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Akram Vignan for Scientists Is there a difference between Self realization and self realization? Having attained the Self, from a qualitative, subjective and unified experience, much of what Prof John Searle says is easy for us. The following is presented to the selective group because, Dadashri had deep inner intents and has laid down the seeds for the world to understand Akram Vignan at a Scientific Level. He wanted scientists to understand his precise unfolding of the Self and the Scientific Circumstantial Evidences at the root level. There is much research that has happened in Neurosciences which has brought man to the ultimate frontier of Who am I? from the scientific perspective, and some of us have already crossed and attained it through pragnya awakened by Dadashri the Akram Vignani. The question now remains as to how we who are on the other side of the line, meet and really begin a meaningful dialogue and thus begin to present to this world, the finer details of what Dadashri has opened up in his very subtle answers in satsang regarding this ultimate knowledge called Tattvagnan elemental knowledge. This is where your help is needed. Please think along and about the the lines of scientists like Dr. John Searle in your area and approach them with our Vignan. Let us begin an initial interaction with them so that while Pujya Deepakbhai is in traveling abroad we may arrange a meeting with a select few such scientists and begin the journey in this worthwhile direction. Please remember and know that the Light that is within us can be made as laser thin as we need it to tease out the subtlest elements that remain mutually unexplored so far. Only a hair strand worth of the knowledge of the Gnani has been understood so far. With the live presence of the living Gnani Purush as the connection in this field, let us make this one of our goals. Please note that since 1999, Dr. Searle and other intense and deep investigators across the globe have gone much farther. There is enough early scientific evidence that supports a face to face meeting with the knowledge of Vyavasthit of Dadashri. For instance, it is now proven that even prior to the movement of say the right hand, much activity arises in significant other areas--non motor cortex-- in the brain. Only when the hand moves, he says, 'I moved my hand- or- my hand moved.' In fact the motion of the hand had already begun before his conscious awareness of it! This cutting edge fund of knowledge has profound worldly implications. It leads directly to the cause and effect relationship life after life, unfolded in The Science of Karma by Dadashri. It ties in to the scientific circumstantial evidences at the subatomic level. And much more. It has implications in the field of justice as we know it. Is anyone really guilty? It takes us to the ultimate solution of the eternal question of free will versus destiny. Once these scientists become aware of the existence of the marvel of Akram Vignan that exists through Pujya Deepakbhai now, our work will be done. Here then is the appetizer... Jai Sat Chit Anand
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Consciousness .
John R. Searle . Abstract
Until very recently, most neurobiologists did not regard consciousness as a suitable topic for scientific investigation. This reluctance was based on certain philosophical mistakes, primarily the mistake of supposing that the subjectivity of consciousness made it beyond the reach of an objective science. Once we see that consciousness is a biological phenomenon like any other, then it can be investigated neurobiologically. Consciousness is entirely caused by neurobiological processes and is realized in brain structures. The essential trait of consciousness that we need to explain is unified qualitative subjectivity. Consciousness thus differs from other biological phenomena in that it has a subjective or first-person ontology, but this subjective ontology does not prevent us from having an epistemically objective science of consciousness. We need to overcome the philosophical tradition that treats the mental and the physical as two distinct metaphysical realms. Two common approaches to consciousness are those that adopt the building block model, according to which any conscious field is made of its various parts, and the unified field model, according to which we should try to explain the unified character of subjective states of consciousness. These two approaches are discussed and reasons are given for preferring the unified field theory to the building block model. Some relevant research on consciousness involves the subjects of blindsight, the split-brain experiments, binocular rivalry, and gestalt switching. I.
Resistance to the Problem
As recently as two
decades ago there was little interest among neuroscientists,
philosophers, psychologists
and cognitive scientists generally
in the problem of
consciousness. Reasons
for the resistance to the problem varied from discipline to
discipline. Philosophers
had turned to the analysis of language, psychologists had become
convinced that a scientific psychology must be a science
of behavior, and
cognitive scientists took their research program to be the
discovery of the computer programs in the brain that,
they thought, would explain
cognition. It
seemed especially puzzling that neuroscientists should
be reluctant to deal with the problem of consciousness,
because one of the chief functions of the brain is to
cause and sustain conscious states.
Studying the brain
without studying consciousness would be like
studying the stomach without studying digestion, or
studying genetics without studying the inheritance of traits. When I first got
interested in this problem seriously and tried to discuss it with brain scientists, I found that most
of them were not interested in the question.
The reasons for this resistance were various but they mostly
boiled down to two. First,
many neuroscientists felt -- and some still do -- that
consciousness is not a suitable subject for
neuroscientific investigation.
