The Hard Problem of Consciousness

[Chan Tiger]

Part I

I'm starting this thread in response to some comments made by the Aphid in the Buddhism section of this forum. Although the issue here definitely intersects with Buddhism, it is actually a much wider philosophical question worth considering on its own.

Originally Posted by the_aphid

Here is a section of The Universe in a Single Atom by the Dalai Lama which I have been contemplating for some time now:

Crucial to understanding the Buddhist concept of consciousness - and its rejection of the reducibility of mind to matter -- is its theory of causation. The issue of causality has long been a major focus of philosophical and contemplative analysis in Buddhism. Buddhism proposes two principal categories of cause. These are the "substantial cause" and the "contributory or complementary cause." Take the example of a clay pot. The substantial cause refers to the "stuff" that turns into a particular effect, namely, the clay that becomes the pot. By contrast, all the other factors that contribute toward bringing about the pot -- such as the skill of the potter, the potter himself, and the kiln that fired the clay -- remain complementary in that they make it possible for the clay to turn into the pot. This distinction between the substantial and the contributory cause of a given event or object is of the utmost importance for understanding the Buddhist theory of consciousness. According to Buddhism, though consciousness and matter can and do contribute toward the origination of each other, once can never become the substantial cause of the other.

In fact, it is on this premise that Buddhist thinkers like Dharmakirti have rationally argued for the tenability of the theory of rebirth. Dharmakirti's argument can be formulated as follows: The consciousness of the newborn infant comes about from a preceeding instance of cognition, which is an instance of consciousness just like the present moment of consciousness.

The issue revolves around the argument that the various instances of consciousness we experience come into being because of the presence of preceding instances of consciousness; and since matter and consciousness of the new being must be preceded by its substantial cause, which must be a moment of consciousness. In this way, the existence of a previous life is affirmed.

Some other Buddhist thinkers, such as Bhavaviveka in the sixth century, have tried to argue for preexistence on the basis of habitual instincts, such as the newborn calf's instinctive knowledge of where to find its mother's teats and how to suck milk. These thinkers make the case that without assuming some form of preexistence, the phenomenon of "innate knowledge" cannot be coherently explained.

Regardless of how persuasive these arguments are, there are many examples of very young children with apparent memories of "previous lives," not to mention the numerous recollections of the Buddha's own past lives found in scriptures. I know of a remarkable case of a young girl from Kanpur in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in the early 1970s. Although initially her parents dismissed the girl's descriptions of a second set of parents in a place she described specifically, the girl's accounts were so concrete that they began to take her seriously. When the two whom she claimed to be her parents during her previous life came to see her, she told them very specific details of their deceased child's life, which only a close member of the family could have known. As a result, when I met her, the other two parents had also fully embraced her as a member of their family. This is only anecdotal evidence, but such phenomena cannot be easily dismissed.

Reams have been written on the analysis of this form of Buddhist reasoning, the technical aspects of which lie outside the scope of the present discussion. The point I wish to make is that Dharmakirti clearly did not think that the theory of rebirth was purely a matter of faith. He felt that it falls within the purview of what he characterized as "slightly hidden" phenomena, which can be verified by means of inference.

So, personally I cannot help but disagree with Dharmakirti. I do not think that the argument that 'every moment of consciousness must be preceeded by another moment of consciousness' is a reasonable argument to make. If this were true, then this would deny the possibility of the evolution of sentience from non-sentience, or life in general from non-life.

Aphid notes that Dharmakirti's argument here seems to conflict with the idea that sentience evolves from non-sentience. My response, in the original thread, was to question this idea. Does sentience in fact evolve from non-sentience?

Lurking behind all of this is the mind-body problem or what philosopher David Chalmers calls the "Hard Problem of Consciousness". Chalmers divides questions concerning consciousness into two categories; hard and soft. The soft problem(s) are essentially empirical questions that can be answered through scientific study, since they concern "the observable behavior of physical objects".

The "hard" problem, however, isn't something that we are likely to solve through scientific study, since it's basically a philosophical question. The hard problem is this: how does conscious experience arises from the brain?

