The Conscious Mind : The Biggest Mystery

The Conscious Mind : The Biggest Mystery

The following material is a summary of the main arguments of David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind. It is mainly quoted material from the book with minimal comments here and there and was originally posted on JBAS (Joshua Ben Adam Society).

“Consciousness is the biggest mystery. It may be the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe…It still seems utterly mysterious that the causation of behavior should be accompanied by a subjective inner life. We have good reason to believe that consciousness arises from physical systems such as brains, but we have little idea how it arises or why it exists at all. How could a physical system such as a brain also be an experiencer? Why should there be something it is like to be such a system? Present day scientific theories hardly touch the really difficult questions about consciousness. We do not just lack a detailed theory; we are entirely in the dark about how consciousness fits into the natural order”.

“Many books and articles on consciousness have appeared in the past few years and one might think we are making progress. But on closer look, most of this work leaves the hardest problems about consciousness untouched. Often, such work addresses what might be called the easy problems of consciousness. How does the brain process environmental stimulation? How does it integrate information? How do we produce reports on internal states? These are important questions but to answer them is not to solve the hard problem: why is all this processing accompanied by an experienced inner life?” “Sometimes this question is ignored entirely, sometimes it is put off until another day, and sometimes it is simply declared answered. But in each case one is left with the feeling that the central problem remains as puzzling as ever”.

“Take consciousness seriously…the easiest way to develop a theory of consciousness is to deny its existence or to redefine the phenomenon in need of explanation as something it is not. This usually leads to an elegant theory but the problem does not go away”. “Throughout this book I have assumed that consciousness exists and that to redefine the problem as that of explaining how certain cognitive or behavioral functions are performed is unacceptable. This is what I mean by taking consciousness seriously.

Some say consciousness is an illusion…it seems to me that we are surer of the existence of conscious experience than we are of anything else in the world…I cannot prove that consciousness exists. We know about consciousness more directly than we know about anything else…”

“The problem of consciousness lies uneasily at the border of science and philosophy…it is not open to investigation by the usual scientific methods…not least because of the difficulties in observing the phenomenon….I argue that reductive explanation of consciousness is impossible and I even argue for a form of dualism…”

“The second part focuses on the irreducibility of consciousness…argues that standard methods of reductive explanation cannot account for consciousness…a satisfactory theory of consciousness must be a new sort of non-reductive theory instead…takes things a step further by arguing that materialism is false and that a form of dualism is true…”

“Consciousness is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious. There is nothing we know about more directly than consciousness but it is far from clear how to reconcile it with everything else we know. Why does it exist? What does it do? How could it possibly arise from gray matter?... It is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved… Nothing is more real to us”.

“Many fall into the trap of confusing consciousness with self-consciousness…”

“There can arguably be perception and thought that is not conscious…what is central to consciousness is experience….this is not a definition…it is clarification”.

“The subject matter is best characterized as ‘the subjective quality of experience’. There is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas, from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue, from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience, from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst, from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind…a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel- an associated quality of experience”.

“Conscious experience is part of the natural world…why does conscious experience exist? If it arises from physical systems, as seems likely, how does it arise?”

Chalmers, for an example, details the physical system for receiving and processing sound. He then asks “Why should this be accompanied by an experience?... To be conscious is to have subjective experience”.

Further definition: “modern cognitive science has much to say about the mind but almost nothing to say about consciousness. Cognitive science deals largely with the explanation of behavior and the mind as the internal basis of behavior”.

There are two different concepts of mind: “the phenomenal concept- this is the concept of mind as conscious experience, mind as characterized by the way it feels. The psychological concept of mind has to do with the concept of mind as the causal or explanatory basis for behavior. The psychological has had center stage”.

Many assimilate the two and this Chalmers views as a great error. “Why the causal role is played and why the phenomenal quality is present are two entirely different questions…What is mysterious is why that state should feel like something… We have no independent language for describing phenomenal qualities…there is something ineffable about them”.

Supervenience is a central concept in Chalmers work. This roughly means created by or determined by or dependent on. “The biological is generally determined by or dependent on the physical. Biological systems are generally supervenient on physical properties. The physical (physical properties) generally entail biological facts or properties. In the natural world certain properties naturally necessitate other properties. Natural law dictates this…(however) it is not at all clear that consciousness is naturally supervenient on physical properties”.