A legitimate brain science can study the microanatomy
of the Purkinje cell,
or attempt to discover
new neurotransmitters, but consciousness seems too
airy-fairy and touchy-feely to be a real scientific subject.
Others did not exclude consciousness from scientific
investigation, but they
had a second reason: "We are not ready" to tackle the
problem of
consciousness. They may
be right about that, but my guess is
that a lot of people in the early 1950s thought we were not
ready to tackle the
problem of the molecular basis of life and heredity.
They were wrong; and I suggest for the current question,
the best way to get ready to deal with a research
problem may be to try to solve it.
There were, of
course, famous earlier twentieth
century exceptions to the general
reluctance to deal with consciousness,
and their work has been valuable.
I am thinking in
particular of the work of Sir Arthur Sherrington,
Roger Sperry, and Sir John Eccles.
Whatever was the case 20 years ago,
today many serious researchers
are attempting to tackle the problem.
Among neuroscientists who have written recent books about
consciousness are Cotterill (1998), Crick (1994), Damasio (1999),
Edelman (1989, 1992), Freeman (1995), Gazzaniga (1988), Greenfield
(1995), Hobson (1999), Libet (1993), and Weiskrantz (1997).
As far as I can tell, the race to solve the
problem of consciousness is already on.
My aim here is not
to try to survey this literature but to characterize some of the
neurobiological problems of consciousness
from a philosophical point of view.
II.
Consciousness as a Biological Problem
What exactly is the neurobiological problem of consciousness?
The problem, in its crudest terms, is this:
How exactly do brain processes cause conscious states
and how exactly are those states realized in brain structures?
So stated, this problem naturally breaks down into a number
of smaller but still large problems:
What exactly are the neurobiological correlates of
conscious states (NCC),
and which of those correlates
are actually causally responsible for the production of
consciousness? What are the principles according to which
biological phenomena such as neuron firings can bring about
subjective states of sentience or awareness?
How do those principles relate to the already well understood principles of biology?
Can we explain consciousness with the existing theoretical
apparatus or do we need
some revolutionary new theoretical concepts to explain it?
Is consciousness localized
in certain regions of the brain or is it
a global phenomenon? If it is confined to certain regions,
which ones? Is it
correlated with specific anatomical features, such as specific
types of neurons, or is it to be explained functionally with
a variety of anatomical correlates?
What is the right level for explaining
consciousness? Is it the level of neurons and synapses, as most
researchers seem to think, or do we have to go to higher
functional levels such as neuronal maps (Edelman 1989, 1992),
or whole clouds of neurons
(Freeman 1995), or
are all of these levels much too high and we have to go below
the level of neurons and synapses to the level of the
microtubules (Penrose 1994 and Hameroff 1998a, 1998b)?
Or do we have to think much more
globally in terms of Fourier transforms and holography (Pribram
1976, 1991, 1999)?
As stated, this cluster of problems sounds similar to any other such set of problems in biology or in the sciences
in general. It sounds like the problem concerning microorganisms:
How, exactly, do they cause disease symptoms and how are those
symptoms manifested in patients?
Or the problem in genetics:
By what mechanisms exactly does the genetic structure of the
zygote produce the phenotypical
traits of the mature organism? In
the end I think that is the right way to think of the problem of consciousness -- it is a biological problem
like any other, because
consciousness is a biological phenomenon
in exactly the same sense as digestion, growth, or
photosynthesis. But unlike other problems in biology, there is a persistent
series of philosophical
problems that surround the problem of consciousness
and before addressing some current research I would like to
address some of these problems.
III. Identifying the Target: The Definition of
Consciousness.
One often hears it said that "consciousness" is
frightfully hard to define. But
if we are talking about a definition in common sense terms, sufficient
to identify the target of the investigation, as opposed to a precise
scientific definition of the sort that typically comes at the end of a
scientific investigation, then the word does not seem to me hard to
define. Here is the
definition : Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective
states and processes of sentience or awareness.
Consciousness, so defined, begins when we wake in the
morning from a dreamless sleep - and continues until we fall asleep again, die, go into a coma
or otherwise become
"unconscious." It
includes all of the
enormous variety of the awareness
that we think of as
characteristic of our waking life.
It includes everything from feeling a pain, to perceiving
objects visually, to states of anxiety and depression, to working out
cross word puzzles, playing chess, trying to remember your aunt's
phone number, arguing about politics, or to just wishing you were
somewhere else.
Dreams on this definition are a form of consciousness, though
of course they are in
many respects quite different from
waking consciousness.
