A mysterious mystery that's observationally observable

Consciousness is a default topic on this blog because it's bloody interesting. How can something so utterly non-physical arise from atoms bashing about ?

One explanation is that it doesn't - that it's all some sort of illusion. What sort ? One idea is that it's no more illusory than icons on a computer monitor : it's a kind of description of the underlying neural processes, and our conscious thoughts have the same type of control over those processes as opening a new window. Another, stronger version is that it's a more like a rainbow - perceptible, but having no actual control over anything at all. And today we come to the strongest interpretation of all : that we only think we're having experiences, but actually we're not.

As far as I can tell, this is as daft as it sounds. We think we're thinking but not actually thinking ? Ha humm, riiiight. Descartes, get your coat, we're leaving. "I think, therefore I am thinking !" Slam door, exit stage right.

I came across this idea is this nice rebuttal article (IAI isn't a site I've encountered before but it looks like one to pay attention to) so I'm doing this the wrong way round. Still, there seem to be two aspects to this. The first charge is against neuroscientist Michael Graziano. According to IAI author Bernardo Kastrup (philosopher and computer scientist), Graziano makes some very odd claims indeed. In his essay at The Atlantic, Graziano writes :

The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, and unexplainable, because that packet of information in the brain is incoherent. It’s a quick sketch. 

That opens up a philosophical can of worms. Our perception clearly isn't the same as reality because it's limited, but we have no way to describe reality except through perception. But lunatics have perception completely at odds with everyone else. Objective reality is a necessary assumption without which we're lost.

What’s it a sketch of? The brain processes information. It focuses its processing resources on this or that chunk of data. That’s the complex, mechanistic act of a massive computer. The brain also describes this act to itself. That description, shaped by millions of years of evolution, weird and quirky and stripped of details, depicts a “me” and a state of subjective consciousness. 

This is why we can’t explain how the brain produces consciousness. It’s like explaining how white light gets purified of all colors. The answer is, it doesn’t. Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. The computer concludes that it has qualia because that serves as a useful, if simplified, self-model. What we can do as scientists is to explain how the brain constructs information, how it models the world in quirky ways, how it models itself, and how it uses those models to good advantage.

While I quite agree that our conscious thoughts and perception can be wildly inaccurate (more on that in a minute), I don't think it makes any sense to say that "consciousness is a description" and also that "consciousness doesn't exist". First, the two claims are mutually exclusive. You cannot have a description that doesn't exist, because that's stupid. Second, if consciousness does exist (which it self-evidently does) but is merely a description, that doesn't help with the weirdness of it in the slightest. That's the whole point people are confused about : how the hell do we get non-physical, purely subjective awareness out of an apparently objective, external, physical reality ?

Kastrup addresses another Graziano essay which is unfortunately paywalled on New Scientist :

 Graziano argues that consciousness is merely a model the brain constructs of itself, so it can “monitor and control itself”.  Consciousness seems immaterial—his argument goes—simply because, in order to focus attention on survival-relevant tasks, the model fails to incorporate superfluous details of brain anatomy and physiology. In Graziano’s words, “the brain describes a simplified version of itself, then reports this as a ghostly, non-physical essence.” 

This is all very reasonable. The problem is that it has nothing to do with phenomenal consciousness. Graziano’s authoritative prose disguises a sleight of hand: he implicitly changes the meaning he attributes to the term ‘consciousness’ as he develops the argument. He starts by talking about subjective experience—i.e. phenomenal consciousness, which is what science can’t explain—just to end up explaining something else entirely: our ability to cognize ourselves as agents and metacognitively represent our own mental contents. 

IAI graciously gives Graziano the chance to respond. Much of what he has to say seems perfectly fine, but he makes one very strange claim indeed :

Among the most common and puzzling reaction I get goes something like this: ‘Graziano says that consciousness does not exist; that we lack an inner dialogue; that getting stuck by a pin, or walking into a wall, is ethereal’. None of these statements are true, of course, but I do often hear them coming from the nonscientific, or often pseudoscientific, political side.

But you said it so explicitly in The Atlantic : "consciousness doesn't happen"; "the brain insists it has consciousness". If this is different from saying that "consciousness doesn't exist", then I'd very much like to know how.

Let's suppose that Graziano has been misinterpreted, that he does think consciousness exists but is merely of the rainbow-like descriptive quality. In that case, much of what else he has to say has merit.

The brain builds models of things in the world around you and models of its own internal events, and in every case, probably without exception, the models are simplifications; they are not perfectly detailed or accurate. Let’s follow this logic. You claim to have a conscious experience. You make that claim because you think it’s true – your higher cognition has hold of that information. You think it’s true because it resonates with your deeper, intuitive models constructed beneath the level of higher cognition. What you intuit, think, and claim, are based on information constructed in the brain.

