Among the problems with which philosophy and the various sciences must deal, the mind-body problem is still the most intriguing”
Wolfgang Kohler, The Mind-Body Problem, Dimensions of Mind, Ed. Sydney Hook, 1960
Among the most difficult issues faced by humans in science and in philosophy is consciousness. The problem with consciousness is that is has many sides to it. On the one hand there is the very difficult problem understanding what it is. Is is a stuff like say an electron is something i.e. matter, or is it it’s own stuff? That is the problem of substance. Then there’s another problem, that is: how is it that we are conscious? We know we have brains, but how do we go from a brain, which is matter (like a rock), to consciousness which appears to be pervasive? There are many more problems, for example, do we all experience the world in a similar way? Is consciousness the same as attention? Is it the same as perception? Is it an epiphenomena? Does consciousness have an effect on the brain? How do we know, other than verbal report, that anyone else is conscious?
None of these questions seem to have straightforward answers. Nor are they the only problems of consciousness. Needless to say that there are great many minds pondering these and many other issues attached to consciousness in great detail. Here however, I thought it might be interesting to ponder just a few of these questions.
The first thing worth noting about consciousness is that it is bounded. In order that consciousness is understood at all, it is worth noting it’s limits. And it is limited in many ways. It’s limits are also the cause of very many of the problems associated with it. For example, you are most probably not conscious of the internet speed of the average computer in Uganda. Neither are you conscious of how long it takes do download a jpeg in Wyoming (unless you are downloading one there right now). In the same vein you are not conscious of the color of the walls in your bathroom unless your bathroom unless you happen to be in your bathroom looking at the wall. Most likely you are in front of a computer looking at a scree reading these words – these are the things in your conscious field right now. And by extension you are also not conscious of another mind beyond the description of its contents that mind may give you. One way or another your mind is limited to its contents and by virtue of that limitation it is fair to say that consciousness has a structure, a structure defined by its content.
Now the problem is that the content of consciousness; the items we can most readily identify with it’s structure have been dismissed as a valid source of evidence. The problem is first, that words are red herrings; we all know that people’s ability to describe their own minds vary. Second, that we don’t know that we’re not talking to an articulate zombie (maybe a computer program with exquisite language abilities). Third, people who have studied phenomenology don’t seem to be able to agree on what the basic constituents of consciousness in fact are. These problems combined have left much to be desired from first person accounts of consciousness.
But that said there are a few glaring problems with these problems. The problem of the red herring is the first worth tackling. The red herring problem is based on the finding that what people report is not always what is found to be going on cognitively. In the words of Jonathan Schooler of the University of Pittsburgh “You can’t always say what you think or think what you say”. And that leads to a rather interesting problem, on the one hand we know that we just can’t report everything that goes on in our minds. There are very many things we experience that we don’t have words for, on the other hand there are very many things that we express that don’t reflect our thought. For example when people are primed with visual stimuli they may say things biased by the prime, even if it wasn’t exactly what they originally thought. Then there is an additional problem, this refers to thought, but a certain amount of our consciousness is not focal, we have a fringe of awareness; a periphery to our experience that, by virtue of focusing on it is no longer the periphery but the focus of the report.
In other words, words don’t seem to secure much certainty. But this may be a bit of a misnomer. First, we are fortunate that we know a enough about the mind to be able to asses which effects are causing inconsistencies with verbal report. Secondly, much of the problem is associated with cognition and thought, not consciousness. If we are studying consciousness we’re not exactly studying cognition, the two converge but are not the same in the same way that attention is not the same as consciousness. we may be conscious of what we think in the same we are conscious of what we attend to, but we are also have consciousness of much of what we don’t think or to that which we attend. The composites of consciousness include and go beyond these things. Not to mention that both thought and attention are cognitive processes, can be manipulated through controlled conditions and measured. It is in that way that we understand them, but it is also in that way that we can understand consciousness. For the most part when we engage in a study we don’t take one persons word for something, even qualitative studies approach peoples reports thematically across several participants in a study. These ‘themes’ are then examined for consistency. In addition, one of the most important bounds for consciousness is the body. We know that our consciousness is limited, not just by the body but by the brain, and in conjunction with verbal reports, the two provide a crux for the kind of consistency sought when we study the mind.
The basis for the problem discussed here has a long history. The problem of other minds (do other people have minds we can know), the problem of zombies (are we speaking to an automaton) and the Chinese Room Argument (just because a computer answers the questions correctly doesn’t mean it understands Chinese) are all very similar to the problems discussed here. They are all based on the logical difference between a report of experience and that experience itself. Science avoids these issues by systematically examining the problems from the third person. But science, especially the science of the mind also relies on the reports of people, as it should.
Logically the philosophical problems have the same shape, and they can be tackled in about the same way, scientifically. We are free to doubt just about anything. We can justify doubt that a world other than the world we immediately perceive exists. But we would also be radically inconsistent if we did. After all the only clue we have that we make an error in something we perceive is perception itself. It is the more consistent perceptions that we have that inform us about the inconsistencies between other perceptions. Science is little more than a systematic version of this principle. By exploring both the structure of our descriptions and the consistencies between our perceptions (and within our theories) we develop systematic accounts of the world which are then formalized. That is the start of an account of consciousness. But best of all it demonstrates how important consciousness is to its own explanation.As Ned Block of New York University points out:
the starting point for work on consciousness is introspection and we would be foolish to ignore it
But it is ignored. That justifies the claim by Block. Daniel Dennet in his theory of heterophenomenology is clear that we can’t rely on consciousness, and many have urged for a reduction to the brain in our exploration of consciousness. In somewhat less dogmatic words John Taylor has said;
It is necessary to have a solid information processing framework for the brain before we embark on such an ambitious project even at the qualitative level
In my opinion it’s not that these people are necessarily wrong, it’s that they miss the point of consciousness. Nagel in one of the most significant essays of the 20th century (What is it like to be Bat)has clearly pointed out that a reductionist program has to be based on what it seeks to reduce and that a reductionism that does not capture the subjective character of experience is compatible with its absence. In my opinion this is right, it’s not that we should stat with the brain, it’s that what we understand about the brain in relation to consciousness has to be limited by what we discover in experience. The two in other words are not just joined at the hip, they are essentially dependent if we are going to have a genuinely good characterization of consciousness at all.
