Is the Problem of Consciousness Hard?

I will suggest that in one sense it is and in another sense it isn’t. We have heard it said that consciousness is very hard, but here I want to emphasize the positive—it isn’t really that hard.[1] The two senses may be described as “objective” and “subjective” (or “subject-relative”). In the objective sense there are two options: all problems are objectively of equal hardness, or they can vary in their degree of objective hardness. In the subjective sense problems clearly vary in their degree of hardness: some problems are harder for some subjects than for others, with some very hard and some less so. In the former case, we can think in terms of engineering complexity or intricacy, where these concepts are defined mathematically (number of components etc.). The more complex or intricate an object is the more objectively hard to comprehend it is. Things do vary in their complexity, objectively speaking, so we may speak of the objective hardness of the problem of understanding they pose. Let’s put this in an evolutionary context: the simpler something is the easier it is for it to evolve; the more complex the harder. This is why simple organisms came first, to be followed by more complex organisms—often after millions of years. Bacteria are relatively easy to evolve; baboons a good deal harder. Bacteria are an easier evolutionary problem than baboons. The longer it takes for something to evolve the objectively harder it is to construct, other things being equal. Correspondingly, the complexity or intricacy will be greater in the case of later biological traits; and hence harder to understand. Baboons are harder to understand than bacteria. Baboons are a harder biological problem than bacteria, and hence harder for intelligent beings to grasp. The science of baboons is harder objectively than the science of bacteria. It is like chess and checkers: chess is harder to understand than checkers, because it is more complex and intricate. This has nothing to do with the subjective difficulty of the two subjects; it is entirely an objective matter (though with consequences for subjective difficulty). In the same way some mathematical proofs are objectively more difficult than others—more complex and intricate. Some physical theories may also be harder than others in this sense. Complicated things pose harder problems than simple things.

How complicated is consciousness? Well, it appeared relatively early on planet Earth (we are speaking here of sentience—pain, vision, etc.). Long before baboons, or even dinosaurs. It does not require a super-complex brain such as a mammalian brain. It is no more complex than the organism that has it. More complex than bacteria, no doubt, but not as complex as many of the more impressive zoological specimens. From an engineering point of view, consciousness is not that difficult a problem—not that hard to construct. Compare language: that came late to the scene and is confined to precious few organisms—just one species, if we use “language” strictly. And language looks a lot more complicated than pain or seeing red; it needs a more complex brain. So, language poses a harder problem than sentience in the objective sense. From a God’s-eye perspective, language is the harder problem; but is it harder from a human point of view? The same question can be asked of rationality: logical reasoning took longer to evolve than pain and vision; but is it also humanly hard to understand? I think not: the basic property of language, its combinatorial power, is not beyond our comprehension. We don’t label language a “hard problem” or think it is the heart of the mind-body problem. It is subjectively easy but objectively hard. Or rather, it is subjectively easier than the consciousness problem (no problems of mind are exactly easy). Thus, objective and subjective hardness are not reliably correlated: we might find more complex things easier to understand than simpler things; we might have epistemic biases. It may even be that some simple easy things are impossibly hard for humans to understand. This is a conceptual possibility. It seems to me that consciousness is just such a case—both easy and hard (in the two senses distinguished). We can therefore correctly assert that consciousness is an easy problem compared to language—but also a hard problem compared to language. These statements can both be true. What I want to stress here is the truth of the former statement—consciousness is an easy problem, as problems go. It is checkers compared to chess on the objective scale. Yet we might find chess easier to play than checkers—language easier to understand than consciousness. We are just biased in favor of understanding language—we know more about language naturally. Our access to language is better than our access to consciousness from an explanatory perspective. It is less of a mystery to us. It seems to us as if consciousness poses the more difficult problem from an objective point of view, but this is an illusion. To the blind man the nature of color is a very difficult problem, but not so for the sighted. Subjective difficulty must not be confused with objective difficulty. The sentience-body problem may be quite easy objectively, but impossibly hard subjectively. Sentience seems to us utterly miraculous but really is quite mundane. In fact, it must be quite mundane, though it may never seem to us that way. In a sense, the mind-body problem, as we apprehend it, is an illusion—an illusion of objective mystery. Pain is nothing spectacular, and the brain’s way of producing it perfectly prosaic. Isn’t this the way it has to be?[2]

[1] I first made this distinction in “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” (1989). There has been a tendency to dwell on the negative answer to the title question, but not the positive answer. Here I will emphasize the easy problem of consciousness: consciousness is not the crowning technical achievement of nature, its most sophisticated production. It’s fairly low on the list of nature’s clever contrivances. It isn’t rocket-science.