This definition is not universally accepted and
the word consciousness is used in a variety of other ways. Some
authors use the word only to refer to states of self
consciousness, i.e. the consciousness that humans and some
primates have of themselves as
agents. Some use it to refer to
the second-order
mental states
about other mental states; so according to this definition, a
pain would not be a conscious
state, but worrying
about a pain would be a conscious
state. Some use "consciousness"
behavioristically to refer to any form of complex intelligent behavior.
It is, of course, open to anyone to use any word anyway he
likes, and we can always
redefine consciousness as a technical term.
Nonetheless, there
is a genuine phenomenon of consciousness in the
ordinary sense, however we choose
to name it; and it is that phenomenon that I am trying
to identify now, because I believe it is the proper target of the
investigation.
Consciousness has
distinctive features that we
need to explain. Because
I believe that some, not all, of the problems of consciousness
are going to have a neurobiological solution, what follows is a shopping list of what a neurobiological account of
consciousness should
explain. IV.
The Essential Feature of Consciousness: The Combination of
Qualitativeness, Subjectivity and
Unity
Consciousness has three aspects that make it different
from other biological phenomena, and indeed different
from other phenomena in the natural world.
These three aspects are
qualitativeness, subjectivity, and unity.
I used to think that for
investigative purposes we could treat
them as three
distinct features, but because they are
logically interrelated,
I now think it best to treat them together, as different
aspects of the same
feature. They are not
separate because the first
implies the second, and
the second implies the third.
I discuss them in order.
Qualitativeness
Every conscious state has a certain qualitative feel to it,
and you can see this clearly if you consider examples.
The experience of
tasting beer is very different from
hearing Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony, and both of those have
a different qualitative character from smelling a rose or
seeing a sunset. These
examples illustrate the different qualitative
features of conscious experiences.
One way to put this point
is to say that for every conscious experience there
is something that it feels like, or something that it
is like to have that conscious experience.
Nagel (1974) made this point over two decades ago when he
pointed out that if bats
are conscious, then there is something
that "it is like" to be a bat.
This distinguishes consciousness
from other features of the world, because in this sense, for a
nonconscious entity such as a car or a brick there is nothing that
"it is like" to be that entity.
Some philosophers describe
this feature of consciousness with the word qualia, and
they say there is a
special problem of qualia. I
am reluctant to adopt this usage, because it seems to imply
that there are two separate problems, the problem of
consciousness and the problem of qualia.
But as I
understand these terms, "qualia" is just a plural
name for conscious states.
Because "consciousness"
and "qualia" are coextensive, there seems no point
in introducing a special term.
Some people think that qualia are characteristic only of
perceptual experiences, such
as seeing colors and
having sensations such as
pains, but that there is no
qualitative character to thinking.
As I understand these terms, that is wrong. Even conscious thinking has a
qualitative feel to it.
There is something it is
like to think that two plus two equals four.
There is no way to
describe it except by saying that it is the
character of thinking consciously “two plus two equals
four". But if
you believe there is no qualitative character to thinking
that, then try to think the same thought in
a language you do not
know well. If I think in
French "deux et deux fait quatre," I find that it
feels quite different. Or
try thinking, more painfully, “two plus two equals one hundred
eighty-seven." Once
again I think you will agree that
these conscious thoughts have different characters.
However, the point must be trivial; that is,
whether or not
conscious thoughts are qualia must
follow from our definition of qualia.
As I am using the term, thoughts
definitely are qualia.
Subjectivity
Conscious states only
exist when they are experienced by some human or
animal subject. In
that sense, they are essentially
subjective.
I used to treat subjectivity and
qualitativeness as distinct features, but it now seems
to me that properly understood, qualitativeness implies
subjectivity, because in order for there to be a
qualitative feel to some event, there must be some
subject that experiences the event.
No subjectivity, no experience.
Even if more than
one subject experiences a similar phenomenon, say
two people listening to the same concert, all the
same, the qualitative experience can only exist
as experienced by some subject or subjects. And even if the different token experiences are qualitatively
identical, that is they all exemplify the same type,
nonetheless each token
experience can only exist if the subject of that experience
has it. Because
conscious states are subjective in this sense, they
have what I will call a first-person ontology, as opposed
to the third-person ontology of mountains and
molecules, which can exist even if no living creatures exist.
Subjective conscious states have a first-person
ontology (“ontology” here means mode of existence) because
they only exist when they are experienced
by some human or animal agent.
They are experienced by
some "I" that has the experience, and it is
in that sense that they
have a first-person ontology.
Unity
All conscious experiences at any given point in an agent's
life come as part of one unified conscious field.
If I am sitting at my desk looking out the window, I do not
just see the sky above and the brook below shrouded by
the trees, and at the same time feel the pressure of
my body against the chair, the shirt against my back,
and the aftertaste of coffee in my mouth, rather I experience
all of these as part of a single unified conscious field.
