If the scientific method focuses on the testable, then the genesis of consciousness is not a scientific question.

Craig Axford

1 day ago (craig-axford.medium.com)

Consciousness isn’t a “hard problem”, as the philosopher David Chalmers famously described it (1996). It’s an unsolvable one. Any explanation we come up with for it, from a theological one to a materialist one, begs questions we simply can’t answer.

If we offer God or some other “supernatural” source as the answer, we must then explain where the consciousness for this apparently intelligent creator came from. Simply saying this source is eternal is just another way of saying consciousness always existed. In other words, it’s just an inherent part of the universe, which is ultimately no different than suggesting it’s an inherent quality of matter itself (a position I will come to shortly).

As for consciousness emerging from matter, this won’t do either. By what means does unconscious matter, if put together just so and in sufficient quantities, suddenly start acting consciously? If a single atom, molecule or cell is by itself unconscious, why should the sum of all this unconscious stuff under any circumstance start producing consciousness?

If we assert that consciousness is, at least in principle, a solvable problem, we must first articulate what would constitute evidence that our explanation is the right one. For example, a materialist contending that the brain produces consciousness must first offer a testable hypothesis that could explain what it is about a brain structured like ours that leads it to produce consciousness.

Likewise, anyone arguing the brain acts as a kind of receiver of consciousness from elsewhere, be it some sort of Cartesian homunculus or somewhere else, must first identify this consciousness ‘receiver’ and also provide us with a means of verifying its function scientifically.

In neither case does it do any good to point out that braindead people show no signs of consciousness or that those suffering from some kind of brain damage exhibit altered states of it. Either side in the debate can reasonably respond that either the generator or the receiver of consciousness has simply been knocked out or damaged.

The two options provided above — either the brain produces consciousness or facilitates its receipt from elsewhere — are commonly described as materialism (or physicalism) and dualism respectively. While the materialists contend that, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett put it in his audaciously entitled book Consciousness Explained (1991), “…there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon”, the dualists contend that the mind is “distinct…from the brain, composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff.”

Dennett falls within the materialist camp. But in pitting materialism against dualism, he overlooks a third possibility that allows consciousness to remain a physical phenomenon. Consciousness could simply be an inherent quality of matter. This third option is no more provable or disprovable than the strong materialist hypothesis or the dualist view that, at least in its purest form, relies on something like a nonmaterial soul somehow pulling the strings. Nonetheless, it is a possibility that avoids their challenges and inconsistencies. It is, in other words, more coherent.

If consciousness is a property of matter, then we would expect sufficiently complex beings to experience it and plainly manifest it, just as humans and other creatures clearly do. There would be no need to look for a source of consciousness or to fall back upon vague concepts like emergence which, upon close examination, lack any explanatory power. Nor would we need to separate the mind and the brain as dualism demands. Brains would simply be a collection of matter that exhibits the material world’s inherent consciousness.

Materialists like Daniel Dennett have referred to dualism as “unscientific” and have cited this shortcoming as “its most disqualifying feature.” Undoubtedly, any attempt to find an alternative to dualism that fails to accept the premise that consciousness can be explained scientifically, and will be sooner or later, would likewise receive the same criticism even if it does treat consciousness as an intrinsic characteristic of the material world.

The problem materialists like Dennett have on their hands is that there isn’t a scientific way to determine the source of consciousness, be it physical or otherwise. As was pointed out above, brain death and brain damage can both be expected to have consequences for awareness whether the brain is the source or is the receiver of signals from a soul or a radio transmitter built by aliens in outer space. Therefore, simply pointing to correlations between physical changes in the brain and changes in our consciousness proves nothing. Materialists may have come a long way with regard to their understanding of the brain’s anatomy, but they are no closer to finding anything in the brain that is, either by itself or collectively, an obvious and testable source for consciousness. Such structures are as elusive as they have ever been.

While CT scanners and other devices can measure brain activity under any number of circumstances, even to the point of showing us which parts of the brain light up when asked certain questions, seeing images flashed on a screen or listening to music, none of this information is inconsistent with either the dualist or materialist theories of consciousness. Nor, might I add, is it inconsistent with the theory that consciousness is an inherent quality of matter and has been from the start. Why, under any of these views of consciousness, should we expect any regions of the brain to light up other than the ones that do?

In his book, Beyond Conceptual Dualism: Ontology of Consciousness, Mental Causation, and Holism in John R. Searle’s Philosophy of Mind (2008), Giuseppe Vicari describes the problem of relying on things like brain scans to prop up the traditional materialist view that matter, when organized in a particular way, somehow generates consciousness: “Every process has a physical realization as its causal basis. This is true for pirouettes and mental states, as we can see from studies made with the imaging techniques and from the studies on brain damage. But this does not mean that we can identify mental processes with their neural causal basis.” (Emphasis added)

One reason imaging techniques that show particular patterns of brain activity (or lack thereof) under certain conditions cannot be taken as evidence they cause the conditions is, as the philosopher John Searle points out, some cause-and-effect relationships are simultaneous as opposed to “discrete events ordered in time.” Vicari quotes Searle at length on this point:

In lots of cases of causation, the cause is simultaneous with the effect. Look at the objects around you and notice that they are exerting pressure on the floor of the room you are in. What is the causal explanation of this pressure? It is caused by the force of gravity. But the force of gravity is not a separate event… Furthermore, there are lots of cases of simultaneous causation that are, so to speak, bottom-up, in the sense that lower-level microphenomena cause higher-level macrofeatures. Again, look at the objects around you. The table supports books. The fact that the table supports books is causally explained by the behavior of the molecules. (Searle, 2004) (Emphasis added)

Just as “the force of gravity is not a separate event” in Searle’s example above, it is entirely possible that consciousness is not a separate event. If this is so, it makes no more sense to say that brains cause consciousness than it does to say that the physical pressure objects like furniture exert on the floor cause gravity. Gravity would exist as a force of nature whether the furniture was there or not. The furniture simply manifests the existence of gravity by sticking to the ground and putting a bit of pressure on the floor as it does so.

Though the analogy is not perfect, as no analogy between something as simple or direct as furniture and gravity could be when compared to something as complex as brains and consciousness, this kind of simultaneous interaction is what the psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues for when he contends that brains permit consciousness as opposed to generating or receiving it:

I suggest that the function of the brain is to create by permission, in other words by acting as a kind of filter. This includes the idea of transmission but adds a further element. Consciousness is sculpted: by saying ‘no’ to some things it enables others to stand forward into being, as Michaelangelo’s hand caused his David to come into being by a process of discarding stone from the formless block and allowing other stone to remain. (McGilchrist, 2021)

The most salient challenge to the notion that consciousness is an intrinsic quality of matter is that, from our perspective, most of the material universe doesn’t exhibit consciousness. It neither has a brain that can filter it nor generate it. From the tiniest particle to the largest stars, we can see no behaviors that we typically associate with awareness, let alone agency. Atoms do what atoms do and our sun does what it does and has done for billions of years. What variations we can detect follow more or less set patterns and deviations from the norm that are not outside the realm of possibility under the laws of physics as we understand them. While there may, from time-to-time, be random variations that surprise us, random variation is not an indication of either awareness or intentionality.

I was reminded of this a couple of years ago during a discussion I was having with a friend on this topic. As a trained geologist and ardent materialist, my friend was, to say the least, dismissive of any notion that consciousness might be an inherent quality of matter. To make his point, he kicked a large rock resting on the ground in front of him and, noting the lack of reaction from the rock, said “See, no consciousness.”

Unfortunately, demonstrations like these only show that if rocks experience consciousness, it is not in a form that humans can even remotely relate to. McGilchrist states that he too has seen rhetorical rocks kicked in an attempt to demonstrate inanimate matter cannot possibly have any access to consciousness. “Sometimes, I am asked, ‘Surely you can’t think a mountain has awareness?’ I feel like replying, ‘but how would you expect a mountain to behave if it did have awareness? Mow the lawn, drink a beer and go to Sainsbury’s?” (2021)

That materialists who are often quick to charge other researchers with anthropocentrism would expect consciousness to only exist in a form that humans could detect and appreciate is, to say the least, ironic. That said, McGilchrist’s point is a valid and important one. He does not claim that there is proof that consciousness is a property of matter, including stuff that we consider inanimate. He is simply pointing out that it is at least as plausible as the available alternative explanations and that, if true, we shouldn’t expect our own filters (brains) to always enable us to see examples of it. Why would it?

It is common knowledge that humans can’t hear dog whistles or smell nearly as well as man’s best friend. Undoubtedly, these differences between humans and canines have a meaningful impact on how each perceives and interacts with the world. If we allow ourselves to believe, even if only for the sake of argument, that consciousness is a feature of the material world, how much different must any conscious experience be for things that operate on vastly different timescales and with radically different physical structures?

The point here is not that consciousness is definitely associated with physicality the way gravity is associated with mass. Though this view is at least as consistent as any other theory of consciousness (I would argue more), it is no more or less provable than other theories. As the 20th century mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated mathematically, it is possible for something to be both true and unprovable.

Regardless, our understanding of consciousness and ability to imagine how it might be experienced by others is limited by our own filtered experience of it. If we have difficulty imagining what it is like to be a bat, to use the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous example (1974), how much more difficult is it to imagine what it might be like to be a rock or a tree? It is precisely because the whole story of consciousness can’t be determined that we can find value in considering and wrestling with alternative explanations for its existence.

REFERENCES

Chalmers, D. J. 1996. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, New York: Oxford University Press.

Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness explained. (P. Weiner, Illustrator). Little, Brown and Co.

McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Vol. 2). London: Perspectiva Press.

Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat. Philosophical Review, 83, 435–450.

Vicari, G. (2008). Beyond conceptual dualism: ontology of consciousness, mental causation, and holism in John R. Searle’s philosophy of mind (Vol. 196). Rodopi.

Written by Craig Axford

M.A. in Environment and Management and undergraduate degrees in Anthropology & Environmental Studies. Living in Moab, Utah. A generalist, not a specialist.