relay gets to consciousness.
I mean, what if all we could observe was the outer glove that’s on the hand? Would we assume consciousness was created by the glove, or define consciousness as the woven patterns in the fabric of the glove? I assume not. And we wouldn’t apply that thinking to the hand, either, if the hand was the limit of our ability to observe. No matter how strong the correlation. So, we shouldn’t apply that reasoning to the brain.
You suggest we can use chemicals to influence the experience at the point of the brain. But we could also do things at the point of the hand or outer glove - set it on fire, expose it to poison ivy, novocain on half the hand, use tape or glue - all of which could likewise “cause” changes in the feeling that gets experienced. But that doesn’t mean the glove/hand creates the conscious experience (even if it were all we could observe and correlate with conscious thought). It would just mean (imply) a change in the content that gets relayed, and would tell us nothing about the end user or the point of consciousness in the relay.
Now, in terms of your argument as presented most recently, what you seem to be addressing primarily is my claim that the most basic starting point for dealing with consciousness is simply saying consciousness exists. As I understand it, your current position is that the most basic starting point for dealing with consciousness is to declare that consciousness exists as part of physical structures, as though the physical structure claim is not an add-on but is inherent in any mention of consciousness. However, I would argue that it is demonstrably an add-on. Our own respective direct observation of consciousness predated and did not rely on you or me knowing about the existence of physical structures which you currently maintain create consciousness. You were in a position to begin to deal with consciousness (had a sense of self, knew about feelings, etc.) before you even knew about the physical structures. Therefore, those physical structures cannot be the most basic starting point for dealing with consciousness. Consciousness started as a thing in its own right.
And it’s not just chronology, but the concept also. Observing physical structures does not and cannot help anyone learn that consciousness is a thing. One must first realize that consciousness is a thing, by observing it directly, before one can associate it with other things (and a small child who skins their hand might indeed associate the pain with the hand and not with the brain, because the hand is all they can observe in the relay. The same category error people make when projecting conscious experience like pain on the brain). Therefore, the physical structure claim is an add-on and you have a burden of proof.
I don’t have a good answer as to how one would prove that consciousness must exist “as part of x,” since brain and consciousness are fundamentally different and separate observations. Consciousness of course is totally distinct as an observation (even given the fact that it is the substrate through which we observe and infer the existence of physical structures).
Now this alone does not, I think, make it impossible to prove that “consciousness must exist as part of x,” but any so-called “proof” would have to be unaffected by the discovery of a mysterious entity which the brain relays data to. Let’s say for instance that some new camera comes along that can capture images of the previously undiscovered objects - about which little is known but they are drawn to brains at a certain point of development in the womb and they sit on them like a cloud and exhibit behavior patterns which correlate with brain patterns and subjective experiences. We each have one and it stays with us from the womb until death. It does not come from the brain but is drawn to it. What would your reaction be to this discovery? If people started saying this thing might be our conscious experience, would you be able to stand up and say, “No, I’ve already proven that conscious experience exists as part of physical brain structures, and here’s my proof…” What would that proof look like? How would you justify calling it a proof?
Now, you did describe your belief as a hypothesis, which doesn’t seem like a strong word, but you also suggest that it should be accepted as a default starting point for consciousness.
Your approach has seemed to be about trying to demonstrate through correlation that consciousness emerges somehow from brain. However, I don’t see how that could be an inference from the correlations, since it does not at all explain the correlations (or vice-versa), so it appears you ruled out options that don’t fit science, and ended up with something that isn’t really relevant to the correlations. In other words, taking the consciousness, that is known to exist, and assigning it to physical structures, does nothing to bridge the gap between people experiencing consciousness and people talking about experiencing consciousness. It even makes the situation worse because it shackles consciousness with the limitations of matter, meaning it can only act in a way that says it is matter, which covers up the fact that it is a conscious experience, rendering it unable to make itself known as a conscious experience, which is the very thing it is required to do in order to achieve the correlations. So it creates an intractable problem and doesn’t make any progress towards explaining or solving anything.
