Will Solving The ‘Hard Problem’ of Consciousness Unweave the Rainbow?
Some say in fifty years or so we'll have enough neuro-scientific evidence to completely describe the functioning of the brain. The question is, will this mountain of evidence be enough to explain the emergence of human consciousness? Consciousness. This familiar yet indescribable experience we all have, an awareness, something we can't physically point to nor experience from another's viewpoint.
Being a hypothetical question about some future state of our knowledge, it has mainly been of academic interest to philosophers. But I actually think it's relevant to all of us because it accesses two fundamental questions about what it means to be human. First, on a practical level, is consciousness amenable to explanation? Second, on a mystical level, if consciousness can be explained, will its essence be lost?
Consciousness: 'easy' and 'hard' problems
An influential approach to consciousness splits the question into the 'easy problems of consciousness' and the 'hard problems of consciousness' (Chalmers, 1995). The so-called 'easy problems' are things like finding out how memory or attention actually work, the nuts and bolts of these functions. And even though these are the easy problems, scientists are still having considerable difficulty with them.
But, argue people like Chalmers, once we've described all these functions, we still won't fully understand consciousness. This is because we won't have addressed the so-called 'hard problem'. This is the feeling of what it is actually like to be you. That ineffable you-ness that no one else can share. Your experience.
Chalmers doesn't represent the most extreme example of this position, there are those who argue we can never truly understand consciousness. At least Chalmers acknowledges there are possibilities, although new conceptual techniques need developing.
There is no 'hard problem'
On the other side of the fence are those who argue the distinction between the 'hard problem' and the 'easy problem' is at best ill-advised and, at worst, plain dangerous. Just because we can't conceive of how consciousness can emerge from the description of the easy problems like attention and memory etc., doesn't mean it never will (Churchland, 1996). Just because we can set up complex philosophical arguments about what might be true in a thought experiment, doesn't mean it explains what is true here and now.
Philosophers of mind like Dennett argue that consciousness emerges from the physical processes of the brain (Dennett, 1996). Effectively he is saying there is no 'hard problem' to explain, some even argue he is saying there is no such thing as consciousness, rather he is redefining consciousness as 'reportability' (Chalmers, 1997).
Unweaving the rainbow
So there's a glance at two views on the so-called 'hard problem' of consciousness. But being a student of psychology, in addition to the actual arguments themselves, I'm naturally drawn to the motivations people might have for which they choose.
While there's a lot of complex discussion in this area, I think it partly comes down to whether you're relaxed about the idea that science might one day be able to explain the essence of human experience. For many people, I think this is an extremely uncomfortable thought. What Keats, talking of Newton's findings, refers to as a fear of 'unweaving the rainbow' - the fear that explaining something might somehow reduce the magic of it - is very real.
What's your view?
You can vote below on whether you think current scientific methods will ever be able to explain consciousness. Of course, it would be great to know your views, so go ahead and post a comment. I'd love to know what you think.
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I subscribe to reductionism as described by Hofstader (in, say, _Mind's Eye_) and more recently explored by Minksy -- that consciousness is at best an illusion on top of a system whose actions are determined by perfectly understandable processes, and at worst a term to gloss over a number of smaller functions which together are experienced as consciousness.
I just started reading your blog a few days ago when I found a post on Digg.com. I spent the next 3 hours reading over your archives. I'm not a psychologist, or even a psychology student, but I just wanted to say that your site is great. Interesting, very informative, and very unbiased; hard to find a blog like that these days.
Thanks Daniel - welcome to PsyBlog!
Metahacker's comment that consciousness is an illusion, "a number of smaller functions which together are experienced as consciousness": That's an illusion experienced by what exactly? What is experiencing these smaller functions? That's consciousness, and that's the problem.
It seems to me you can't just say "illusion" or "emergent phenomenon" and wave your hands expecting the problem to disappear; this is the major issue with Dennett too.
I experience consciousness as I write this right now. There are two big questions that raises. First, what do I need my consciousness for, and what is the mechanism within the universe which allows me to be aware of being here in the first place?
Until you can answer the question of why anything in the universe needs to be aware of looking through its eyes, hearing through its ears, and thinking to itself, you haven't even begun to address consciousness. That's why I suspect it's so difficult; it's inherently a "why" where science is much more accustomed to dealing with "what" and "how".
The only way to avoid this question that I can see, is to deny consciousness exists utterly, even to the extent of denying one's own experience of it. Does anyone here claim not to experience consciousness, I wonder?
The Mind and Brain are very seperate entities. Your brain is simply the receiver of information, much like a television set. The Mind is the sender. The Mind sends the information to the brain, which then processes it. So, all attributes of Mind, such as emotions, thoughts, memories, etc, are all a product of the Sender. The Receiver processes these signals.
The Mind lives completely outside of the body/brain, in an entirely different dimension. Quantum Physics is now teaching us that there may be as many as twenty seven different dimensions. Of course, we can only experience three of them. So, trying to study the Mind-Brain problem is fruitless. Scientists will never find our Minds. It cannot happen. We cannot observe outside of 3D, so how are we to study this?
Internationally recognized Brain researcher Sir John Eccles once wrote, "... that the mind is a separate entity from the brain, and that mental processes cannot be reduced to neurochemical brain processes, but on the contrary direct them. And... a mind may conceivably exist without a brain." There is a growing number of scientists that are sharing this idea.
