The following is a freewriting exercise I had about consciousness. The purpose was to just get some ideas on paper, and it is by no means a polished, consistent, position that I wish to defend at all costs. I post it here to give you a view of some of the things I am pondering. Again, I am warning you that it is very rough and chaotic, and not a definite position, but it captures the general idea:
Consciousness and the laws of logic – We say, when talking about the laws of logic, that something cannot both be A and not A at the same time and in the same sense. One of the consequences of these laws are, for instance, that I am a singular, individual being, and I can’t be two places at once. I cannot be in New York and San Francisco at the same time. Well, there is a sense in which this is true. Suppose we decrease the amount of separation. Suppose instead I say something like, I can’t be both where I am and three inches to the left at the same time. Well, is this true? We are inclined to say, as the laws of logic go, that this is true. But, whatever does it mean? At which point am I such that I cannot also be three inches to the left of that point? What is the reference point? Taking what we typically mean when we say this, we are inclined to place that reference point at the outermost edge of our bodies, such that all other points in our bodies would have to be both where they are and three inches to their left as well.
But, why must this be the case? What if we mentally place one point somewhere in the middle of our bodies and the other point, at a distance of three inches, at another place still within our bodies, in what sense would we not be in two locations at once?
Complications surrounding this mental exercise lead us to believe that our personal selves are located at a mathematical point in space. This is not so. I am a body. I am located simultaneously at all the mathematical points that can be said to lie within the bounds of my body.
Mathematical points do not really exist. They are mental concepts by which we can get some handle on thinking about the universe. I cannot grab a mathematical point and show it to you saying, “Here is a ‘location’.” The concept is totally arbitrary, and should be abandoned when talking about the location of the conscious self. I can very well be in one location at the same time as I am in another location, depending on what you mean. If the arbitrary locations you’ve decided to inquire about are so distant that they lie outside the extreme limits of my body, then I cannot physically occupy them at the same time. Nor can there be two ethereal copies of my body occupying the same volume but centered around two points largely separated in space. It all depends on what you mean. But, the point to take away here is that there is a sense in which it very much is possible for me to be in location A and location B at the same time.
Neuronal events, or firings, or however you want to call it, just is a conscious event. To ask who or what is conscious of this event is to fall into the basic trap of confusion that has plagued the idea of consciousness. Nothing is observing this event and making sense of it. The event itself is the basic unit of consciousness. The unit is compound and can be objectively measured. It lasts for a very short period of time.
Now, if that event is consciousness, then does that mean each and every such event is a separate consciousness? No. No such event by itself is a person. A person is a supremely complex thing, and this is in stark contrast to the way it is typically thought of. We are looking for a simple core of being, that which can look at and interpret a large field of neuronal events and make sense out of them. But we are overlooking that those neuronal events themselves might just be the conscious person. It’s just a brute fact that these neuronal events are the conscious stuff, and we have to get used to it and reinterpret reality based on this understanding. Nothing interprets these neuronal events; they are the interpreter. Neuronal events are not encoded information that has to get transduced into the language the conscious mind can consume. They are the conscious mind. The conscious mind takes up some amount of volume and is not located at a mathematical point. This is the confusion we’ve been handed down. The conscious mind is the body, in totality. The body is not something possessed by the mind, the person is just a composite thing, and the body, in its totality, is the person.
So the question of whether I am the same person if my arm gets cut off is a bit of a trick question. Technically the answer is no, but to a large extent you are. You have maybe changed by an amount of .0001, but you have changed. You can no longer be conscious of your arm, because it is not there.
The situation is like we have been handed down a particular way of thinking about ourselves and how we fit into the universe, and we just fail to make sense of the world without thinking according to that way. We cannot step out of that perspective because that perspective is to a large extent JUST HOW we make sense of our day to day experience. Step out of that perspective, and things just don’t make any sense any more. We’re going to have to learn how to make sense of things.