I think that is perfectly reasonable - self-knowledge has all the same errors as other kinds of knowledge. When I move my arm, I have no sensation of the electrical currents directed by my brain to move it. All kinds of bodily processes are under my conscious control without me being aware of them. You can be mistaken about your own emotions. And you can have implicit, unconscious bias where you'll act differently than your stated beliefs. But then Graziano takes a stranger turn :

There is no wiggle-room about it. It must be true. But that information is almost certainly not perfectly accurate. Therefore, we know – I would say with certainty – that whatever consciousness you actually have, it is different from the consciousness that you think you have. That’s a thought and a half. People always have a hard time wrapping their minds around it.

With the caveat that consciousness is a spectrum, not a binary state (e.g. dreams), I don't think that's possible. I can certainly be mistaken about my own deeper beliefs, desires, and external perceptions. Happens all the time. But mistaken about my own conscious thoughts ? I don't think so. I cannot think I'm thinking something different from what I'm actually thinking - not at the highest level of consciousness, anyway. I can certainly be mistaken about what my brain is doing, but that's a different prospect.

Some of the attributes of consciousness that you claim to have, you probably don’t have. Some of the attributes of consciousness that you actually have, you probably don’t know that you have. 

Yes, that's fine. I may be mistaken about how much control consciousness gives me - I may feel I'm consciously in control when I'm actually not (I don't believe that argument but I do respect it as a legitimate point of view). If that's all he's saying, then fair enough.

My interest as a scientist is this: what parts of the consciousness that we think we have are accurate, and what parts are inaccurate? Literally, physically, the brain processes information through the interaction of billions of neurons. But when we introspect, when we dip into our intuitions and thinking, we report something totally different – not electrical impulses and synapses, not interacting chunks of information, but something amorphous and ghost-like.

Which is all well and good, but is absolutely at odds with the statement that consciousness doesn't happen. I have to suppose that the author went mad when he wrote that, because he unambiguously believes that consciousness does in fact exist ("An internal dialogue? Sure, of course we all have it. A mind spinning with thoughts and sensory impressions? Yes.") A pity the New Scientist article is paywalled. Comparing the Atlantic and IAI pieces, Graziano seems tremendously confused.

Kastrup next takes aim at an Aeon piece by philosopher Keith Frankish. Kastrup goes to considerable lengths to ram home the point that you can't merely think you're thinking : you must, unavoidably, actually be thinking. And Frankish does makes some really outlandish and I think utterly pointless claims :

The sound seems to be in the air, the taste in the wine, the pain in your toe, and so on. But it is generally agreed that this can’t be right. For science tells us that objects don’t have such qualitative properties, just complex physical ones of the sort described by physics and chemistry. The atoms that make up the skin of the apple aren’t red... It seems, then, that the qualities of colour, sound, pain and so on exist only in our minds, as properties of our experiences. Philosophers refer to these subjective qualities of experience as ‘qualia’ or ‘phenomenal properties’, and they say that creatures whose experiences have them are phenomenally conscious. 

It is phenomenal consciousness that I believe is illusory. For science finds nothing qualitative in our brains, any more than in the world outside. The atoms in your brain aren’t coloured and they don’t compose a colourful inner image. (And even if they did, there is no inner eye to see it.) Nor do they have any other qualitative properties. There are no inner sounds, smells, tastes and pains, and no inner observer to experience them if there were. 

Riiight. That's just bollocks, isn't it ? Yes, perception is not the same as reality, but it's not completely unrelated either. An apple viewed under the same conditions will always look red. Our perception isn't so subjective that an apple could spontaneously appear to be a psychotic turtle or an exploding toaster : we'd have to work very, very hard to cause those sorts of mistakes. The redness is indeed in our minds, but it arises from distinct and entirely physical characteristics of the apple. As for there being no inner eye or mental life, that is positively mad. It literally doesn't make any sense at all. I can't be just pretending that redness exists. True, redness could well be my brain's way of describing the signals it processes, but that doesn't for one moment mean I have no inner perception (nor does an inner perception require that atoms physically have redness - indeed the whole point is that mental perception is non-physical). Kastrup adds :

Bewilderingly to me, he then makes a remarkable admission: “But how does a brain state represent a phenomenal property? This is a tough question.” Well, this is the only salient question, isn’t it? And Frankish’s entire case rests on the answer. He continues:
“I think the answer should focus on the state’s effects. A brain state represents a certain property if it causes thoughts and reactions that would be appropriate if the property were present.”
This blatantly begs the question again. Only under the assumptions of eliminativism or illusionism do effects sufficiently account for the question Frankish is leaving open. What defines experience is precisely that, regardless of its effects, there is something it is like to have it.