This unity of any state of qualitative subjectivity has
important consequences for a scientific study of consciousness.
I say more about them later on.
At present I just want to call attention to the fact that the unity is
already implicit in subjectivity and qualitativeness for the
following reason: If
you try to imagine that my conscious
state is broken into 17 parts, what you imagine is not a single
conscious subject with 17 different conscious states but rather
17 different centers of consciousness.
A conscious state, in short,
is by definition unified, and the unity will follow from the subjectivity and the qualitativeness, because there is
no way you could have subjectivity and qualitativeness
except with that particular form of unity.
There are two areas of current
research where the aspect of unity is especially
important. These
are first, the study of the split-brain
patients by Gazzaniga, (1998)
and others (Gazzaniga, Bogen, and Sperry 1962, 1963), and
second, the study of the binding problem by a number of
contemporary researchers. The interest of the split-brain
patients is that both the anatomical
and the behavioral evidence suggest that
in these patients there are two centers of consciousness that
after commissurotomy are communicating
with each other only imperfectly.
They seem to have, so to speak, two conscious minds inside one skull. The
interest of the binding problem
is that it looks like this problem might
give us in microcosm a way of studying the nature of
consciousness, because just as the visual system binds
all of the different stimulus inputs into a single
unified visual percept, so the entire brain somehow
unites all of the variety of our different stimulus
inputs into a single unified conscious experience. Several
researchers have explored the role of synchronized neuron firings in
the range of 40hz to account for the capacity of different perceptual
systems to bind the diverse stimuli of anatomically distinct neurons
into a single perceptual experience. (Llinas 1990, Llinas and Pare
1991, Llinas and Ribary 1993, Llinas and Ribary,1992, Singer 1993,
1995, Singer and Gray,
1995,) For example in the
case of vision, anatomically separate neurons specialized for such
things as line, angle and color all contribute to a single, unified,
conscious visual experience
of
an object.
Crick
(1994) extended the proposal for the binding problem to a
general hypothesis about the NCC.
He put forward a tentative hypothesis that the
NCC consists of synchronized neuron firings in the general
range of 40 Hz in various
networks in the thalamocortical system,
specifically in connections between the thalamus and layers
four and six of the cortex.
This kind of instantaneous unity has to be distinguished from the
organized unification of
conscious sequences that we get from short term or iconic memory. For nonpathological forms of consciousness at least
some memory is essential in order that the conscious sequence
across time can come in
an organized fashion. For example, when I speak a sentence I have
to be able to remember the beginning of the sentence at the
time I get to the end if
I am to produce coherent speech.
Whereas instantaneous unity is essential to, and is part of,
the definition of consciousness,
organized unity across time is essential to the
healthy functioning of the conscious organism, but it is not
necessary for the very existence of conscious subjectivity.
This combined feature of qualitative, unified subjectivity is
the essence of
consciousness and it,
more than anything else, is what makes consciousness different
from other phenomena studied by the natural sciences.
The problem is to explain how brain processes, which are
objective third person
biological, chemical and
electrical processes, produce subjective
states of feeling and thinking.
How does the brain get us over the hump, so to speak, from
events in the synaptic
cleft and the ion channels to conscious thoughts and feelings?
If you take seriously this combined feature as the target of
explanation, I believe
you get a different sort of research project from what is
currently the most influential. Most neurobiologists take what
I will call the building
block approach: Find the NCC for specific elements in
the conscious field such as the experience of color, and then
construct the whole field out of such building blocks. Another
approach, which I will
call the unified field approach, would take the research
problem to be one of explaining how the
brain produces a unified field
of subjectivity to start with. On the unified field approach,
there are no building blocks, rather there are just
modifications of the already
existing field of qualitative subjectivity.
I say more about this later.
Some philosophers and neuroscientists think we can never have
an explanation of subjectivity:
We can never explain why warm things feel
warm and red things look red. To these skeptics
there is a simple answer:
We know it happens. We know that brain processes cause
all of our inner qualitative, subjective thoughts and feelings.
Because we know that it happens we ought to try to figure
out how it happens.
Perhaps in the end we will fail
but we cannot assume the
impossibility of success before we
try.
Many philosophers and scientists also think that the
subjectivity of conscious states
makes it impossible to have a strict science of consciousness. For, they argue, if science is by definition objective, and
consciousness is by definition
subjective, it follows that there cannot be a science
of consciousness. This argument is fallacious. It commits the fallacy of
ambiguity over the terms
objective and subjective. Here
is the ambiguity: We need
to distinguish two different senses
of the objective-subjective distinction.