[2] The basic point here is to distinguish sharply between metaphysics and epistemology: consciousness is not metaphysically (or physically) hard, but it is epistemologically hard. The reason is that our intellectual faculties are not naturally geared to understanding it, despite its inner simplicity. An analogy is flight: flight is quite easy from a metaphysical (and physical) point of view (little insects can do it), but very hard for humans. It’s easy because of simple facts of nature: the lighter you are the easier it is to get off the ground. Flight is not intrinsically a hard problem—without gravity it is easy-peasy. Even humans can do it. Consciousness is easy to understand if you have the right mental faculties, but very hard if you don’t. Objectively, consciousness lies at the level of the eye or limb, roughly. Language and logic lie at the level of art and science, again roughly. Consciousness is primitive. Language and logic are cultured (quite hoity-toity).

Philosophy at the University

We are depressingly familiar with the argument that philosophy should not be taught in universities because it has no economic payoff. No goods and services result from it. You can’t make an honest living from it. We shouldn’t use public resources to finance such a useless study. By all means pursue philosophy as a hobby, but don’t expect taxpayers to foot the bill. I am going to argue that this is the opposite of the truth: it is precisely because philosophy is economically useless that we should study it at universities. Paradoxical? Not a bit of it. We just need to remember the function of a university. Many subjects are not studied at universities, though they may be studied elsewhere—comedy and entertainment, waste management, farming, furniture design, plastics, landscaping, cooking, etc. These are all worthwhile subjects of study with clear economic payoffs. Thus, private enterprise makes a point of funding these studies: it pays to learn them. There is money to be made by being an expert in these fields. By contrast, there is no money to be made by studying philosophy—it doesn’t produce anything that is economically viable as a business (intellectual landscaping?). There just isn’t the demand for it—so why use up resources to supply it? Why invest in philosophy if you can invest in plastics or steel or comedy clubs? But that is why philosophy should be studied in universities: because it can’t be justified by capitalist economic incentives. Without their backing it will wither and die, unlike industrial studies. Of course, this is to assume that it has value—just not economic value. It is worth studying, because it is interesting, deep, intellectually challenging, and concerned with real problems. If it were not, there would be no point in studying it. The question is where should it be studied; and the answer is in universities—because capitalist entrepreneurs will not take it on (unless some unprecedented demand for it springs up). Nor is philosophy alone in this: many subjects need universities to exist at all, because they have no economic payoff. History, zoology, literature, pure mathematics, linguistics, political science. It isn’t that these subjects have no economic benefits; it’s that the benefits don’t justify the expenditure, judged economically. They are bad capitalist investments. So, they need another home if they are to thrive. That is what universities are for: studying worthwhile things that won’t be covered by normal economic forces. And this is bound to be so given that not all worthwhile subjects have popular followings—not everyone likes theoretical physics or ancient history, though everyone likes to eat, laugh, live comfortably, etc. A university is an island of uneconomic activity—and that is good. The reason universities should include a philosophy department is that without them it would not exist—and we want it to exist.

Crime and Punishment

I keep on hearing the same refrain from people on the left and the right: deport criminals! Send them back here they came from! The motive is clearly to protect law-abiding citizens from further crimes, and that is not a silly idea. Some are even extending this policy to “homegrown” criminals. But it is a terrible idea. Being repatriated or exiled is no punishment at all in cases of serious crime, such as murder. You just get to go back to your old criminal life, with no life sentence or death penalty. There is zero deterrent power in that threat. Moreover, the criminal is then free to re-enter (illegally) the country in which he was found guilty of a crime, possibly to re-commit. You might say that we could send them to a prison in another country, but there are several problems with this. First, why would another country take such people into their prisons? Second, they may have different laws and penal policies. Third, they would need to be paid handsomely. This is an unworkable policy. The only viable form of such a policy would be to set up a penal colony in a remote location—a prison abroad. That would keep the criminals away from us without involving another country. I never hear this mentioned, possibly because there is nowhere to build such a colony (Greenland anyone?). No, realistically, you have to put criminals in prison in and run by the country in which the crime was committed. Deportation is not the solution to crime. Not letting criminals in to begin with is another matter, but we have plenty of laws on the books to prevent that. So, I wish pundits would stop saying we all agree that criminals should be deported, whether foreign or homegrown.