Well exactly. The whole point is what that inner experience really is and how it arises. Saying that we don't have inner experience is absurd. From a perspective of tackling what consciousness is, it doesn't matter a jot that our mental descriptions of the external world are in some sense inaccurate - the fact is, we have non-physical mental descriptions.

Frankish raises a fair point regarding free will :

There is absolutely no reliable evidence for nonphysical effects in the physical world – no confirmed cases where a nonphysical feature diverts an electron, triggers a chemical reaction, makes a neuron fire, or produces any other physical change. 

As I've already admitted, this is a difficulty. But I don't see how we would go about measuring physical effects induced from non-physical causes. Free will means I can move about however I choose, and I hold to the common sense notion that I do this using my conscious thought. I admit I don't know how the two domains interact. But I also point out that it's damn hard to construct an experiment where we could pin down the moment a conscious choice has a direct physical effect at the subatomic (or other) level. Furthermore :

If our sensations are nonphysical features, then it looks like they don’t have any effects on anything, even on our own thoughts and reactions. We would think and act in exactly the same way (including believing that we are phenomenally conscious) if we didn’t have them or had completely different ones. This is a strange conclusion.

That's just the idea that consciousness is a rainbow-like illusion. But it presupposes that free will just isn't a thing, which Kastrup points out is circular logic. But I digress - free will is not necessarily the same as consciousness anyway.

Frankish then dives into some truly ghastly, torturous analysis that confounds the bleedin' obvious with total nonsense. It's as though these "illusionists" desperately don't want to believe in consciousness but ultimately can't bring themselves to deny it, because its existence is as obvious as a brick to the face.

Illusionists agree with other physicalists that our sense of having a rich phenomenal consciousness is due to introspective mechanisms. But they add that these mechanisms misrepresent their targets... your introspective system misrepresents complex patterns of brain activity as simple phenomenal properties. The phenomenality is an illusion. 

The idea, then, is that introspection tracks the impact objects make on us. The red quality you seem to experience is an expression of your response to the apple – your active ‘redding’, as the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey puts it in his book Seeing Red (2006). However, introspection doesn’t represent phenomenal properties as properties of us but as powers in objects to create that impact.

What in the world does he mean by "illusion" here ? Look, this isn't difficult. Objects have characteristics which induce mental states via perception. Those states are necessarily limited and imperfect. But for god's sake man, to claim those states don't exist is preposterous ! Of course they are illusions in the sense that there are no atoms of justice or molecules of mercy, but to pretend that there's no inner eye with which to see redness is ridiculous. To simultaneously claim, "the apple is not really red, that's just a mental description" and also "there are no mental descriptions" is just gghhaaaargh. Stop it.

Illusionists agree, then, that there is more to conscious experience than access consciousness: there is a level of self-monitoring involving the illusion of phenomenality. We might call it pseudo-phenomenal consciousness... representations of phenomenal properties are simplified, schematic representations of the underlying reality, which we can use for the purposes of self-control. We should no more expect to find phenomenal properties in our brains than to find folders and waste baskets inside our laptops.

You're a bunch of bloody nutters. You take a perfectly obvious concept and twist it into something outrageously complicated. Again, you can't say, "mental descriptions are just representations" and then say, "mental descriptions don't exist".

If we observe something science can’t explain, then the simplest hypothesis is that it’s an illusion, especially if it can be observed only from one particular angle. This is exactly the case with phenomenal consciousness. 

The hell are you on about mate ? What in god's name do you think "illusion" means ? Is it something I can see or isn't it ? START MAKING SENSE ! Illusionism is, as far as I can tell, either an utterly pointless rebranding of what we all knew already, or a self-contradicting mass of totally confusing hogwash.

If I had to try and work out what an illusionist meant, I might pose the following questions :

• What do you mean by illusion ? Something that is non-physical, a trick of perception, something that doesn't exist at all, or something else entirely ?
• Do you deny we have an inner mental life and images, or not ?
• If we have mental lives, in what sense are they illusory ? 
• If we don't have mental lives, how can I be fooled into thinking that they're - in some very loose sense - real ?
• Everyone already accepts that mental perceptions are fundamentally different to external reality. The difficulty is that one is physical while the other is non-physical. What new explanation do you offer as to how one arises from the other ? What property of your sort of "illusion" in any way helps explain what mental perception actually is ?

EDIT : Kastrup responds to Graziano's response here, which pretty much boils down to what I've said. Illusionism is self-contradicting and doesn't make any sense. "I'm not really thinking. I just think I'm thinking". Daft.