In contemporary Western philosophy, the mainstream answers to this question fall into two basic camps. One is dualism, which states that conscious experience is somehow separable or distinct from physical brain-states. The other is materialism, which holds that consciousness is entirely reducible to these physical processes in the brain. In the first view, consciousness is something entirely distinct and separate from physical matter; in the second view, consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon.

Both positions have their difficulties. Dualism, which has largely fallen out of vogue, has to explain how mind and matter could possibly interact if they are distinct and separate. Materialism, on the other hand, has to explain how and why inert physical processes give rise to an conscious, experience, and an inner life---or, to use Aphid's words, how sentience evolves from non-sentience.

It is precisely this idea that makes the "hard problem" hard. The hard problem of consciousness begins with the assumption that the brain, being material, is non-sentient and composed of non-sentient entities.

Both dualists and materialists share this assumption, which can be traced back to Descartes in the early 17th century. Descartes held that the world consisted of two kinds of stuff: res cogita, "thinking substance", subject, mind, or sentience; and res extensa, "extended substance", object, matter, or non-sentience.

Although most of Descartes' theories have fallen out of fashion, the basic dichotomy of his worldview has proven so influential that it forms the basic, "common sense" worldview of most people alive today. According to this worldview, humans are unique in that we alone possess consciousness; the universe is a collection of "dead matter"; non-sentient, non-experiencing entities which interact according to deterministic physical laws. Against the cold, mechanical brutality of nature, human beings stand alone. We are not only separate from the rest of the universe; we are strangers in it. There is an overriding sense that consciousness somehow doesn't belong, or at the very least is a phenomenon strikingly different from the rest of the cosmos.

This worldview has informed much of Western philosophy for at least one hundred and fifty years. While earlier generations of theistic philosophers (including Descartes himself) saw humanity's apparent uniqueness as a blessing given by God, the more recent crop of thinkers see this largely as a random accident. Consciousness is a fluke, an frothy epiphenomenon atop what is essentially a brute, insentient universe.

In his essay On the Nature of Consciousness, which you can find in the 'essay section' of thebigview, Alan Watts summarizes this worldview and it's characteristic pessimism rather nicely:

Originally Posted by Alan Watts

They conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism. Something, in other words, that is functioning according to regular, clock-like mechanical principles. Newton's whole image of the world is based on billiards. The atoms are billiard balls, and they bang each other around. And so your behavior, every individual around, is defined as a very, very complex arrangement of billiard balls being banged around by everything else. And so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is, to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists, blind energy. In say the metaphysics of Ernst Hegel, and T.H. Huxley, the world is basically nothing but energy--blind, unintelligent force. And likewise and parallel to this, in the philosophy of Freud, the basic psychological energy is libido, which is blind lust. And it is only a fluke, it is only as a result of pure chances that resulting from the exuberance of this energy there are people. With values, with reason, with languages, with cultures, and with love. Just a fluke. Like, you know, 1000 monkeys typing on 1000 typewriters for a million years will eventually type the Encyclopedia Britannica. And of course the moment they stop typing the Encyclopedia Britannica, they will relapse into nonsense.

And so in order that that shall not happen, for you and I are flukes in this cosmos, and we like our way of life--we like being human--if we want to keep it, say these people, we've got to fight nature, because it will turn us back into nonsense the moment we let it. So we've got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it. From outside. And so we get a culture based on the idea of the war between man and nature. And we talk about the conquest of space. The conquest of Everest. And the great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer.

I bring this up because the notion that human consciousness is a small spark in an otherwise vast, cold, empty universe is precisely that: a notion. A view, and one that most people adopt without adequately questioning. There's no scientific reason why we should accept what is essentially a metaphysical view (Watts calls it a myth, a metaphor for understanding our place in the universe) and yet many of us treat this worldview as if it were established fact.