Many laugh at this notion, labeling it "Sci-Fi". But think about it. If our Mind truly lives within the brain, how can one experience thought during clinical death (ie Cardiac Arrest)? Doctor's Sam Parnia and Peter Fenwick, leading researchers in the field of NDEs and the Consciousness debate, describe patients that are clinically dead experiencing a vivid dream or awareness. Many explain that the lack of oxygen or the heavy drugs play a role. However, in many cases, the brain is dead. There are no signals being transmitted during clinical death (about 20-40 seconds in, all activity ceases). But several patients describe amazing details of the OR room, the actual procedures, etc. There are too many cases documented to dismiss. Find more at the site (http://horizonresearch.org/).
Although no one truly has the answer, the above information is probably the best guess (or, at least, best documented).
The philosophers who are the most optimistic are the Churchlands. They hold a the interesting belief that consciousness IS the neurons and their chemical processes. Counterintuitive, but they have to do it to steer clear of materialism. Steven Pinker who is certainly not someone trying to smuggle woo in the door when no one's looking is a mysterian who believes that our minds just weren't evolved to be able to solve puzzles like this one. Dan Dennett is hard for anyone to quite pin down what he thinks. AI has certainly been a huge disappointment concerning the rate that it is moving. I certainly subscribe to it all being material, but I think we may be a long way off from discovering it. And I think Pinker could be right. BTW Loved Susan Blackmore's little book Conversations on Consciousness.
I think that a hard problem really exists, even if we don't know if it can be solved. The very fact that it belongs in the whole spectrum of philosophy of mind identifies it as a proto-science, which will probably evolve in the next decades as an autonomous discipline. If you are interested check out some of my thoughts about consciousness on http://encefalus.com/neurology-biology/split-brains-consciousness-michael-gazzaniga/
The nearest I ever saw to a definition of consciousness
was 'the capacity to experience', in a source which would be considered very unscientific. It would take some hard thought to work out whether that is tautological. Another criticism is that, if consciousness exists, you are not only capable of experience, but also incapable of not experiencing either sense data or your own thought, so
'susceptibility to experience' might be more precise. Like every phenomenon, it can not be explained ultimately, because the terms in which it is explained will themselves require explanation, and so on until you hit the brick wall or fall into recursion. e.g objects fall downwards because of gravity. What is gravity ?
The tendency of material objects to move towards each other in the absence of an opposed force. Why do they move towards each other ? Because of gravity. (oversimplified I know).
I find the concepts in "Philosophy in the Flesh" by Lakoff and Johnson provocative. Their book is based on three major findings of cognitive science:
1) The mind is inherently embodied
2) Thought is mostly unconscious
3) Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical
Based on these 3 findings I suggest that we are:
1) driven unconsciously to interpret events in terms of roughly similar previous events (metaphors or pattern matching)
2) Driven to explain our unconscious feelings and thoughts by conscious narrative that we assemble post hoc (if you ask people (or yourself!) why they have done things they often struggle to produce anything other than a shallow explanation)
3) Because our consciousness (both unconscious and fully aware) arises from our bodies, senses, and memory of similar events together with memories of self (our physical boundaries, discrimination between self and not-self activities, mirror neurons etc) we have a top level consciousness which is effectively a narrative explanation we tell ourselves from our individual point of view.
After the first few experiences of life we get locked into the recursive tale we tell ourselves, and remember it as a long running and persistant narrative. This feeling we call consciousness.
So in answer to the original question, no, I don't think there is a hard problem of consciousness. I do think it very likely that many people will find it very hard to accept the nature of consciousness - a tale we tell ourselves to explain away the 95% of our thoughts which are unconscious. Our consciousness has an evolutionary utility in that it provides a capability of allowing us to sometimes second guess ourselves.
Unweaving the rainbow? There is no rainbow, just as there is no Santa Claus.
Understanding consciousness will only lead to a more awe-inspiring view of the universe.
In our most simple understandable form, we are energy. Consciousness could be a form of energy "resonance." Similar to standing waves, intelligence may structure energy into an orderly form that we call consciousness.
Will neuroscience beakthroughs help us understand how and if consciousness emerges from resonance in the brain? Probably.
A big question is, "Why am I experiencing this one particular life out of 6.5 billions possible lives?" Well, maybe the answer is all too obvious: You're only "you" because of isolated sensory input and isolated memory. Memories may one day be digitally recorded and swapped between people, ending people's doubts of "Am I the only one with perception?" and "Is my consciousness somehow unique?" To the dismay of many, we may find the answers to both to be, "No."
One meta-comment: It's surprising to me how frequently people misunderstand what the hard problem even. Maybe these people don't experience consciousness at all?
Anyway, it seems like a lot of people are talking about that inner sense of me-ness, or selfhood, or maybe for Freud, the Ego; the thing that I refer to when I say "me". That has nothing to do with the hard problem of consciousness, since it's trivial to show that that phenomenon is not a permanent feature of experience: go watch a good movie, read a book or do anything else that occupies your mind. In those experiences, it's pretty obvious that the sense of me-ness isn't present, in moments of intense focus, etc. But other phenomena are present, so then it's obvious that the sense of self is an object of consciousness that comes and goes, not consciousness itself.
There's consciousness, which is it's content, and there's AWARENESS! An even tougher mystery to nail down, no?
Science is a product (and an unusual one) of the mind. Science is no more rational than other ways of thinking - it just looks that way in retrospect which is how we teach it. As a product of the mind how can it think up the mind ? The latter is bigger than science- it's a paradox that is an outcome of Godel's theorem. The fact that science can articulate a problem does not guarantee in any way that it can solve it. Is there a rational description of quantum theory ? of the first cause ? or indeed the nature of mass and energy that does not involve a circular argument ?
NO + NO = NO