His definition of materialism- “the widely held doctrine of materialism (or physicalism) which is generally taken to hold that everything in the world is physical or that there is nothing over and above the physical or that the physical facts in a certain sense exhaust all the facts about the world”.

Reductive explanation- “an explanation wholly in terms of simpler entities…when we give an appropriate account of lower-level processes, an explanation of the higher-level phenomenon falls out”. Chalmers argues that reductive explanation is not the be-all and end-all of explanation.

“If all goes well, biological phenomena may be explainable in terms of cellular phenomena which are explainable in terms of biochemical phenomena which are explainable in terms of chemical phenomena which are explainable in terms of physical phenomena. As for the physical phenomena one tries to unify these as far as possible but at some level physics has to be taken as brute: there may be no explanation of why the fundamental laws or boundary conditions are the way they are”.

“Conscious experience does not supervene logically on the physical and therefore cannot be reductively explained”.

“No explanation given wholly in physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience…Consciousness is a surprising feature of the universe. Our grounds for belief in consciousness derive solely from our own experience of it…It is my first person experience of consciousness that forces the problem on me”.

On the many others claiming to explain consciousness (as verbal report, perceptual discrimination, information availability, or other processes or functions of the brain)- “they simply miss what it means to be a conscious experience…although conscious states may play various causal roles they are not defined by their causal roles… what makes them conscious is that they have a certain phenomenal feel and this feel is not something that can be functionally defined away…they trivialize the problem of explaining consciousness…to analyze consciousness in terms of some functional notion is either to change the subject or to define away the problem. One might as well define world peace as a ham sandwich. Achieving world peace becomes much easier but it is a hollow achievement”.

Perhaps consciousness should be analyzed as some sort of biochemical structure- “to analyze consciousness that way again trivializes the explanatory problem by changing the subject. It seems that the concept of consciousness is irreducible, being characterizable only in terms of concepts that themselves involve consciousness”.

“Physical explanation is well suited to the explanation of structure and function…the fact that consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact not explainable simply by telling the story about the physical facts”.

“Consciousness must be explained on its own terms”.

On the work of many others on consciousness- “none of them gives us anything close to an explanation of why these processes should be accompanied by conscious experience…the question of why these processes should give rise to experience is simply not addressed…he (Dennett in Consciousness Explained) seems to take it as a basic premise that once one has explained the various functions one has explained everything…all provide intriguing accounts of the  performance of cognitive functions, but all leave the really hard questions untouched…they can also tell us something about the brain processes that are correlated with consciousness. But none of these accounts explains the correlation: we are not told why brain processes should give rise to experience at all…these theories gain their purchase by assuming a link between psychological properties and conscious experience but it is clear they do nothing to explain that link”.

“There seems to be a huge jump between the materialistic level of explaining molecules and neurons and the subjective level”.

“The failure of logical supervenience directly implies that materialism is false; there are features of the world over and above the  physical features….facts about consciousness are further facts about our world over and above the physical facts…the presence of consciousness is an extra fact about our world, not guaranteed by the physical facts alone…the character of our world is not exhausted by the character supplied by the physical facts; there is extra character due to the  presence of consciousness”.

“The failure of materialism leads to a kind of dualism, there are both physical and nonphysical features of the world…the dualism implied here is instead a kind of property dualism; conscious experience involves properties of an individual that are not entailed by the physical properties of that individual although they may depend lawfully on those  properties. Consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical features of the world…it remains plausible that consciousness arises from a physical basis even though it is not entailed by that basis…the fact that the mind needs to arise from the brain indicates that there is something further going on”.

“Fundamental features cannot be explained in terms of more basic features and fundamental laws cannot be explained in terms of more basic laws; they must simply be taken as primitive”.

“We might take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world…perhaps there is some other class of novel fundamental properties from which phenomenal properties are derived”.

“After all, we really have no idea about the intrinsic properties of the physical. Their nature is up for grabs and phenomenal properties seem as likely a candidate as any other…Conscious experience arises from the physical according to some laws of nature, but is not itself physical”.

“Much reaction to dualism is grounded in nothing more solid than contemporary dogma… after all materialism has always worked elsewhere…and with phenomena such as learning, life and the weather all that needs to be explained are structures and functions…In their own domains the physical sciences are entirely successful. They explain physical phenomena admirably, they simply fail to explain conscious experience. To deny materialism is not to deny naturalism”.