In one sense, the
epistemic sense (“epistemic”
here means having to do with knowledge), science is indeed
objective. Scientists
seek truths that are equally accessible to
any competent observer and that are independent of the
feelings and attitudes of the
experimenters in question.
An example of an epistemically objective claim would be
"Bill Clinton weighs 210 pounds".
An example of an epistemically
subjective claim would be "Bill Clinton is
a good president". The
first is objective because its truth
or falsity is settleable in a way that is independent
of the feelings and attitudes of the investigators.
The second is
subjective because it is not so settleable.
But there is another sense
of the objective-subjective distinction, and that is
the ontological sense (“ontological” here means having to
do with existence). Some
entities, such as
pains, tickles, and itches, have a subjective
mode of existence, in
the sense that they exist only as experienced by a conscious subject.
Others, such as
mountains, molecules and tectonic plates
have an objective mode of existence,
in the sense that their existence does not depend on any consciousness.
The point of making this distinction
is to call attention to the fact that the scientific
requirement of epistemic
objectivity does not
preclude ontological subjectivity as a domain of
investigation. There
is no reason whatever why we cannot
have an objective science of pain, even though pains
only exist when they are felt by conscious agents.
The ontological subjectivity of the feeling of pain does not preclude an
epistemically objective science of pain.
Though many philosophers and neuroscientists are
reluctant to think of subjectivity as a proper domain
of scientific investigation, in actual practice, we work on it all the time.
Any neurology textbook will
contain extensive discussions of the etiology and treatment of such ontologically
subjective states as pains and anxieties. V.
Some Other Features To
keep this list short, I mention some other
features of consciousness
only briefly.
Feature 2:Intentionality
Most important, conscious states typically have “intentionality,”
that property of mental
states by which they are directed at or
about objects and states of affairs in the world.
Philosophers use the word intentionality not just for
“intending” in the ordinary
sense but for any mental phenomena at all that have
referential content. According to this usage, beliefs, hopes,
intentions, fears, desires and perceptions
all are intentional.
So if I have a belief, I must have a belief about something.
If I have a normal visual experience,
it must seem to me that I am actually seeing something, etc.
Not all conscious states are intentional and not all
intentionality is
conscious; for example, undirected anxiety lacks intentionality, and
the beliefs a man has even when he is asleep lack consciousness then
and there. But I
think it is obvious
that many of the important evolutionary
functions of consciousness are intentional:
For example, an animal has conscious feelings of hunger and
thirst, engages in conscious
perceptual discriminations, embarks on conscious intentional
actions, and consciously recognizes both friend and foe. All of
these are conscious
intentional phenomena and all are essential for
biological survival.
A general neurobiological account of consciousness will
explain the intentionality of conscious states. For example, an
account of color vision will naturally explain the capacity of
agents to make color
discriminations.
Feature 3,
The Distinction Between Center and Periphery of Attention.
It is a remarkable
fact that within my conscious field at any given
time I can shift my attention at will from one aspect to
another. So for example,
right now I am not paying any attention to the pressure
of the shoes on my feet or the feeling of the shirt on my neck. But I can shift my attention to them any time I want.
There is already a fair amount of useful work done on
attention. Feature
4. All Human Conscious Experiences Are in Some
Mood or Other.
There is always a
certain flavor to one's conscious
states, always an answer to the question "How are you
feeling?". The moods
do not necessarily have names. Right now I am not especially
elated or annoyed, not ecstatic or depressed, not even just
blah. But all the same I
will become acutely aware of my mood if there is
a dramatic change, if I receive some extremely good or bad
news, for example.
Moods are not the same as emotions, though the mood we
are in will predispose us to having certain emotions.
We are, by the way, closer to having pharmacological control of
moods with such drugs as
Prozac than we are to having control of other internal features
of consciousness.
Feature
5. All Conscious States Come to Us in the
Pleasure/Unpleasure Dimension
For any total conscious experience there is always an answer to
the question of whether it
was pleasant, painful, unpleasant, neutral, etc.
The pleasure/unpleasure feature is not the same as mood, though
of course some moods are more pleasant than others.
Feature 6.
Gestalt Structure.
The brain has a
remarkable capacity to organize
very degenerate perceptual stimuli into coherent
conscious perceptual forms.
I can, for example, recognize a face, or a
car, on the basis of very limited stimuli.
The best known examples of Gestalt structures come from the
researches of the Gestalt psychologists. Feature
7. Familiarity
There is in varying degrees a sense of familiarity that
pervades our conscious
experiences. Even if I
see a house I have never seen before,
I still recognize it as a house;
it is of a form and
structure that is familiar to me.