Any object extended in space occupies an infinity of mathematical points or “locations.” This is just consequential of the concept of ‘point’ that we’ve invented for ourselves to make better sense of geometry. Now, this is a very useful concept in some respects, but should not even enter into the question of consciousness. The science of consciousness is not geometry, and need not include the language of mathematics. Just like the concept of length doesn’t apply to the science of politics. Now it’s fitting that these concepts are routinely applied to consciousness because many of our current concepts of consciousness and concepts of mathematics were invented by the same man – Rene Descartes.
Now, my position is that a particular neuronal event is a unit of consciousness. Say, if a neuron fires, it is a conscious event. To ask what is conscious of it is to ask an improper question. IT is conscious. But a neuronal fire lasts only for a very short period of time, and is not particularly sophisticated. A helpful, though potentially dangerous, analogy is that a transistor going from off to on is one unit of computation. Nothing much is computed, but it is the very basic event that makes up a computer.
The computer analogy in fact is a very useful analogy on many levels, but I have to be careful to explain that the operation of a computer is not the same as the operation of a mind. I said that a single neuronal event is a unit of consciousness – it is the most basic and primitive form of consciousness possible – but what is different about this event that makes it an instance of consciousness? Why, for instance, is the event of one rock striking another not an instance of consciousness? The answer comes when we start to look at different kinds of events, and notice that nothing important is accomplished in certain events.
Some people, like Daniel Dennet, like to say things like such events are conscious to some very limited extent. His favorite analogies involve the workings of viruses. No, the viruses themselves aren’t conscious. The event itself might be conscious, but the thing involved isn’t conscious. Just like the neuron isn’t conscious. We are so set on looking to objects imbued with consciousness, and that is part of our problem. If we think that neurons are the stuff of consciousness, we tend to think that each neuron is in some way conscious – that it is like a little conscious being, and if you get enough of them together, you have a big conscious being that is conscious only by virtue of being made up of little conscious beings.
Is a sleeping person conscious? Yes. Is an anesthetized person conscious? Yes. But there is no experience because no memories of the events taking place are being formed. Experience requires the formation of memory. If you inhibit the being’s capacity to form memory, you have made the being incapable of experiencing, and have knocked him, in our common usage of the term, unconscious. In this way there is the possibility of there being zombies. A living thing can act to us objective observers as being completely conscious, and so long as that system is not forming the right kind of memory, it is not experiencing anything.
Now the type of memory I am here considering is not the same as our common understanding of memory – the short and long term varieties. What I am talking about is perceptual memory – the kind of memory that makes perception possible. Perception is the involuntary recall of this very primitive kind of sense memory.
Or, maybe the recall of memory is also important. Maybe I can inhibit the firings in certain neurons that might recall memory. But, I think we will see that these events always occur together. The firing of a neuron is the recollection of memory and at the same time the change in memory – either reinforcing or nullifying.
What then is pain? Pain is a particular perception, like vision or hearing. Most often people perceive pain when they are receiving bodily damage, but sometimes people perceive pain when they are perfectly fine. There are areas of the brain associated with perception of various sorts, and I would venture the suggestion that there are also similar areas of association in the brain for pain. Signals are perceived as painful when they affect those areas just like they are perceived as vision when they affect the vision areas. If you could redirect signals to the vision areas that usually end up in the pain areas, you would “see” pain. But if you perceived signals bound for the pain areas instead in your vision areas, you would not be motivated to have any particular physiological response. If these signals were to find the home they are typically destined for, the areas of pain association, then other areas connected to it would also fire and trigger the appropriate physiological responses. Perhaps it would increase your heart rate, initiate your flight or fight system, cause you to wince, etc…
Pain is no special class of perception. You experience pain just as you experience vision. If your pain areas are being activated, you are aware of something painful. If your vision areas are being activated, you are aware of something visual. My thesis is that this activity among the neuronal substrate just is the experience itself.
Or, maybe the typical alert form of consciousness we can observe in other creatures from an objective standpoint, requires perception and the formation of memory, such that zombies are impossible. Inhibit these areas of the brain, and it’s not possible for a being to be awake, alert, etc.