----

Wow, that got long...I don't have time to keep going, so for now consider this "part I". In Part II I'm going to continue to deconstruct this Cartesian metaphysical baggage. I'm also going to propose a starting point for a new way of looking at the "hard problem". This should hopefully serve as a some kind of follow-up to the Aphid's comments, which is the whole reason why I posted this in the first place.

In the meantime, feel free to comment on anything I've written, add your own opinions, etc.

[scameter]

Well, I think that sentience did evolve from non-sentience, as did humans develop from non-humans; the intelligence of the species simply increased until it was capable of reasoning that it is itself. This is evident by the fact that some animals, i.e. house cats and dogs, cannot recognize themselves in mirrors, but chimps can, because they are more intelligent. However, I think that consciousness is different than sentience. Sentience is merely the recognition that you are yourself, while consciousness is the receiver of subjective experience, which is why when we are unconscious we experience nothing even though our body sometimes responds. I think that consciousness did not evolve from non-conscious animals/material, nor is it there to be found in the brain, because it is not physical: it is our soul. It is why we are here, to experience life, and it is what makes us unique. I'm not saying this arrogantly or in an anthropomorphic way. I'm simply making an observational statement.

[Flux]

Chan Tiger--First of all, I would like to point out that materialism and epiphenomenalism are two distinct theories of consciousness. Epiphenomenalism avoids the problems of Cartesian interactionist dualism (where the mental "substance" has a causal effect on the physical) by having mental events be superfluous byproducts of physical events. In epiphenomenalism, physical events cause mental events, but mental events do not cause mental events and mental events do not cause physical events.

Materialism is a trickier term than one might think. First of all, there are non reductive physicalists who are materialists in the sense that they do not think that there is any mental substance, but are dualistic in the sense that they think that mental properties can not be explained in terms that refer only to physical properties. Reductive Physcialists believe that there is no ultimate distinction between mental and physical events--our subjective experience, redness, pain, etc, is actually composed out of particles. Reductive physicalism is profoundly counterintuitive at first, but I'm currently reading Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained which has thus far succeeded in convincing me that it is at least a possibility, although I am not completely convinced.

I think that the "hard problem of consciousness" as you stated it, is in such a form that it cannot be solved. Obviously, consciousness cannot come from something that is completely unconscious, inert, dead, etc. Therefore, if consciousness arises from matter, it follows that it is not entirely correct to view matter as completely "dead". Evolution, for instance, suggests that there is a continuum between consciousness and unconsciousness, suggesting that the relatively "inert" nature of matter is a difference of degree, not of type.

Regardless of whether or not mental properties are reducible to physical properties, I agree with Chan Tiger that it is a mistake, t0 see the universe as blind and dead. To say that it is blind and dead is not really to assert something factual about the universe, but to give the already existing facts of the universe a certain connotation. Personally, I think that one must strike a balance between seeing the universe as completely inanimate, and seeing it as anthropomorphic.

[the_aphid]

It is an excellent topic Chan Tiger, but I just want to clarify in this new thread that I am not asserting that sentience definitely evolved from non-sentience. I was simply attempting to show that if Dharmakirti's assertion was correct that this possibility would be denied.

Here is another section from The Universe in a Single Atom (pg 104-106) which I feel adequately addresses the reason for differing mindsets on the topic of consciousness. That is, at least, the reason for differing mindsets between science and Buddhism.

By contrast with science, in Buddhism there is no substantive philosophical discussion on how living organisms emerge from inanimate matter. In fact, there does not appear even to be an acknowledgment that this is a serious philosophical issue. At best there is an implicit assumption that the emergence of living organisms from inanimate matter is simply a consequence of cause and effect over time, given a set of initial conditions and the laws of nature that govern all realms of existence. However, in Buddhism there is a greater appreciation of the challenge of accounting for the emergence of sentient beings from what is essentially a non-sentient basis.

This difference of concern suggests an interesting contrast between Buddhism and modern science, which may have partly to do with the complex historical, social, an cultural differences that underlie the development of these two investigative traditions. For modern science, at least from a philosophical point of view, the critical divide seems to be between inanimate matter and the origin of living organisms, while for Buddhism the critical divide is between non-sentient matter and the emergence of sentient beings.

