Consciousness Condensed (I)

I made a rare effort to watch a longer YouTube video recently, so I suppose I'd better try and summarise it.

I've never heard of Closer To Truth before but I liked the video very much so I've subscribed to the channel. It seems like a commendably even-handed approach to what often generates heated arguments online – the nature of consciousness. Well, it's about time this blog saw a return to its default topic !

The video is three hours long and covers the interviewee's efforts to produce a "landscape of consciousness", summarising 325+ theories of consciousness. This is something I've wanted for a long time. It seems to me that when you talk to people about what they believe, they often have ideas you think would be self-contradictory, but they don't see it that way at all : everyone thinks their own idea is obvious and is equally convinced that all the others are wrong. Perhaps by mapping the parameter space of consciousness we could discover whole new theories, or at least better understand how they relate to each other.

I've not done much more than glance at the resulting website so far. It doesn't seem to quite do what I had in mind – for example, both idealism and materialism are (or at least can be in some incarnations) monisms, but these and monism are all grouped separately. The difficulty is the truly vast scale of parameter space here, and as Kuhn himself says, some people fervently insist they're materialists whereas he himself might disagree; nuances too mean that pigeon-holing them becomes extremely difficult. Kudos to Kuhn for his efforts to take everyone seriously and try to see their own perspective, rather than revising their claims to fit his taxonomy.

In that spirit, what I'll try to do here is twofold. First, I'll try and summarise the categories of theories as discussed in the video (four in this post and the remaining four in part two). I'll add minimal commentary of my own, except to provide relevant links, and try and present only what was discussed – thus reducing most of the three hours down to about ten minutes or so. Finally I'll add some of the recurring themes that came up and offer a bit more of my own opinions. 

1) The Theories

Kuhn presents eight major categories arranged in a simple, linear way. But what even is consciousness ? Kuhn takes probably the simplest definition possible, which at the same time pinpoints the most difficult aspect of the problem : a felt inner awareness. He neglects free will and intelligence and all that, though some of these do come up a little in the individual discussions. 

This I think is a very sensible approach, as even if you think that "inner awareness" is easy to explain*, it forces you to actually explain it in comparison to other positions. Not everyone agrees that the Hard Problem is hard or even a problem, but this method contrasts the different positions very naturally (Kuhn says that everyone has an assumed theory whether they know it or not) . Kuhn elaborates that consciousness may be the key to Ultimate Reality** : not necessarily that consciousness is reality – we'll get to that – but that our understanding of consciousness and our understanding of the nature of reality are intimately connected.

* Plenty of people think so, but none of their explanations even make sense to me. Either they just don't get it, or I don't. Possibly both, in different ways.
** It's very meaning-of-life stuff, at times – as it should be !

The one bit of motivation that Kuhn presents where I just go "huh ?" is his question : "Should a being which can conceive of eternity be denied it ?" Only later does even the relevance of this become apparent, but it's enormously unsatisfactory... I see no reason whatever that because I can imagine a thing it has some validity, or that I somehow deserve it. 

On to the theories. Kuhn frames this as being a matter of where awareness comes from, which is enormously dependent on the different models.

1) Materialism

Fully half of the theories are some variety of materialism, the idea that there is some physical stuff out there and our experiences supposedly in here aren't necessarily fully distinct. Within this is a surprising range of disagreement, but they all agree that at the very least the physical world is necessary, if not always sufficient, for consciousness.

Why is this so popular ? Probably because of its enormous scientific success. Key to this, says Kuhn, is that by positing an external, objectively testable world, a materialist perspective offers itself up to scrutiny by anyone and everyone. There can be discussion, progress, and consensus. Conversely anything of a non-physical world is much harder (if not impossible) to understand scientifically and so the same kind of progress is impossible.

Kuhn stresses that he himself is not a materialist, but neither is he at all opposed to science – as far as I can tell, he simply thinks consciousness doesn't fit the remit. He notes, though a number of different materialist viewpoints which he thinks have at least some value (and I much prefer this approach to the often fraught online arguments) :

• Enactivism : consciousness is embodied in living systems. It isn't possible to be conscious without a body.
• Neurophenomenology : personhood arises from the whole of a person. The experiential (rather than the physical) has primacy, but still neuroscience has meaning and value. Kuhn likes this idea but says it hasn't made much progress and seems skeptical it ever will.
• Eliminativism : a strong and stupid version of illusionism that says outright that mental states simply do not exist. I hate it, but Kuhn says it has value in at least forcing a new way of thinking about things. I suppose so, but such mental gymnastics – contortions would be a better word – I think are difficult to the point of being damaging rather than productive. I can have a respectful sympathy for many other positions I9 disagree with, but not this one.