Why react to the notion that the mind or consciousness is not physical in nature? In my view, both the materialists and immaterialists have it wrong. The immaterialists say that the mind is immaterial, but they propose a substance that for all intents and purposes is very much like a material substance. They call it spirit, and have neither proof of its existence nor a cogent explanation of how it works. The materialist, on the other hand, sees this and says, no, we can work with the substances we have and look for consciousness in those substances. It is along these lines that both the materialist and immaterialist are making the same mistake. They are both, in a sense, substantialists, and are looking for the mind along very similar lines, with reference to the same kind of thing. On the one hand, the materialists are looking to substances we are acquainted with and know exist, and on the other hand the ‘immaterialists’, which is a misnomer, are looking to a mystical substance because they see that material is not the right kind of thing to be conscious.
However, my case is that consciousness is not to be found in substance of any kind, real or imagined, nor is it to be found in form. It is rather to be found in function. As long as you get particular events happening, you have function of the right sort. Consciousness is a particular type of function.
Notice though, that you cannot have function without substance or form. You have to have a real substance arranged in a particular way so that the right kind of function can be facilitated. Therefore, my immaterialist position is no friend to supernaturalism. There can be no conscious god unless his/her mind is functioning on top of some substrate or other. My position is immaterialist in that I recognize that consciousness is substrate-independent. It can work on top of any substrate you choose, but cannot operate with no substrate whatever. That is, it’s dependent on the presence of a substrate, but not on any particular substrate.
Consciousness is an event or process that follows a particular algorithm. Now, algorithms don’t ‘exist.’ They are not things, but are only mathematical models or descriptions within our minds. In order to get it to work, you have got to set up real conditions in the real universe by which the process actually takes place and the event happens in reality. There is no such thing as ‘purely mental’ in the sense that you can have a ‘purely mental,’ disembodied being.
Let me be clearer on what ‘substrate-independent’ means. It means that the presence of a substrate is required in order for the conditions to obtain and for the desired function or process to occur, but no particular substrate out of the many we know is required. The proper function can be accomplished in silicone the same as it can be accomplished in a bit of organic material. But, no function at all can be completed in the utter absence of any substrate whatever. The religious immaterialists are at a bit of a contradiction on this point because they say that consciousness can ‘exist,’ or, more precisely, function, in the total absence of any material at all. But then, they make up a mystical, un-provable, substance called “spirit.” In this sense, they are no different than materialists, only they appeal to a non-existent material because they recognize that no known material can work. So, in a sense, my position is not materialist but is rather functionalist. A function is not a piece of matter, but it requires matter to be put in a particular situation in order to work. Form is also not material in nature, but pure form cannot exist. It cannot exist in the absence of matter. Likewise, function, and in our view a particular kind of function, cannot exist in the absence of both matter and form. It requires matter, but not any particular kind of matter.
The objective measure as to whether or not a thing is conscious is the proper form and function facilitating the right kind of events. If a thing was deliberately made to be conscious by setting up this function, and we see that it is functioning both under the hood and overtly, that is, it appears to be us to be acting in accord with a conscious being, then it is conscious. The same cannot be said of a robot designed to appear conscious. It might fool us in its overt actions, but under the hood we see that 1) it was deliberately designed only to appear overtly conscious, and 2) that it was not endowed with the right kind of forms facilitating the right kind of function. A robot like this would be easily deemed not conscious.
We already speak of mental function as opposed to being beings that just inherently think. Thinking is a process, an event or series of events. We should already then be asking what kind of event is this and how does it work.
People are not static entities, and can change. Some people change in very profound ways. Therapy presupposes that people can change. Does this make you a different person? Yes… but not very radically different. Personal identity, as it is sometimes defined, is false. Suppose I have a lump of clay and one day you walk in and notice this lump of clay on my table. You leave and while you are gone I manipulate this lump of clay into a slightly different form. You come back the next day and notice it looks different and ask, “Is that the same lump of clay that I saw yesterday?” Well, yes, it is the same lump, but it has also changed. So this question is very complicated to answer.