We may even ask why there is this fundamental difference between the two traditions. One possible reason modern science perceives the critical divide to lie between inanimate matter and living organisms may have to do with the basic methodology of science. By this I am referring to reductionism, not so much as a metaphysical standpoint but more as a methodological approach. The basic approach of science is to explain phenomena in terms of their simpler constitutive elements. How can something like life emerge from non-life?

...

Buddhism draws the critical division differently -- i.e., between sentience and non-sentience -- because it is primarily interested in the alleviation of suffering and the quest for happiness.

...

This fundamental difference between Buddhism and science -- whether the line is drawn between sentience and non-sentience or between living organisms and inanimate matter -- has significant ramifications, among them a difference in how the two investigative traditions may regard consciousness. For biology, consciousness is a secondary issue, since it is a characteristic of a subset of living organisms rather than of all of life. In Buddhism, since the definition of "living" refers to sentient beings, consciousness is the primary characteristic of "life".

...According to this worldview, humans are unique in that we alone possess consciousness; the universe is a collection of "dead matter"; non-sentient, non-experiencing entities which interact according to deterministic physical laws. Against the cold, mechanical brutality of nature, human beings stand alone. We are not only separate from the rest of the universe; we are strangers in it. There is an overriding sense that consciousness somehow doesn't belong, or at the very least is a phenomenon strikingly different from the rest of the cosmos.

I can't help but feel that this is an overly pessimistic interpretation to adopt. Relating the discussion of consciousness back to the thread of Universal Evolution, I do not feel the notion of a progressive evolution from non-matter to matter, to life, to sentience, etc, is a pessimistic view. It doesn't suggest we are alone in the universe, that we are strangers within it, but rather that sentient entities are simply less likely to occur in the universe than say 'primitive' biological life, which itself is less likely than inanimate physical matter. Which seems to make sense, when you consider the requirements of each phenomena. Sentience appears to require biological life, which in turn appears to require a very specific environment, while the cold, dark, physical material of the Oort cloud has no requirement of life in order to exist.

Also I'd just like to stipulate that I personally don't believe that any human activity or behaviour sets them apart from every other species on the planet. Sure humans are unique, but so is every life form, and sentience as a whole is not understood well enough yet to suggest that humans are the only beings possessive of it. I am fairly convinced that at the very least, chimpanzees and bonobos share sentience with the human race.

And yes, you can consider the development of sentience to be a fluke occurrence, but that seems to suggest that it was an accident, or a mistake, that consciousness is 'unnatural' when compared with all other universal phenomena. Personally, I look at it as a 'permitted rarity' in the framework of existence. That anything and everything that can occur, will occur, given enough time and space, but that some things are less likely to occur than others.

I bring this up because the notion that human consciousness is a small spark in an otherwise vast, cold, empty universe is precisely that: a notion. A view, and one that most people adopt without adequately questioning. There's no scientific reason why we should accept what is essentially a metaphysical view (Watts calls it a myth, a metaphor for understanding our place in the universe) and yet many of us treat this worldview as if it were established fact.

You are right, it is a notion, one people should not forget and simply assume to be a fact. But there is a scientific reason to favour this view over the alternatives.

This should hopefully serve as a some kind of follow-up to the Aphid's comments, which is the whole reason why I posted this in the first place.

I am pleased to have initiated such an interesting thread of discussion.

p.s. - can't wait for part II

[MultipleTentacles]

This is a fascinating discussion.

I think it's fascinating reading what the Dali Lama said, because it seems to directly contradict what I wrote about in my philosophy class, viz. Panprotopsychism. I held that the entire universe has some modicum of consciousness, and consciousness is explained by a sustained system of observation and elaborations on observations. You need a brain (matter) to do that.