Surrealist painters try
to break this sense of the familiarity and
ordinariness of
our experiences, but even in surrealist paintings the
drooping watch still looks like a watch, and the three-headed
dog still looks like a dog.
One could continue this list, and I have done
so in other writings (Searle 1992).
The point now is to get a minimal shopping
list of the features that we
want a neurobiology of consciousness to explain. In order to
look for a causal explanation we need to know what the effects
are that need explanation.
Before examining some current research projects, we need to
clear more of the ground. VI.
The Traditional Mind-Body Problem and How to Avoid It.
The confusion
about objectivity and subjectivity I mentioned
earlier is just the
tip of the iceberg of the traditional mind-body problem.
Though ideally I think scientists would be better off if they
just ignored this problem, the fact is that they are as much
victims of the philosophical traditions as anyone else, and
many scientists, like many philosophers, are still in the grip
of the traditional categories of mind and body, mental and
physical, dualism and materialism, etc.
This is not the place for
a detailed discussion of the mind-body problem, but I
need to say a few words about it so
that, in the
discussion that follows, we
can avoid the confusions it has engendered.
The simplest form of the mind body problem is this: What exactly is
the relation of consciousness to the brain?
There are two parts to
this problem, a philosophical part and a scientific part.
I have already been assuming a simple solution to the
philosophical part. The
solution, I believe, is consistent with everything we know about
biology and about how the
world works. It is this:
Consciousness and other sorts of mental phenomena are caused by neurobiological
processes in the brain, and they are realized in the structure
of the brain. In a
word, the conscious mind is caused by brain processes and is itself a
higher level feature of the brain.
The philosophical part is relatively easy but
the scientific part is much
harder. How, exactly, do brain processes cause consciousness
and how, exactly, is consciousness realized in the brain? I want to be very clear about the philosophical part,
because it is not possible to approach the
scientific question intelligently if the philosophical issues are unclear. Notice two features of the philosophical solution.
First, the relationship
of brain mechanisms to consciousness is one
of causation. Processes in the brain cause our conscious
experiences. Second, this does not force us to any kind of
dualism because the form of causation is bottom-up, and the
resulting effect is simply a higher level feature of the
brain itself, not a separate substance.
Consciousness is
not like some fluid squirted out by the brain.
A conscious state
is rather a state that the brain is in.
Just as water can
be in a liquid or solid state without liquidity and
solidity being separate substances, so consciousness
is a state that the brain is in without consciousness being a separate substance.
Notice that I stated the philosophical solution without using
any of the traditional categories of "dualism,”
"monism,” "materialism,"
and all the rest of it.
Frankly, I think those categories are obsolete.
But if we accept those categories at face value, then we get
the following
picture: You have a choice between dualism and
materialism. According to dualism,
consciousness and other mental phenomena exist in a different
ontological realm altogether from the ordinary physical world
of physics, chemistry, and biology. According to materialism
consciousness as I have described it does not exist.
Neither dualism nor materialism as traditionally construed,
allows us to get an answer
to our question. Dualism
says that there are two
kinds of phenomena in the world, the mental and the
physical; materialism says that there is only one, the
material. Dualism ends up
with an impossible bifurcation of reality
into two separate categories and thus makes it impossible to explain the relation between the mental and the
physical. But materialism
ends up denying the existence of any
irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience
or awareness.
In short, dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism
denies the existence of
any phenomenon to study, and hence of any
problem.
On the view that I
am proposing, we should
reject those categories altogether.
We know enough about how the world works to know that
consciousness is a biological phenomenon caused by brain
processes and realized in the structure of the brain.
It is irreducible not because it is ineffable or mysterious,
but because it has a first
person ontology, and therefore cannot
be reduced to phenomena with a third person ontology.
The traditional mistake
that people have made in both science
and philosophy has been to suppose that if
we reject dualism, as I
believe we must, then we have to embrace materialism.
But on the view that I am putting forward, materialism
is just as confused as dualism because it denies the
existence of ontologically subjective consciousness in the
first place. Just to give it a name, the resulting view
that denies both dualism
and materialism, I call biological naturalism.
VII.
How Did We Get Into This Mess? A Historical Digression
For a long time I thought
scientists would be better off if they ignored the history
of the mind-body problem, but I now think that unless you understand something
about the history, you will always be in the grip of historical
categories. I discovered this when I was debating people in
artificial intelligence and found that many of them were in the grip of Descartes, a philosopher many of them
had not even read.
What we now think
of as the natural sciences did not really begin
with Ancient Greece. The
Greeks had almost everything, and in
particular they had the wonderful idea of a "theory".
