Problems of Consciousness

Problems of Consciousness

Think back to the time when we had very little knowledge of the brain, but substantial knowledge of consciousness and the mind generally. We didn’t even know that the brain is the organ of the body responsible for the mind, or that any bodily organ is (it might emanate from an astral plane or some such). It is a mystery which bodily part is bound up with the mind. Is it the heart or the stomach or the brain? Then it is discovered that the brain is the organ in question, whatever that mysterious organ is. We gradually begin to unravel the brain mystery: the brain consists of cells called “neurons” (they could have been called “quarks”) that have a distinctive structure (nucleus, dendrites, axons), visible under a microscope. We even discover the nerve impulse and begin to figure out how it works (electrochemical processes of inhibition and excitation). Another mystery solved, or partially solved. So, now we know what implements conscious processes in the brain: we know what underlies mental phenomena, as well as which organ is responsible. We are beginning to map the correlates of consciousness in the brain. Good progress so far; we might reasonably hope that other remaining mysteries will be solved, especially given the progress we are making in understanding the physiology of other organs of the body.

But other mysteries remain that call for even more strenuous intellectual efforts: for example, why does consciousness exist? What does it do for its possessor in furthering its life prospects? Here we may turn to the idea of behavioral complexity or flexibility or adaptability: the mind is what enables animals to behave in intelligent complex ways. Then the question becomes how the brain enables this property of mind. Admittedly, this is a steeper problem—even a full-blown mystery. But some genius comes up with a promising idea: the brain consists of an enormous number of these neuron thingummies and they communicate with each other. Other organs may also have enormous numbers of constituent cells, but they don’t talk to each other the way neurons do—they don’t transmit information across the entire organ (think of the corpus callosum). Complex intelligent behavior is based in the complex communicative processes of the brain. Now this is admitted not to remove all perplexity about consciousness in relation to behavior, but it looks like a feasible explanation of one aspect of consciousness. We know why consciousness exists, given that it allows for adaptive complexity; and the brain is what confers this power on it. The powers of the mind are rooted in the powers of the brain as a multicellular holistic rapid-fire processor of information, or so our genius assures us (and it sounds plausible enough). If we go on to ask why all this behavioral fancy footwork, we can appeal to evolutionary theory—complexity aids survival. Thus, we have solved many mysteries of consciousness (as well as the unconscious); in particular, we have solved the problem of the means by which the mind exerts its remarkable behavioral powers. It looks as if we have got consciousness under good explanatory control—as good as the heart, lungs, stomach, etc. Those old mysteries have now disappeared.

But one mystery still stands stubbornly out—the how mystery. How does the brain, in all its holistic informational complexity, produce consciousness? How do those blessed little neurons, numerous and talkative as they are, give rise to (conjure up) the rich pageantry of conscious experience? How does the cheap plonk of the brain get transformed into the exotic cocktail of the mind? Gee, that’s a tough one (much head scratching ensues). In other words, the adamantine core of the mind-body problem has not been solved. We know the which, the what, the when, the means, the why, and the to-what-end—but we don’t know the how. Isn’t that odd? All that impressive mystery-solving and yet no progress with this mystery! Shouldn’t we have solved the how-problem long ago? Thus, we are faced with a meta-mystery: the mystery of why the how problem is so mysterious. It makes one think that nature can’t really be behaving very mysteriously with respect to this problem; the mystery is not a de re metaphysical mystery, but a human-intellect mystery, i.e., a function of our peculiar mental set-up. It’s a blind-spot, a scotoma, an area of cognitive paralysis, a mote of dirt in the mind’s eye. It’s the work of the Devil not God. It’s a bug in the human cognitive system not a sign of the miraculous. The mystery is boring, considered objectively. This is my positive solution to the philosophical mind-body problem: it’s an artifact of our biological nature as finite flawed limited creatures—like back pain or the appendix or the vagus nerve. It’s not a symptom of our intrinsic amazingness. Consciousness is no more objectively amazing than fur or teeth; indeed, less so, because the lack of knowledge in this area serves no discernable purpose. We just happen to be dumb about the how-problem of consciousness, that’s all, though not so dumb about the other problems of consciousness. It isn’t deep or profound or earth-shattering. It isn’t as if the neuron is coated with invisible other-worldly glitter. The brain is as dull as the liver sub specie aeternitatus. The severity of a problem has nothing intrinsically to do with its ontology, but everything to do with its cognitive psychology. No doubt the brain is more than we currently suppose, but that more is not a step into the Land of Oz. Nature is natural, tautologically so. The mechanism (I use the word advisedly) that explains how the brain produces consciousness is not one of those with which we are already familiar: the lungs extracting oxygen, the stomach exuding acid, the kidneys filtering, the bowels pulverizing, the hand squeezing. But it is not in principle of a different metaphysical order; after all, it has only neurons to work with. So, let’s not go all gooey and dualistic over it, godly and spiritual. The consciousness of a frog is no less natural than its moistness or warty skin. But we are damned if we can see it that way. The problem lies in the eye of the beholder.

To sum up: consciousness is mostly not mysterious (anymore), and what remains a mystery cannot be inherently and objectively any different. It is, however, a mystery why it is a mystery; the existence of the mystery is itself a puzzle. It seems to have something to do with our means of acquiring knowledge of empirical reality, i.e., by the senses plus some rules of inference. But knowledge is quite mysterious too, so we lack a clear explanation of the existence of the how-mystery of consciousness. We know the mystery is there, but we are ignorant about what leads to it. We thus suffer from a meta-mystery. Many things about the conscious mind are not mysterious, or not totally mysterious, but one thing is—and that fact is something of a mystery. We have the how-mystery and the mystery of that mystery.[1]

[1] What if the mind-brain relation were not a mystery at all, like the stomach-digestion relation, but that one organ of the body was deeply mysterious to us because of some quirk in our cognitive psychology, say the lungs? Wouldn’t that seem extraordinary? But the mystery would be skin-deep, so to speak, given that the lungs work in the way we know they do. It would be misguided to adopt a dualist metaphysics of the lungs, regarding them as proof of God’s existence. The lungs and the brain are biological products, no matter how hard they may be to understand (in some respects). The case is rather like trying to understand a non-human language with a human brain, or see a color outside of the normal human range with human eyes.