Now I could be wrong, but I think that when the Dali Lama talks about mind as opposed to matter, he is speaking of a wrong view of matter--i.e. that matter is some kind of self-existent, independently arising thing. If I'm wrong and he's talking about matter as just another dharma and saying it cannot be conscious, I have serious reservations about that statement. It seems to me very obvious that our consciousness is intimately tied up with the brain. If you have no brain, or matter analogous to it, you have no consciousness, or sentience, or anything like that. When I passed out to get my wisdom teeth removed, I did not "leave my body" and start floating around being conscious somewhere else, I stopped being conscious.

However, my reservations are mitigated by the observation that physical matter does not tell the entire story--there are also metaphysical possibilities. And I think the essential nature of a mind is a "reality limit" of interconnection with all things. That includes metaphysical possibilities, of which there are more than physical possibilities. But the idea that the soul is separate from the body in most forms is a pernicious idea, which is probably why the Buddha said it is better to think of the body as the soul. After all, witch burnings took place based on the assumption that you could purify a soul by burning away the impure body. This is clearly a misguided idea.

Let me take a moment to clarify my idea of the wrong idea of matter: I think there is nothing "concrete" about matter. Matter is simply information--numbers. It is not some concrete "substance" that you can take a tiny little hammer and knock on. Furthermore, I don't think there is any such thing as "space" or "spacetime" as separate from matter. Spaciotemporal location is just a property of matter. I'm fairly convinced this is the right way of looking at matter. Of course, I'm not 100% sure, because I've never studied physics in depth. But perhaps the Dali Lama was speaking to this idea of matter when he said that the mind is not matter.

[the_aphid]

Originally Posted by MultipleTentacles

But perhaps the Dali Lama was speaking to this idea of matter when he said that the mind is not matter.

Basically I think that is correct. I would sum it up by saying that he suggests that consciousness and matter are interdependent, but that the mind is not reducible to the physical fluctuations of the material basis of the brain. Likewise, the physical world we experience is not simply reducible to our subjective experience. However, this is not to be looked at dualistically. There is not an independent consciousness which looks out upon an independent material universe.

Anyways, I will now attempt to revive this discussion by posting some of my recent wonderings on the nature of sentience. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the dependence of sentience. Basically I can sum it up in the question; what is sentience dependent upon?

By this I mean, is sentience dependent upon our ability to remember the past? Or is it dependent upon our freedom to choose? Or our ability to suffer? Or our sensory faculties? Suppose you spontaneously lost your ability to see, hear, smell, taste and touch, would your sentience soon follow?

[Chan Tiger]

Sorry I haven't really responded! I was planning a longer, more detailed reply and it seems I've gotten side-tracked. I'll try to respond in the next few days because I do want to continue this discussion.

But for now I'd like to leave a brief comment on the Aphid's question about "sentience". We should be especially careful of our language here. "Sentient" by definition refers to the capacity for sensation or feeling; in other words, sensory perception. It may, however, be possible for there to be experience, awareness, and/or consciousness without sensory perception or sense organs.

Given that we are sensory beings, however, it is difficult for us to imagine what "experience" could be like without sense receptors. As a result, in our everyday language we often bundle the concept of "experiencing being" with "sensory being" under the referent of "sentient".

The possibility that "sensory beings" are perhaps only one particular kind of "experiencing being" is not one most people consider or are willing to take seriously---but perhaps it is something we should examine more closely.

I should also add that this everyday notion of "sentient" may cause difficulty in understanding the Buddhist concept of "sentient beings". The latter is not influenced by a Cartesian/Platonic worldview, while much of our everyday language (and hence our everyday metaphysics) is.

That just about brings me to "Part II", so I'll leave it at that for now. There are some other comments I want to address too, so hopefully this thread will become more like a conversation. I just have a lot of thoughts on this subject and it might be easier for me to just get them out in one or two large segments

[...]

..i haven't read the loooong posts in this thread, but at the risk of being redundant i'll offer you this:

In an almost infinite universe with endless possibilities, given enough time, the chance of life evolving from nothing is 1/1.

[jonathan.s]

you will of course provide an example of a universe where life didn't arise by way of illustration

[...]

Originally Posted by jonathan.s

you will of course provide an example of a universe where life didn't arise by way of illustration

..don't hold your breath