The invention of the idea
of a theory -- a systematic set of logically
related propositions that attempt to explain the phenomena of
some domain -- was
perhaps the greatest single
achievement of Greek civilization.
However, they did
not have the institutionalized practice of systematic observation and
experiment. That
came only after the Renaissance, especially in the 17th century.
When you combine systematic
experiment and testability with the idea of a theory, you
get the possibility of science as we think of it today.
But there was a feature of the seventeenth century, which was a
local accident and
which is still blocking our path.
It is that in the seventeenth century there was a very serious
conflict between
science and religion, and it seemed that science was a threat to religion. Part of the way
that the apparent threat posed by science to orthodox
Christianity was deflected was due to Descartes and
Galileo. Descartes,
in particular, argued that reality
divides into two kinds, the mental and
the physical, res
cogitans and res extensa.
Descartes made a
useful division of the territory: Religion had the territory of the soul, and science
could have material reality.
But this gave people the
mistaken conception that science could only
deal with objective third person phenomena, it could
not deal with the inner qualitative subjective experiences
that make up our conscious life.
This was a perfectly
harmless move in the 17th century because it kept the
church authorities off the backs of the scientists.
(It was only partly successful. Descartes, after all, had to
leave Paris and go live in Holland where
there was more tolerance, and Galileo had to make his
famous recantation to the church authorities
of his
heliocentric theory of the
planetary system.) However,
this history has left us with a
tradition and a tendency not to think of consciousness
as an appropriate subject for the natural sciences, in the way
that we think of
disease, digestion, or tectonic plates
as subjects of the natural sciences.
I urge us to overcome this reluctance,
and in order to overcome it we need to overcome the
historical tradition that made it seem perfectly
natural to avoid the topic of
consciousness altogether in scientific investigation.
VIII.
Summary Of The Argument To This Point
I am assuming that
we have established the following:
Consciousness is a biological phenomenon like any other.
It consists of inner qualitative subjective states
of perceiving, feeling and thinking.
Its essential feature is unified, qualitative
subjectivity. Conscious
states are caused by neurobiological
processes in the brain, and they are realized in the structure
of the brain.
To say this is
analogous to saying that digestive processes are caused
by chemical processes in the stomach and the rest of the
digestive tract, and that these processes are realized in the
stomach and the digestive tract.
Consciousness differs from other biological phenomena in that
it has a subjective or
first person ontology. But
ontological subjectivity does not prevent us from having
epistemic objectivity. We can still have an objective science
of consciousness. We
abandon the traditional categories of dualism and materialism, for the same reason we abandon the categories of phlogiston
and vital spirits:
They have no application to the real world. IX.
The Scientific Study of Consciousness
How,
then, should we proceed in
a scientific investigation of the phenomena involved?
Seen from the outside it looks deceptively
simple. There are
three steps. First, one
finds the neurobiological events that are correlated with consciousness (the NCC).
Second, one tests to see that the correlation is a genuine causal relation.
And third, one tries
to develop a theory, ideally in the form of a set of laws, that would formalize the causal relationships.
These three steps are typical of the history of science. Think, for example, of the development of the
germ theory of disease.
First we find correlations between brute empirical phenomena.
Then we test the correlations for causality by
manipulating one variable
and seeing how it affects the others.
Then we develop a theory of the mechanisms involved and test
the theory by further experiment.
For example, Semmelweis in Vienna in the 1840s
found that women obstetric patients in hospitals died more
often from
puerperal fever than did those who stayed at home. So he looked more closely and found that women examined by
medical students who had just come from the autopsy room
without washing their
hands had an
exceptionally high rate of puerperal fever.
Here was an empirical correlation. When he made these young
doctors wash their hands
in chlorinated lime, the mortality rate went way down.
He did not yet have the germ theory of disease, but he was
moving in that direction.
In the study of consciousness we appear to be in the early
Semmelweis phase.
At the time of this writing we are still looking for the NCC.
Suppose, for example, that
we found, as Francis Crick once put forward as a tentative hypothesis,
that the neurobiological
correlate of consciousness was a set of
neuron firings between the thalamus and the cortex layers 4 and
6, in the range of 40 Hz.
That would be step one. And
step two would be to manipulate the phenomena in question to see if
you could show a causal
relation. Ideally,
we need to test for whether the NCC in question is both
necessary and sufficient for the existence of consciousness. To establish
necessity, we find out whether a subject who has the putative NCC
removed thereby loses consciousness; and to establish sufficiency, we
find out whether an otherwise unconscious subject can be brought to
consciousness by inducing the putative NCC.
