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| This article, from aeon, is nearly ten years old. But as far as I know, very little progress has been made on this age-old question. The real problem  It looks like scientists and philosophers might have made consciousness far more mysterious than it needs to be "You're doing it wrong," profound thoughts edition. What is the best way to understand consciousness? I don't know, but I have a strong suspicion that the first step is "be conscious." Psychedelics are also an option. In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into ‘mind stuff’ and ‘matter stuff’. Regular readers will note that I appreciate Descartes. But I reject that dualism. Provisionally. But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesn’t rely on philosophical research to provide the answers. Which is good, because "philosophical research" is nothing more than "reading dense tomes that philosophers crafted." And there are more of those than can be read. I've said before that philosophy and science are partners, in a sense: science informs philosophy, while philosophy guides science. Its key is to recognise that explaining why consciousness exists at all is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis – to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable. A noble goal, in my way of thinking, but from my purely amateur perspective, the question of "why consciousness exists at all" has, at base, a very simple answer: because evolution selected for it. That's not a complete answer, of course, but one thing I haven't seen (though I haven't seen everything) is an attempt to explain consciousness in terms of evolutionary adaptation. All species have evolved, and not all have evolved what we think of consciousness, but those that didn't have other adaptations that promote survival and reproduction. In humans, it's adapted to the point that we can consciously choose (whether choice is an illusion or not) not to reproduce, and that's interesting. In my own research, a new picture is taking shape in which conscious experience is seen as deeply grounded in how brains and bodies work together to maintain physiological integrity – to stay alive. In this story, we are conscious ‘beast-machines’, and I hope to show you why. And, questionable labels aside, that's pretty close to my own thoughts—albeit with more resources, education, and focus. Let’s begin with David Chalmers’s influential distinction, inherited from Descartes, between the ‘easy problem’ and the ‘hard problem’. The ‘easy problem’ is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all: why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe? Again, though, I suspect that "hard problem" is asking the wrong question. But there is an alternative, which I like to call the real problem: how to account for the various properties of consciousness in terms of biological mechanisms; without pretending it doesn’t exist (easy problem) and without worrying too much about explaining its existence in the first place (hard problem). Ask me, calling it "the real problem" is a problem, because it exudes an air of self-superiority. But don't ask me what I'd call it, because I don't know. I'm not going to get into much more of the article here. Just one more quote: Rather, consciousness seems to depend on how different parts of the brain speak to each other, in specific ways. Science likes to divide and conquer. That is, if you have a complex system, it can be more productive to study its subsystems to gain an understanding of that. Like, if you're trying to figure out a car, you can break it down into things like engine, cooling system, steering mechanism, brakes, etc. Each one of those can be understood on its own. But to make a recognizable "car," you also need to know how all of these systems interact with each other. That's relatively simple with a car; not so much with a body. I'm not weighing in on the results, here. I just think (perhaps because I'm programmed to) that it's helpful to try a different approach sometimes, and this seems like just such an attempt. It could well be that, just as we can't get an outsider's perspective on the Universe, perhaps we can never truly understand consciousness. Or maybe we're just asking the wrong questions. |
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