Classical Conditioning

There is something puzzling and not quite believable about Pavlov and his dogs. The dogs instinctively salivate to the sight and smell of food—this is an inborn reflex reaction. The claim is that if you sound a bell a number of times at the same time as presenting food you will get the salivation reflex to the bell alone: that is, the bell will elicit salivation. The dog will learn to salivate to a bell. But this is not generally true of instinctive reflexes: suppose you sound a bell whenever you tap someone’s knee—can you elicit the patellar reflex with the bell alone? Definitely not: you need the stimulus of the hammer. The reflex is hardwired and geared to the physical stimulus striking the knee. You might expect to see your leg go up soon after the bell sounds, because you expect it will be tapped; but it won’t actually go up without the tap. Similarly for the blink reflex: it won’t activate to the sound of a bell, no matter how many repetitions you perform. So, why would the salivation reflex be activated by the mere sound of a bell? It is different with a voluntary action: suppose you sound a bell just before you electrify the ground on which a dog is standing; the dog will soon learn to anticipate the electric shock and jump off at the sound of the bell.[1] But salivating isn’t a voluntary action; the dog can’t decide to salivate. The dog might think, “It would be good if I start salivating now, because food is about to be given to me”, but this can’t actually activate its salivary gland; it’s a reflex that acts independently of the will. Similarly, you couldn’t condition someone to sweat when a neutral stimulus is presented, after associating this with a sweat-inducing stimulus—a bell will not cause a person to sweat even if previously paired with vigorous exercise or a sauna. Nor have I ever heard anyone claiming that it can. So, what is going on with Pavlov and his dogs? Was the experiment ever replicated? I assume it was, but the conclusion apparently violates basic laws of reflexology. And it certainly doesn’t generalize to other sorts of instinctive reflex. How much did the dogs salivate, according to Pavlov? Was it the same as with a food stimulus or considerably less?

I have a theory, but I have never heard it stated before, and it is at odds with behaviorist psychology. It assumes that Pavlov did observe the effect he claims, incredible as it seems—and we should always be careful about the claims of psychologists. The theory is that the dogs imagined the food when they heard the bell—and this activated their salivary glands. Perhaps the imaginative act was quite vivid, approximating an actual perception; even an imagined smell entered their hungry consciousness. We might say they were under a kind of illusion of food presence—it seemed to them that food was under their nose or on the way. The reflex might then be activated by the imaginative act. Consider a dog in the wild hunting for food: even a quite neutral stimulus such as a certain type of bush might cause the hungry dog to imagine its prey hidden in the bushes, as so often in the past; it then begins to salivate in anticipation of food, on the principle that it’s good to get the juices flowing in order to consume the desired prey. In other words, a sequence of mental processes led to the salivation; it wasn’t just an unmediated response. So, the dog hears the bell and knows food is about to be delivered; it imagines the food and this acts on its nervous system like a perception of food; so, it salivates. The reflex is still geared to a mental presentation of food not to the bell as such. By contrast, there is no point in reflexively kicking up your leg at the sound of a bell, or reflexively blinking, or sweating. This theory at least makes sense of an otherwise incomprehensible experimental result. But it is unlikely that the salivation will be quantitively the same as the unconditioned salivation response; there will just be an incipient salivation response (no point in wasting good saliva when no food is forthcoming). In general, I find myself quite skeptical of Pavlov’s alleged result, despite its canonical status in the field. Did Pavlov really just discover that imagining food can cause an animal to salivate? That is not what we are usually told. And the finding is difficult to accept unless under this interpretation. Instinctive reflexes are stimulus-bound—tied to a specific type of stimulus. They can’t be triggered by associated arbitrary stimuli.[2]

[1] This is a completely unethical experiment, but it serves to make the point as a thought experiment.

[2] I first heard about Pavlov’s experiments on so-called classical conditioning nearly sixty years ago and yet this objection has only recently occurred to me. This is very typical of psychological experiments: there is always a gap between the observable results and the interpretation of these results. Pavlov’s experiments shaped scientific psychology, but if I am right they were badly misinterpreted (even if they were valid experimentally). I suspect their appeal lay in the fact that they were surprising and contrary to common sense—they made psychology seem interesting. But properly interpreted, they are either unsurprising or invalid (at least for reflexes generally). This is rather alarming.