Another objection to dualism- “it cannot explain how the physical and nonphysical interact…but the search for a connection is misguided. Even with fundamental physical laws we cannot find a connection that does the work. Things simply happen in accordance with the law, beyond a certain point there is no asking how…if there are indeed such connections they are entirely mysterious in both the physical and psychophysical cases so the latter poses no special problem here”.

“Newton’s opponents made a similar objection to his theory of gravitation. How does one body exert a force on another far away? But the force of the question dissolved over time. We have learned to live with taking certain things as fundamental”.

“Our access to consciousness is not mediated at all. Conscious experience lies at the center of our epistemic universe, we have access to it directly”.

“If property dualism is correct then there is more to me than my brain. I am constituted by both physical and nonphysical properties, and the full story about me cannot be told by focusing on only one half”.

Toward a theory of consciousness- “we can give up on the project of trying to explain the existence of consciousness wholly in terms of something more basic, and instead admit it as fundamental…the cornerstone of a theory will by psychophysical laws explaining the relationship between consciousness and physical systems. A theory will not explain why consciousness exists…there need be nothing especially supernatural about these laws. They are part of the basic furniture of nature, just as the laws of physics are. There will be something brute about them, it is true. At some level the laws will have to be taken as true and not further explained….something, somewhere must always be taken for granted…if it turns out that in the study of consciousness one needs to take some aspect of the relationship between physical processes and consciousness for granted then so be it. This is the price of constructing a theory”.

“Awareness is the psychological correlate of consciousness…if consciousness is always accompanied by awareness one is led to suspect something systematic is going on… all we know is that consciousness arises from the physical somehow, but we do not know in virtue of what physical properties it so arises”.

“There is a basic intuition that consciousness is something over and above functional organization…consciousness is a further fact for which no functional organization is logically sufficient. There is also a natural tendency to believe that everything is physical and that consciousness must be physically explainable in one way or another…but this is quite misguided. The addition of biology into the picture has not helped the original problem at all. The gap is as large as ever; consciousness seems to be something over and above biology too…no physical facts suffice to explain consciousness…the problem was the assumption of materialism in the first place. Once we accept that materialism is false it becomes clear that the search for a physical X-factor is irrelevant…we have to look for a Y-factor, something additional to the physical facts that will help explain consciousness…some irreducible psychophysical laws”.

Information theory- “information spaces are abstract spaces and information states are abstract states. They are not part of the concrete physical or phenomenal world. But we can find information if both the  physical and phenomenal world…it seems clear that information spaces and states are realized throughout the physical world…physically realized information…physical realization is the most common way to think about information embedded in the world…whenever we find an information space realized phenomenally we find the same information space realized physically…this double life of information spaces corresponds to a duality at a deep level…information has two aspects, a physical and a phenomenal aspect”.

“It could be that the physical is derivative on the informational”.

“The mysterious primitive nature of these qualities, (leads to) the impossibility of explicating them in more basic terms”.

“A conscious experience is a realization of an information state…wherever there is information there is experience”.

“We ought to take the possibility of some sort of panpsychism seriously (consciousness everywhere)”.

“Is information primary or is it really the physical and the phenomenal that are primary with information merely providing a useful link?”

“Speculative metaphysics is probably unavoidable in coming to terms with the ontology of consciousness”.

“Fundamental physical states are effectively individuated as information states…physics tells us nothing about what mass is or what charge is….specific states of mass or charge might as well be pure information states…the suggestion is that the information spaces required by physics are themselves grounded in phenomenal or protophenomenal properties”.

“Our conscious experience does not seem to be any sort of sum of microphenomenal properties corresponding to the fundamental physical features of our brain…our experience seems much more holistic than that, much more homogeneous than any simple sum would be…it does not seem to be any simple sum or collection of these  properties…we tend to think about this in terms of a physical analogy, based on the way in which microphysics adds up to macrophysics, but this may be the wrong way to think about it. Perhaps phenomenology is constituted in a different way entirely”.

“It is not obvious that neural processes in a brain should give rise to consciousness either.

Either way experience must be taken as something over and above the physical properties of the world”.

“I resisted mind-body dualism for a long time but I have now come to the point where I accept it, not just as the only tenable view but as a satisfying view in its own right…I think dualism is very likely true and I have also raised the possibility of a kind of panpsychism. Like mind-body dualism this is initially counterintuitive but the counterintuitiveness disappears with time…If God forced me to bet my life on the truth or falsity of the doctrines I have advocated I would bet fairly confidently that experience is fundamental and weakly that experience is ubiquitous”.