Kuhn notes the great variety of materialist perspectives. In some extreme cases, self-professed materialists insist there's nothing more fundamental to reality than, err... consciousness.

You can't win, really.

2) Non-reductive physicalism

By far my biggest critique of the video is that the categories aren't mutually exclusive. No matter, we'll just have to live with that.

NRP is, in some ways, a hardcore version of materialism. It says that consciousness is purely physical... but with the enormous provision that it can't be explained by purely physical laws. The obvious question arises as to what the hell that even means.

The answer seems to lie in emergence. That is, like temperature, consciousness arises from physical processes, but can't be fully encapsulated by those actions. You can't speak of the temperature of a single atom, but you can for a sufficiently large ensemble. 

And there are different kinds of such emergence. Weak emergence is very much like temperature, in that properties at some level are unknowable but ultimately fully explicable from a reductive approach; consciousness arises, somehow, from purely atoms. Strong emergence says that properties are indeed forever inexplicable; something totally new arises as a result of atomic processes without being produced by them.

There's a very nice tie-in here to philosophy of science more generally. You might remember that I went into non-foundational models of reality some while back (a topic with which I'm not entirely finished) and there's a clear connection here. Going from individual atoms to temperature and/or consciousness... in some sense you could think of this as very much different levels of reality. So are there direct, causative connections between them ? Neither form of emergence says anything much about that, at least not directly.

The final major point mentioned here is property dualism. Unlike classical Descartian dualism, which says that consciousness is some kind of unknown substance, property dualism says it's an unknown... property. That is, there's one kind of stuff which can be arranged into atoms and molecules and electrical charges and also minds. It's very like neutral monism, on which more later. Kuhn is instinctively against it for reasons which aren't clear, though I find it rather appealing.

3) Something something QUANTUM

There are more than twenty variants of this, but like materialism, all say that quantum processes are necessary (but not always sufficient) for consciousness. These can be very different flavours of exotic, including notions that it's all due to other dimensions somehow.

Whatever you think about in relation to minds, quantum theory has undoubtedly forced us to confront key issues. Wave-particle duality strongly suggests that our daily intuition about the world is flat-out wrong and we don't see reality as it truly is. At the same time, it seems very observer-centric, raising the issue of what role the observer is playing in constructing its own perception. I say "its" not because I believe all observers are gender-neutral, but to emphasise that the theory itself says nothing about them : it does not insist on them being conscious, and could plausibly be defined as just an interaction.

I tend to strongly agree with Kuhn on this one : naturally skeptical, but his stance has softened. Quantum processes clearly are involved in nature to some degree* e.g. photosynthesis, so certainly they could play a role in consciousness at some level. Kuhn mentions the idea of the brain as a receiver rather than a generator, a concept I have no problem with though some – doubtless because of perceived religious/mystical connotations – react to such ideas as though Roger Penrose personally buggered their pets or something.

* The argument that biology is too warm and wet has never made any sense to me. There's no temperature and certainly no moisture on subatomic scales and the briefest moments of time !

In any case, whether this helps identify what consciousness actually is I'm far more skeptical. It seems to me that a non-physical theory is actually nothing of the sort if it just replaces a substance with some other kind of substance (a la Descartes)... what's the point of that ? It gets you nowhere. "No, don't be daft, electrons can't be consciousness itself, it's the magnetic field, silly !"... it doesn't really make any sense. A truly non-physical theory ought to be more full-throated, but more later.

4) Integrated Information Theory

I found this one much the hardest to understand. It's been floating around for a while and never come across as anything more than respectable-sounding waffle to me, and it still doesn't.

The idea, according to the interview, is that consciousness is some kind of structure in a non-Euclidean world. This structure results from integrating information, somehow.

Nah... I'm gonna skip this one. I'll bring in some of the wider discussion later on in the Themes section, but the theory as described here made no sense to me at all.

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So, four main ideas so far. The world is made of physical stuff and our minds arise out of it (or even don't exist at all); or they arise from it but in a somewhat weirder way; alternatively they might be something verging on the supernatural a la the quantum fields; finally, they might be something multi-dimensional for some reason. 

I think any broader conclusions are best left to next time, when I'll cover panpsychism, monism, dualism, and idealism. I remain unhappy with how all of these are arranged, but at least this rather awkward grouping is definitely not my fault.