Consciousness has to have the ability to cause the brains of witnesses to make their bodies move in a way that outwardly communicates and bears witness to the reality of the conscious experience. But collective human wisdom can’t begin to explain objectively what conscious experience is like, even though we actually already know what it is like. So it doesn’t make sense that little mechanistic chemical brain processes, with no way of knowing anything, let alone what subjective experience is like, would encounter a neuron permutation with neurochemicals that somehow communicates what conscious experience is like. It only makes sense as a relay of data *to a conscious user and from a conscious user*, not as an identifier of conscious experience existing as part of physical structures. Everything about neurons is about relaying or strengthening/weakening relay signals, in order to accomplish tasks.
Okay, so what about emergence? Well, my understanding is that, as far as matter is concerned, emergent properties are tidy descriptions, for our convenience, of the way particles/structures move and interact in relation to each other, and the related forces that affect their movement. Conscious experiences, like pain, the color red, the taste of cake, etc. would be complete novelties to that framework. So I feel like attempts to explain consciousness with emergence fail because they are smuggling consciousness into an explanatory framework which is for something totally different. What would be the reasoning behind lumping the taste of cake in with a bunch of descriptions of matter moving around? I realize that talking about the taste of cake involves movement of the body, and thus movement of matter, but that stems from the actual sensation of the conscious experience, which is not a description of matter moving. So the movement of matter in that way could be said to emerge from the conscious experience, which is the opposite of conscious experience emerging from matter. The conscious experience itself is invisible, totally undetectable to science. There is no movement of matter to explain in conjunction with the actual conscious experience.
As far as I can tell, the reasoning behind the emergence idea is something like this:
1 - Some things can emerge from matter
2 - Consciousness is a type of thing
3 - Therefore, consciousness can probably emerge from matter
I can see how it might at first appear plausible. But upon closer inspection, it’s more like saying “things come from factories, and consciousness is a thing, so consciousness may have come from a factory.” In other words, a non-explanation:
1 - Some things that are fundamentally different than consciousness can emerge from matter
2 - Consciousness is a thing that we are totally unable to comprehend the nature of
3 - Therefore, consciousness can probably emerge from matter (?!) and this is the default explanation (?!)
I realize the brain is like a big black box, so it’s easy to see how people can assume it’s capable of everything that gets projected onto it. But it really does make more sense as a relay device than as an end user. Relaying things is literally what neurons do, and is all they are known to do, as alluded to earlier. This can serve as “hardware” like a computer, and obviously gets put to use. But if you take consciousness out of the equation, computers have no value. A conscious end user is required. It can get confusing because a computer can be programmed to act like an end user. But the reason people assume computers can potentially think consciously is because people extrapolate that from the belief that brains can do it. But computers can’t ever do anything that would make the concept of consciousness helpful in explaining their behavior. If a computer talks about consciousness, for example, we can trace that behavior back to the programming and see that it does not reflect any actual experience the computer is having (this should also hold true if people attempted to use a computer to emulate a human brain, i.e. we should be able to trace everything the emulated brain does to the binary code, ultimately, and thus explain it all without room for consciousness to play a role).
I realize I may be beating a dead horse, but the burden of proof for your add-on is heavy. The idea that consciousness exists as part of physical structures makes all information about the subjective experience benign, unable to have any effect, meaning we would not be able to talk about it. Something else, a brain process outside the conscious experience, would have to be impacted by it in a physical way that somehow communicates that it is a conscious experience - but there does not seem to be any possible way to represent subjective experience in objective ways. I mean, imagine tasting a new food for the first time. The body relays patterns to the brain, which then creates a physical structure which houses the subjective experience of the taste? Okay, then your friend asks you to describe the taste. So you think about the flavor, but how? How do you communicate to yourself about the flavor as you are thinking how to describe it, when the experience of the taste is a physical structure that the mechanical chemical processes of your brain has no way of understanding? And this is even granting that the physical structure is a conscious experience, which itself doesn’t make any sense - and from there does nothing to account for the correlation. So, saying that a subjective experience is a physical object is not only not an explanation but creates an intractable problem.
In contrast, the idea that the framework of consciousness is able to impact brain activity, is not intractable. Physical objects can be moved. We already know they can be, so the exact mechanism - while unknown - does not create a special problem, because the brain is simply acting as a relay device.
But why is my explanation not an add-on with a heavy burden of proof? The impact of consciousness on the brain, while it raises questions and has implications, is not some unwarranted conjecture but is an inference from the fact that 1) we have conscious experiences and 2) we then use our brain to have our body talk about the experiences. That allows a direct inference of a relay between consciousness and brain and body. I’m not adding anything that isn’t inferred.