The self and personal identity is a bit of an illusion. You have a persistent perception of yourself that, while it changes, is largely the same over time. It is your concept of yourself that you constantly make reference to, and you mentally adjust for changes you make. Now, the self is a concept in the mind just as the concept of ‘car’ is in the mind. You perceive yourself to be the same just as you perceive a certain car to be the same car, even though it was totaled in an accident. Take a rusty old car for example. Let’s say I get to work restoring it, and since it is in really bad shape I have to do a monumental amount of restoration. Let’s say I strip all the body panels off, all the interior out, the tires and wheels off, and am left with largely just a frame. I rewire the whole car, put on new wheels and tires, re-upholster the interior, put in a new engine, and place brand-new body panels on the outside. If you ask if it is the same car, would you answer yes or no? It’s a tough question.
If you were to take all of your neurons out one by one and replace them with different neurons that are adjusted to have the same synaptic bias such that they fire just like the old neuron, and you continue until every neuron is replaced, would you be the same person? Clearly the answer is yes. The conscious mind is dependent upon matter, to be sure, but is not dependent on any particular piece of matter. Now if I were to cut out a piece of your brain and those neurons are no longer available to function with the rest of the system, would you be a different person? Yes, in a way, even if in a very small way, you are. This is why we perform brain surgery. The essential difference is not that some of your matter is missing it’s that some matter upon which the functions should be taking place is missing, and no longer available to facilitate that function. Now if I were to replace that chunk of brain with, say, silicone-based electronic components that facilitate the exact same function as that block of neurons did, I could safely replace that part of your brain and it would make no difference at all. I could even replace your entire brain with silicone-based neurons, so far as they are all configured with the same biases they are functionally equivalent.
Now to ask the interesting and very troublesome questions. Suppose you stepped into a machine that could read your physical makeup down to the minutest of details, store this information, disintegrate your body, and recreate you just as you were, at some distance away. Now, there is the question of, in this case, would this machine be ‘transporting’ you, or killing you and recreating you. That question, to me, is unimportant. The important question is if, at the other end, you would be the same person, or a recreation? The answer that I’ve already committed myself to is that even if the recreation event uses different atoms than were in your original body, you would be the same person. We already know the body’s atoms are completely replaced by new atoms every seven years. And I am promoting a view that so long as your brain functions just as it did you would be the same.
One way to handle such questions is to just note that a machine of this sort would probably be physically impossible. It is just a fantasy machine that could lead us astray as we are trying to get a very physical understanding of the mind, in the physical universe we are acquainted with. That’s another point to make about my theory – the mind is a physical thing, though not a material thing. The religious person pretends to be a non-materialist and non-physicalist. The process of electrolysis is a very physical thing, but is not material. Processes are not material, but are definitely physical. You cannot have a process of electrolysis in the absence of hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
Another mental experiment is suppose we have a machine like the above, and instead of analyzing you, taking you apart, and recreating you, it can take a snapshot of you and recreate a copy of you. Now there are two of you. The question is, are there two of you, or two separate consciousnesses? The answer is there are two. But, if the same neuronal firings are taking place, just in two different places, which ‘consciousness’ do you experience? The answer is, these neuronal processes over here are one consciousness, and those over there are another. You sit in one seat. So long as the neuronal processes in your head are uninterrupted and persist, you are alive and are the same consciousness. If there are now two of you, from a third-person standpoint, you will both have the same memories, and will insist that you are the same person. But, the moment you have two sets of neuronal processes, the experience from that point forward is different. You could convince the person sitting in the left seat that he was just now created if you can have him recall the last thing he remembered – that he sat down in the right seat. Your neurons also are not firing identically. The physical objects in the room are seen by you both from slightly different vantage points, and you are not having the same visual experience.
Now if we go backwards and look at the first example again, we would ask whether the recreated person would be you or a copy of you. And, either way, would your experience pick up roughly where it left off? I think that the difficulty involved in this thought experiment highlights the conceptual errors that we typically employ in thinking about consciousness. Supposing that the memory-biases on every single neuron are just as they were, and that every single neuron was networked in with the same synaptic connections they had, we would be compelled to say you are the same person and your experience will pick up right where it left off. But, this assumes the concept of invariant personal identity is valid. Perhaps you are never the same person as you were a moment before, at least in a very technical and mathematical sense. Because of the difficulty outlined above, I think this is a worthwhile avenue to explore. Perhaps it will turn out that we should abandon the concept of personal identity and the concept of the invariant self.