The Nature of Consciousness

by Don Wharton

I treasure Sam Harris is a great many ways. However, he recently posted a two part essay on consciousness which demonstrate complete confusion about the subject (link1, link2). I think that we should start with the obvious point that some objects are complex biological machines which are conscious. Humans are the preeminent examples and they can more richly demonstrate their consciousness by verbal reports on the content and nature of what they are conscious of. There are an increasingly well understood array of cognitive function which support that activity.

What does Sam Harris do in response to the fact of human consciousness? He basically assumes that something magical happens that cannot be explained. He has many statements such as the following:

“How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided. Therefore, although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our mental life.”

It not difficult in the slightest for me to imagine that science will explain this phenomenon. Our universe is profoundly and completely natural with no supernatural elements. Our instrumentation is increasingly sophisticated in deriving data about how the brain works and where various types of emotion and cognition occur. The entirety of our subjective experience is created by these various brain functions combined with the sensory and support mechanisms for the brain supplied by the rest of our bodies. I an not only certain that this is true; I am certain that when we eventually build systems that adequately emulate the entire array of these functions we will have a system that is aware and will be able to demonstrate that subjective awareness as well as any person. If it is built on a computer system (as is most likely) we might have a feeling of incredulity in response to our relationship to the invented system. However, it should be an undeniable fact when it is achieved.

The fact is that nothing is ever proved by incredulity. Sam Harris, simply repeats one layer of incredulity after another with the expectation that we will accept his assertion that there is something that cannot be explained. For example: “Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.” 

What should we do in the face of such claims. I think it is appropriate to approach these claims with the scorn we express for all unsupported religious claims. That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. That was a standard line used by Christopher Hitchens and it fully applies here. There simply is no reason to assume that subjective experience is anything other than the well integrated collection of more primitive functions in the system that experiences.

There is the obvious fact that no description of any object, such as a brick, would ever be equal to the brick itself. Reality is different from any of our maps of that reality. This is not rocket science. However somehow very bright people can trip over this very obvious and simple distinction when it comes to consciousness.

Words, Things and Simplifying Explanations like Free Will

By Gary Berg-Cross

Language is a wonderful, adaptive, social tool. We use it to communicate to others, and thus it has evolved in part to serve social purposes. Putting a name to things helps bring some simplification to complex phenomena. But words can also be Procrustean beds that dice up real, roundish objects to fit into our square conceptual holes. For example, we can say that that a clock is happy or in pain, but to our best knowledge these are social rectifications of some concept that may not correspond to reality. They are borrowed from our social realm and used to explain things there. To some degree they reflect the fact we thinking and linguistically express things anthropomorphically as objects. We see and name the world in terms that make sense to us.Science is a discipline sitting on top of our social world with a specialized language. But the Sciences are also social so Scientists create causal hypothetical concepts such as the Ether or phlogiston to explain things.  If these fail to be validated by observation they come to be seen as artificial creations. 

Philosophy probably has had an equal number of word creations if not more. Among them are concepts like consciousness, self, spirit, will and free will. Is there a reality to them? Some like spirit, that have been pulled into religion and laden down with dogma, no longer seem viable as causal philosophical concepts. Others like consciousness seem fair game for a joint cognitive science-philosophy effort.

The Free-Will versus Determinism argument has been raging for quite a while and very now and then every now and then some thinker takes a whack at it. This usually stirs the pot anew. Philosophers with a good grounding in modern science have provided some new perspective on the topic using neuroscience and an evolutionary perspective. For example Daniel Dennett’s in his Consciousness Explained (1991) approached the issue something like an update to David Hume’s ideas in the light of our neo-synthesis of Darwin's theory of evolution. Dennett calls the idea that we live in the here and now, moving steadily into the future an illusion. Instead cognitive "real time" is a spider web process of zigzagging through memories as we assess our progress on goals, hopes, plans and regrets! Indeed,in his view the Self like Consciousness is a type of internal reification. It is a constructed web of tales spun by us to make sense of experience. To Dennett our human consciousness, along with our narrative self-hood, is a product of experience not their source. This makes sense for several reasons including the fact that as children are learning language they see others as objects and so it is easy to identify oneself as a similar object. This concept of a conscious self serves a role of a unified agent who we can speak about in simple words. During this period we may pick up a term like "soul" and make a simple connection to a concrete concept so that the term comes becomes part of an unverified system of belief.

More recently Dennett took on the issue of whether there can be freedom and free will in a deterministic world in his Freedom Evolves. Surprisingly he frames his conclusion in the other direction considering the idea that as cognitive agents we can avoid some things we foresee. Our ability to understand some things mitigates the idea of inevitability.  
"Some things we can avoid. We are free to avoid some things such as ducking to avoid a tree branch. Very useful, but it doesn’t work so easily with a Tsunami. So some parts of the future is inevitable and others not within a deterministic world. So some concept of freedom is not an illusion but an adaptive, objective phenomenon that is distinct from other biological conditions and found in only humans through evolution. We are less instinctual, automated creatures and can even chose to be non-adaptive to prove a point."

See http://dontdontoperate.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/free-will-religion-without-god-dennetts-compatibilism/ for Dilbert's view on Free Will.

Even more recently Sam Harris has had a go at the issue in his The Moral Landscape (pp. 102-110), which has further stirred the pot. To Harris, unlike Dennett, the problem with free will is that no account of causality leaves room for it. All our internal life of thoughts, moods, and emotions effect of us in ways that are: “from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable.”

Harris asks why he might have used the term “inscrutable” in the above sentence and answers for us that he has no idea. It is not clear that he was free or constrained to do this and even the meaning of the claim is inscrutable or opaque. 

Harris’ stance mixes philosophy and cognitive-neuroscience observing that only a small fraction of momentary information that our brains process becomes conscious. This requires attention which we have in small amount. You can actually experience how limited this is in the selective attention video on YouTube. 

The essential message is that human evolution has given us a cognitive system that allows us to note only important changes in our environment. It has not produced an all knowing or even totally rational system. We use simplifying models to helps us make sense of a complex world. While we are aware of some our inner life of thoughts and emotions, we are personally unaware of the neural events that produce these changes. Thus we generate models of the world of ourselves and of other people explain why things happen. These such as concepts of a unified self are simplifications, but pretty good ones to start with. It’s just that Science has moved us along and is helping us un-muddle the words used for concepts that are not simple “things” but processes.

Perhaps somewhere between Dennett and Harris’ views is Schopenhauer's summary statement pushing the issue a bit farther back to cognitive primitives:

'Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants'.

It seems to capture an important aspect of the argument.