And, again, the correlations you point to can be accounted for by the general idea of relay, while they can’t be accounted for by adding the idea that subjective experiences are physical objects (because your proposal fatally cripples the ability of conscious experience to participate in the inferred relay, without being helpful in any way).
Let’s break each category down:
1 - Individual organism development. I’d like to use an analogy that I used back when we first started discussing consciousness. Since you have never met me in person, your experience of me has only ever been online. It started with some comments on reddit, then expanded from there. Your experience of “me” has changed over time, correct? And it has all been correlated with the internet. Every interaction. Does this indicate the internet created me? Of course not. And this is obvious to you because you independently know the relationship between people and the internet. But even though we don’t have that luxury with regards to consciousness and the brain, so it isn’t as obvious, the analogy still demonstrates that if correlations don’t justify the claim that people emerge from the internet, then correlations likewise don’t mean consciousness emerges from brain. Especially in light of the intractable problems.
2 - Neuro-biological correlates. Again, like my usage of the internet. Electrical influences can alter your experience of me. Autocorrect, power outages, connection speed fluctuation, screen resolution, etc. but you still aren’t tempted to think the internet creates me.
3 - Injury data and ablation experiments. If you were to block me on social media, it would change your experience of me. Or if you were to create a fake account and I didn’t know it was you I was interacting with, that would also change your experience of me. If you sent me a file that contained a virus and the virus made it so I could only use half the keys on the keyboard at times and the other half at other times, that would change your experience of me, etc.
4 - Activity/inactivity of the brain. Activity/inactivity of electrical equipment correlates with your experience of me. We never contact each other when our equipment is off.
5 - Evolutionary correlates. Society went from having no access to the internet, to having email, then message boards, then more advanced social media, smart phones, videos, etc. The experience people have of each other online has changed a lot over the years.
..
In this message, I believe I have supported each of the following:
1 - Consciousness exists.
2 - The existence of consciousness implies the existence of a framework for consciousness.
3 - From correlations we can infer the existence of a relay between brain and consciousness.
4 - Number 3 indicates that the framework for consciousness is conducive to the relay with brain, but that may be the only thing we know about it.
5 - Conjecture about consciousness being a brain structure creates an intractable and unnecessary problem and is not an explanation at all. Nothing about it makes it any sort of candidate for being the framework of consciousness. One might understandably intuit that it gets us closer to answers, because it puts consciousness close to the “action” (i.e. declaring consciousness to be literally part of the brain structures), but proximity doesn’t bestow understanding or explanatory power, and in this case hides consciousness inside a physical structure for no reason, thereby limiting it to the properties of a physical structure (and thereby preventing the subjective merits of consciousness from having any effect, which is highly problematic and irreconcilable with the fact that we talk about consciousness and therefore it does have effects).
6 - Speaking of consciousness as a thing in its own right is not adding conjecture or unnecessary speculation, but is simply acknowledging the fact of consciousness existing, *without* adding conjecture. This may be confusing when people are attached to their own conjecture to such an extent that when their conjecture is taken away they may *feel* as though conjecture is being added even though the opposite is the case.
7 - The only apparent reason to add conjecture about consciousness being a brain structure would be to try to anchor consciousness to a naturalistic worldview (naturalistic assumptions, either methodological or ontological).
..
In closing, it may be helpful to touch on a larger philosophical framework for our discussion.
I asked you a while ago, and we briefly discussed, the following question:
Is there a logical way to determine which of the following statements is more likely to be true, and how much more likely it is to be true?
1 - Humans know about the vast majority of the types of things that exist
2 - Humans know about only a tiny fraction of the types of things that exist
We seemed to agree that it would be difficult to logically favor one over the other. Assuming this means that 2 should be treated as equally plausible, it seems to me that we should not approach the world with a philosophical bias towards 1.
Now take it a step further. Imagine a boy has lived his entire life in an opaque box floating through space and knows nothing outside of it. He survives because a special symbiotic bacteria lives on him and keeps him hydrated and nourished. If that boy were to ask himself the above question (maybe not with words, but applying it to himself), what would be the most logical way for him to answer? Would 2 not make the most sense?
Our situation is not identical to that of the boy, because we have a workable explanation for where our bodies came from, and he doesn’t. But, like him, nothing in our box can explain where we came from. What are “we?” We are experiencers of consciousness.