Pure cases of causal sufficiency are rare in biology, and we
usually have to understand the notion of sufficient conditions against
a set of background presuppositions, that is, within a specific
biological context. Thus
our sufficient conditions for consciousness would presumably only
operate in a subject who was alive, had his brain functioning at a
certain level of activity, at a certain appropriate temperature, etc.
But what we are trying to establish ideally is a proof that the
element is not just correlated with consciousness, but that it is both
causally necessary and sufficient, other things being equal, for the
presence of consciousness.
Seen from the outsider's point of view, that looks
like the ideal way to proceed. Why
has it not yet been done?
I do not know. It
turns out, for example, that
it is very hard to find an exact NCC, and the current investigative
tools, most notably
in the form of positron emission tomagraphy scans, CAT scans, and
functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques, have not yet identified the NCC. There are interesting differences between the
scans of conscious subjects
and sleeping subjects with REM sleep, on the one hand,
and slow wave sleeping subjects
on the other. But it is
not easy to tell how much
of the differences are related to consciousness.
Lots of things are going on in both the conscious and the
unconscious subjects'
brains that have nothing to do with the production
of consciousness. Given
that a subject is already conscious, you can get parts
of his or her brain to light up by getting him or her to
perform various cognitive
tasks such as perception or memory.
But that does not
give you the difference between being conscious in
general, and being totally unconscious.
So, to establish this first
step, we still appear to be in an
early a state of the technology
of brain research. In
spite of all of the hype surrounding
the development of imaging techniques, we still,
as far as I know, have
not found a way to image the NCC.
With all this in mind, let us turn to some actual efforts
at solving the problem of consciousness.
X.The
Standard Approach to Consciousness: The Building Block Model
Most theorists tacitly adopt the building block theory of
consciousness. The idea
is that any conscious field is made of its various parts: the visual experience of red, the taste of coffee, the
feeling of the wind
coming in through the window. It
seems that
if we could figure out what makes even one building block
conscious, we would have the key to the whole structure. If we could,
for example, crack visual consciousness, that would give us the key
to all the other
modalities. This view is explicit in the
work of Crick & Koch (1998).
Their idea is that if we could find the NCC for vision, then
we could explain visual consciousness, and we
would then know what to
look for to find the NCC for hearing, and for the
other modalities, and if we put all those together, we would
have the whole conscious
field.
The strongest and
most original statement I know of the building block theory
is by Bartels & Zeki (1998, Zeki & Bartels, 1998). They
see the binding activity of
the brain not as one that generates a conscious experience
that is unified, but rather one that brings together a whole
lot of already conscious
experiences . As they put it (Bartels & Zeki 1998: 2327), "[C]onsciousness
is not a unitary faculty, but.. it consists of many
micro-consciousnesses." Our
field of consciousness is thus made up of a lot of building blocks of
microconsciousnesses. “Activity
at each stage or node of a processing-perceptual system has a
conscious correlate. Binding
cellular activity at different nodes is therefore not a process
preceding or even facilitating conscious experience, but rather
bringing different conscious experiences together” (Bartels &
Zeki 1998: 2330). There
are at least three lines of research that are consistent with, and
often used to support, the building block theory.
1. Blindsight
Blindsight is the name given by the psychologist Lawrence
Weiskrantz to the phenomenon whereby certain patients with
damage to V1 can report incidents occurring in their visual
field even though they report no visual awareness of the
stimulus. For
example, in the case of DB, the earliest patient studied, if an X or
an O were shown on a screen in that portion of DB's visual field where
he was blind, the patient when asked what he saw, would deny that he
saw anything. But if
asked to guess, he would guess correctly
that it was an X or an O. His
guesses were right nearly all the time.
Furthermore, the subjects in these experiments are usually
surprised at their results. When
the experimenter asked DB in an interview
after one experiment, "Did you know how well you had
done?", DB answered, "No, I didn't, because I couldn't see
anything. I couldn't see
a darn thing." (Weiskrantz 1986: 24).
This research has subsequently been carried
on with a number of other patients, and blindsight
is now also experimentally induced in monkeys (Stoerig and
Cowey, 1997).
Some researchers suppose that we might use blindsight as the key to understanding consciousness.
The argument is the following: In
the case of blindsight, we have a
clear difference between conscious vision and unconscious information processing.
It seems that if we could discover
the physiological and anatomical difference between regular
sight and blindsight, we might have the key to analyzing
consciousness, because we would have a clear neurological
distinction between
the conscious and the unconscious cases.
2. Binocular
Rivalry and Gestalt Switching
One exciting proposal for finding the NCC for vision is to study cases where the external stimulus is constant but where the internal subjective experience varies. Two examples of this are&nb |