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.

Watching Myself Watch Myself Watch Myself

Well, I’ve been trying all day to remember to view my self as the perceiver of body and brain sensations. I have been working at this for a while—years. Decades.

It’s not easy. If I don’t have a mechanism in place to remind me, I can go weeks without observing myself as perceiver; without, in short, recognizing my true self.

But wait. I was awake. I was watching things, hearing things, feeling things. I was aware, conscious, whatever you want to call it.

Or maybe not. From those times when I was just operating in the world and not being the observer, I have no recollection of having that fully awake feeling I get when I do identify my self as observer. Now, when I am thinking about it, I do have that feeling, and I have that feeling as I recall experiences. I am self-aware as I remember; I was not self-aware back then.

It would seem that I have two levels of awareness. I can walk around in the world, do things and feel things. I am conscious then, sentient, mentally alert. But when I reflect on myself, pay attention to myself, I step up to another level of consciousness. This may be the state William James called spiritual self-awareness. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky called it remembering oneself.

The assumption most of us make is that when we are awake, we are in this state continuously. Being able to reflect on our memories fosters this illusion, but we are just plodding around like robots most of the time. We can call up our memories and reflect on them, but even then we most likely do not feel our own awareness—and we don’t really call up that many memories anyway. We just know that we could if we wanted to, and so have convinced ourselves that we are thoughtful, self-aware beings.

Do you suppose it is possible to live an entire life and never attend to one’s own awareness? It may well be. I’ve known people who have made me wonder. When philosophers talk about a quale, which is a word for the experience of a sensation, they must be aware of the experience of self-reflection. When a philosopher avoids talking about qualia, or acts as if they don’t matter or exist, well, you have to wonder.

Without language, animals cannot ascend to self-reflection. Our favorite animals, our dogs and cats respond to us emotionally, and can be very intelligent—for dogs and cats—but all of that is quite possible without a moment of self-reflection.

I want to contend that we operate on either of two levels of consciousness. At the most common level we are observers, recorders, reactors. It is this level of consciousness that some philosophers explain in terms of brain structure and behavior. We may be self-conscious (in the sense of being anxious), or aware of the condition of our body or feelings or mind. We may be thinking about ideas, even working hard to learn something. But in this state, though we are observers, we are not necessarily aware of ourselves as observers.  

When we become aware of our own awareness we enter that more rare state of consciousness: we are here now, we remember ourselves, we live in the present. It is so easy to do, if I could just remember to do it!

Self-reference is a pretty powerful concept.  Playful examples include sentences like, “This sentence is false.” Bertrand Russell’s mathematical example was the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. (So what is the status of that set?) Kurt Gödel showed that every complete logical system contains such a statement, which is therefore true but unprovable, or false and provable. This means that no mathematical system can be entirely true and complete, which changes the way I look at the Universe I’ll tell ya. More on this paragraph next post.

And then us—sporting our self-reflective consciousness, when we remember it. That the Universe could contain such a thing is disorienting. If you don’t feel a bit disoriented by it, you haven’t been paying attention.