Like the box, the contents of this conscious substrate is all we know. All our observations and inferences are on “this side of” the box. And nothing in the box can explain where the substrate itself is from or what it is.
If the boy can logically base his answer on reasoning which is similar to reasoning we can apply in our own case, then that has implications for us, and we may want to identify thresholds and principles, perhaps allowing us to apply Bayesian reasoning to the question at hand.
I find it highly unlikely that any significant amount of what exists would be available to us for our review and observation as we float around on the pale blue dot. But other people however might think that the limits to what we can discover are a good indication (or a marker?) of us running up against the extent of what “is.”
I think one of the reasons for the different intuitions may be different assumptions about how much we can comprehend and imagine, relative to what could ultimately be comprehended and imagined.
As you might know, the U.S. Patent Office shut down at one point (1830) because some people believed that humans had already figured out everything of significance that could be invented. Now, I can see how that might have seemed to make sense. People could look out into the world and see all the familiar things repeated over and over - trees, rocks, rivers. New things were not really part of their everyday lives.
I see an analogy between that and people who look out into the universe and think we’ve got a pretty good grasp on things.
Without knowing what is possible, we can fall into the trap of a beginning chess player who learns how to do a 4 move checkmate and can beat all their friends with it - so they think they are a pretty good chess player. I think that sometimes academic credentials can provide that false sense of security (which is not to disparage academic achievement, but to recognize that it is of a significance that is tentative and relative).
Along similar lines, it may have once seemed like an obvious default for people to assume the earth was the center of the universe and that the burden was to prove otherwise. But that’s based on a fallacy. Similarly, I think it’s a mistake to assume that the true nature of existence is something we can comprehend. That’s putting the cart before the horse and putting our ego at the center of the universe.
Science is a great tool relative to what we can access and comprehend, but it’s perhaps like an ant crawling around the White House. The ant can see the paint, and dust, crumbs, etc. and the ant is very good at finding things. But it has zero comprehension of the fact that the President is inside the Oval Office, addressing the world via satellite. It can’t even begin to understand any of that.
Returning to the boy in the box, we can use the box as an analogy for the universe. Just because we are inside this thing, does that mean there is nothing outside of it? Or even that most things - almost everything, even - aren’t likely to be outside of it? If things can be outside, what are the odds that most things would be in here with us instead of out there? If nothing can be outside, then why not? See, we talk about the idea of a multiverse, partly because of implications of string theory but also because we are familiar with the idea of a “universe,” and we think there might be other things “like this” out there existing. But why do we assume things have to be inside a universe just because we are? It’s a little like if the boy in the box wonders if other boxes might exist. A box is all he knows, so he might find it hard to think outside of it. Just like it might be hard for us to envision other things.
Of course, I’m not saying that existence is a free for all where we assume that anything we imagine must exist. But this is why it is so significant that consciousness is beyond our comprehension and yet we know it is real. It gives us a taste of something that is outside the laws of physics. Science can’t grapple with it. The key is to accept that fact and to consider the implications that it points to. It’s like a hidden clue that’s right in front of us that tells us there’s a lot going on and points us to 2 if we don’t try to force it into 1.
If we allow consciousness to point us to 2, which it naturally and logically does, we can reasonably posit other conscious beings and thus posit the pairing of our consciousness with our body as a meaningful act initiated by a conscious being. In fact, I think intentional pairing is not just idle speculation but a valid inference.
In which case LDS theology makes sense of the fact that the being is not revealing itself to objective measures, and of the concept of faith as a consciousness based connection (see https://youtu.be/Pa4J8zivN-w for instance, on the logic of faith).
Spiritual witness is much harder to criticize when we realize that we don’t know what consciousness is. If we dwelt with God for eons, and He allows us to recognize and remember His voice, even if we don’t remember details of the experiences, faith makes perfect sense. Underneath the noise from the brain is that underlying connection, still intact. Rather than a feeling that one tries to sort out the significance of, it’s an underlying knowledge of things as they are, but with details hidden from view. And it leaves open plenty of room for people to have different purposes in their lives, God speaking to each person’s understanding, etc.
Thank you for continuing this discussion as time and interest permit. I hope we ultimately reach greater resolution.
As always, my friend, I welcome and look forward to any pushback/feedback. Sorry this message is so verbose!
