Acknowledge Consciousness!

I recently finished reading a book by Stanislas Dehaene titled Consciousness and the Brain. This was the third book bearing a seductive title that had disappointed me to the point of anger. The other two are The Mind’s I by Douglas Hofstadter and Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.

Each of these three books bludgeoned me with information about brain function and about how one or another kind of electrical stimulation creates this or that conscious feeling. Researchers have used all kinds of fancy technology to map the active part of the brain or plot brain waves and correlate these data with the experiences reported by the patient. The implication is that feelings and ideas and the subjective sense of self are not the stuff our consciousness is made of; they are nothing more than electrical impulses beeping around among neurons and dendrites and synapses.

 

The Brown Jacket, Oil, 1965, 32 x 24

The conclusion, which each author holds off until the end, is that consciousness is just an illusion. And they’re so smug about it!

Let’s assume for now that these three eminent scholars are using the word “consciousness” in the same way, referring to that subjective sense of awareness of self. This is a difficult thing to name; all the standard English terms are ambiguous. “Consciousness,” “awareness” and the like are most often used to describe mere wakefulness, and so are insufficiently clear for the purposes of this discussion.

There are terms that do work. The best among these, because it cannot be hijacked by folks that don’t understand it, is atman, a Hindu term. “Witness,” as used by the followers of Gurdjieff, is also clear, but only so long as we agree that we are speaking in terms of The Fourth Way. There are other possibilities, but let’s stick with atman.

If I can call an item “mine,” then it is not “me.” (Forget grammar for a moment.) “My” car is not me. I say “She ran into me” when another driver collides with my car, but she didn’t hit me. My clothes are not me. My body is not me. It’s an object I drag around but it’s not me.

More subjectively, I have feelings but they are not me. They are my feelings. My ideas, my thoughts are not me. I observe them. If I claim them, I am objectifying them.

Finally, my mind is not me. It is mine. “I have a good mind.” “I’m losing my mind.” Spending some time in silence, I sit and watch the mind cavort, tug at my heartstrings, worry me, chastise me. That mind is not me.

There is something that is truly I that watches what the mind and perceptions present. Well, I can’t really call it watching, because this atman does nothing, feels nothing, thinks nothing—just witnesses. That whatever-it-is is always the very last stop on any journey to the depth of introspection, but I can never get there, because even if I convince myself that I am identifying with atman, it is actually atman that is observing my mind thinking about identifying with atman.

Everything in our world could function just the same without atman witnessing. These days especially, with ever advancing technology of artificial intelligence, we can imagine a world of mosquitos and dogs and people programmed to do what they do, even to think about what they do, even to think about thinking, and yet never have this sense of “I-ness.”

And that is what these three authors are claiming is happening. They present the scientific evidence that the mind and feelings are brain functions, as if the brain is an extremely complex computer and no more. Well, maybe it is, and this research is profound and fascinating. But they go too far, inferring that since every feeling and idea can be theoretically explained in electrical terms, with no reference to an atman, then that must be all there is.

They conclude that consciousness—atman—is an illusion.

Look, I don’t know how or why this well-oiled human machine comes with atman, such an ineffable connection. I read books like these in the hope that someone else brighter than I has some insight into this difficult problem, but to say there is no such thing as consciousness, that it is an illusion?

“Illusion: an unreal vision presented to the bodily or mental eye” (Webster). Right, so to whom is the illusion presented? I know! Atman! Consciousness! The mere mention of illusion negates their entire argument.

These books just pissed me off.

I think they were written by robots.