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.

Goodbye to Qualia

Cartesian Duality

The fallacy of the Cartesian duality is not in the partition of personhood into two categories, but that the division was taken between mind and body. To say, “I think, therefore I am,” is to suggest that my thinking is non-physical. Philosophers have argued successfully that the act of thinking is based in the material world, the action of a physical organ—just as would be the throwing of a baseball. The mind is part of the body. 

What is outside the physical is self-awareness, pure and unattached to thoughts, memories, or feelings. The proper separation of categories distinguishes the entire body of the person, including the mind, ego, emotions, ideas and memories, from the self-awareness of the person.

There is no difference between your pure self-awareness and mine. We can agree with Hindu theologians and posit an ocean of consciousness. If one center of awareness is indistinguishable from another, then who is to say there are multiple consciousnesses? Personally, I prefer to think of consciousness as something like a life force that injects itself where it can into the world. The picture in my head—maybe somewhat silly—is of a grove of cypress in a swamp, all inter-connected under the water and mud. The network of cypress is the force of consciousness, pushing into the world. The trees and the knees push up through the surface of the water and make themselves known, entering our physical reality in many places.

If qualia are the experiential part of our conscious life, then memories and feelings are qualia too, just as much as colors and cold. We may not be able to describe a particular type of quale to a person who has never experienced it, but we can “point” to the notion, with language. “When you think about something and your throat tightens and your nose and tear ducts tingle, that’s sadness.”

Death and Experience

 When we die we separate from the qualia of life, and can no longer experience the colors, smells, and sounds of this world. The reason for this is the loss of the function of the sense organs. We lose brain function as well, when we lose the brain. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that we lose the ability to recall memories. If atman consciousness is eternal—and it may well be—still with no qualia to be conscious of, self-awareness must lie dormant in some way.

The discontinuity of death is, at best, a jump discontinuity, not a removable one, borrowing here from the terminology of mathematics. What this means is that at death, a change occurs in the nature of the experience of the individual. It is not like a temporary loss of consciousness, in which we wake to the identical experience we left a second or minute ago. Instead the continuous experience of our conscious life has abruptly taken a brand new course, with a completely different starting point. No filling in of experience will make the transition smooth and unnoticeable.

In the case of remembering our own history and assuming continuity of life experience, all we really have is memory. And memories are qualia, which give us information about nothing other than themselves.

The Theory of Survival

 What can survival after death possibly mean? To believe that I will survive death is to say that there will be a person of some sort with my memories. I have no connection to that person. Actually, I have no sensory connection to any person who might be living tomorrow, but I trust that one person tomorrow will have a continuity of experience—or at least the conviction of continuity—with memories of experience that I have now. To be a believable and believing future me, the person must have memories of past feelings and experiences that match his present. I can expect no such matching in the case of a person who appears after my death, whether that appearance is of an infant in another family, or a ghost in this world, or a new inhabitant of Heaven.

I find it problematic that physical causes can interrupt or halt neural functions such as memories, feelings, and personality. Total anesthesia creates a glaring discontinuity in our awareness, albeit a removable discontinuity. This means that we could restore the continuity of consciousness by dropping in the missing experience—i.e. withhold the anesthesia. Still, I find the blank stretch philosophically and experientially troubling, as incontrovertible evidence that our consciousness depends absolutely on physical structure. Anesthesia is much more convincing than sleep, during which I continue to have experience. Disease and injury can cause brain damage that unalterably affects personality. Does a person’s “real” personality survive Alzheimer’s, a stroke, or a fractured skull, even though the original personality never again appears in this life?

Unless there is another duality, such as between a physical and an astral body, the theories of reincarnation or Heaven have big problems here. (I am using the term “astral” strictly as a convenience, and not necessarily as mystics might. Physicists seem convinced these days that “reality,” whatever that is, is composed of ten dimensions, if we count time as a dimension. This makes it conceivable that there is more to our existence than meets the eye here in the classic four dimensions. For convenience, I resort to calling the non-worldly part of us “astral.”) If we confine our examination to the important distinction between atman and the rest of the person, there is no memory function to carry forward, and reincarnation is meaningless. On the other hand, if there is a division between astral and physical bodies, and the astral body survives, then both meaningful reincarnation and taking up residence in Heaven are conceivable.

I make no claim that any of this is groundbreaking. My sole purpose is to report the thoughts I enjoy.