by Paul Singh
All sorts of philosophical adventures are launched from that odd question. Scientists eager to get philosophical can follow paths opened by Greek philosophers like Democritus, who didn’t expect qualities like redness to exist in the physical world. If it isn’t there, where is it? Either redness is some sort of illusion we all suffer from and talk about, or redness is really inside us instead of out in the world. Neither option makes much sense.
The first option says that there’s no redness in the world. No quality could be. Nothing you think you see, hear, taste, smell, and feel, and so on is in the world. Does that table in front of you appear to have a size? It is just an illusion. Does the hardness of the table seem real? It is illusory, too. Everything that you think you sense about the table can’t be out there. Science can select some qualities, such as size and speed, and theorize about what the world is actually made of. Perhaps there are only solid atoms moving around in space. But those qualities are just arbitrarily selected, at first, and in the end, they all get replaced. Nothing is really solid, it turns out, and the small things inside atoms don’t have a definite size or speed while fulfilling probability fields instead. The theorized properties of the “real” physical world are hardly anything like what we perceive at all, which is just nonphysical illusion.
The second option ends up at the same mysterious destination. If that redness can’t be out there because it can’t be physical, then it can’t be inside our physical heads either. If the redness must be somewhere real (and not illusory), on this second option, then there must be an inner nonphysical world of qualities that we can perceive. Either option ends up at the same destination: the world we think we inhabit is actually just our own nonphysical realm. This is the philosophical position of phenomenalism: all possible experience of anything is entirely nonphysical and probably illusory. No exceptions for anyone, not even scientists or sages. Whatever anyone has ever perceived is in that phenomenal realm. This is not just humanity’s problem. If there is any physical reality, nothing alive anywhere in the universe will ever encounter it.
That conclusion follows from certain premises, including one premise that can surely be discarded. To repeat: There is no such thing as consciousnesses over and above simply being alive and living consciously. If consciousness is regarded as so completely different from everything else, then bizarre questions can be raised about where it is, and why is it so different, and how physical things (if there are any) interact with nonphysical consciousness. Those questions are unanswerable, by any intelligent method. That’s why many philosophers resort to unintelligent methods (like inventing webs of verbiage), while theologians try to keep up or add more unintelligent methods (like dreaming up divine deeds). Too many philosophers have accepted physical-phenomenal paradoxes so they can endlessly ruminate on them. Theologians seem pleased to embrace irrational mysteries about minds or souls that cannot fit into the material world.
Both philosophers and theologians find additional satisfaction in science’s apparent inability to explain consciousness. But science doesn’t attempt to explain nonexistent and mythical matters. Science’s refusal to take nonphysical consciousness seriously gets derided by the paradox admirers. They are incredulous at the notion that science would ignore or deny that people see colors and hear sounds. Science doesn’t ignore perception, however. The cognitive and neurosciences are explaining how colorful objects are seen and loud noises are heard. Complaining that psychology can’t explain why red things look red to our brains is like complaining that a chef who has demonstrated how to combine and cook all the ingredients of a casserole still hasn’t explained why a casserole has come out of the oven. Casseroles simply are what get produced by that precise cooking procedure. Conscious experiences simply are what get produced by environments stimulating brains to deal with ongoing events. This is all ultimately a matter of biology. Biological sciences in general discover how and why the specialized structures of organisms have evolved in their own distinctive ways. The brain sciences take responsibility for investigating the incredible amount of complexity and detail involved in the processes of the nervous system that lead to conscious experience.
The life sciences and brain sciences are free to ignore speculations about what needs explaining or how explanations must work. Those speculations often appeal to intuitive beliefs about awareness, consciousness, or the mind which seem hard to deny. Surely the beauty of that rose isn’t essentially material itself. Surely an image viewed in one’s imagination cannot be physical. Surely my belief that winter is coming can’t have a mass or size. It seems easy to agree with these claims. We do intuitively know what we find beautiful, what we can imagine, and what we think is correct, without having to ponder much. Those intuitions deserve explanation, but not in the mythical guises preferred by philosophy or theology. Science has no obligation to explain those guises, fancifully draped and posed for all-too-human dramas.
The human ability to culturally fashion our own stories for our social edification and entertainment is an ability grounded in our biological endowments, to be sure. But biology and psychology explain the natural endowments, not the artificial character of culture. Cultures may have to script such things as dharmas and demons, or matters of duty or data, and label them as intuitive or innate to justify religious tradition. Science isn’t required to accept any of them. Cultural authorities complain about science’s incompetence concerning them, and assert that science can’t discern much of reality. However, science is only designed to ignore superstition, not realities.
Superstitions are so tempting and so persistent because they shape our intuitions. We all have to rely on many sorts of intuitions to get through the day, to be sure. However, intuitions aren’t all the same. Intuitions can make you believe something, and even act on it, but they can’t guarantee truth or reality. We are evolved to be susceptible to intuitions, because the brain delivers fast incomplete information as well as well-digested information. The brain couldn’t have evolved to guarantee that all intuitions are true knowledge. It generates convincing intuitions to make one act now, not to reflectively ponder philosophical conundrums. If young minds can be persuaded to interpret intuitions a certain way, indoctrination gets established, and conviction remains indistinguishable from intuition. What seems to be known without help is merely what became habitual long ago. Cultures have far more to do with intuitive convictions than genuine information.
We are extremely vulnerable to entrenched intuitions, and not only because culture’s dogmas can be instilled while we are unreflective and ignorant. The brain is largely defenseless primarily because it didn’t evolve to resist cultural tales, especially where its own operations are concerned. Whatever does happen to rise to the level of conscious awareness, such as vague feelings, intuitive flashes, or focused attentions spans, can’t possibly be reliable information about how the brain does what it does. All the same, all the kinds of awareness we have are caused by the brain, so everything in awareness has some scientific explanation. Mental events going on without any brain involvement would be proof that science is limited, naturalism is wrong, and a different world view about religious matters would be needed. Such proof isn’t at hand today, despite what some people claim. The cognitive and brain sciences do have confirmable hypotheses about mental activity that keep the body and mind thoroughly interrelated, just as naturalism would expect. In fact, the remarkable progress of the brain sciences demonstrates that anything mental simply is neurological in origin and function.
The brain sciences are only a few generations old. But the illusions of having a substantial and separate consciousness, a personal self, and a free will have been embedded in the folk psychologies of many cultures for millennia. Although a handful of cognitive biases and convenient rationalizations are actually responsible for creating these cognitive illusions, no one could have realized this before the modern cognitive and brain sciences emerged. Although the past ignorance of nonscientific peoples is excusable, what
must be inexcusable is the way that this ignorance was inflated and perverted in order to exploit the fears and hopes of ordinary people. Seemingly intuitive and obvious, these illusions about one’s self were reinforced by dogmatic religious thinking and regrettable philosophical speculation. Curious illusions became unshakable delusions.
By the time science could catch up, it confronted immense obstacles. A correct explanation of animal and human behavior in entirely natural and biological terms was severely obstructed for millennia. Ignorant ideological forces were far more interested in indoctrinating people about immaterial consciousness, unnatural free will, and the immortal soul. To reverse engineer this artifice of lies, we must expose these three delusions for what they are— dogmatic convictions unsupported by any reasonable evidence or confirmed science.
The cognitive and brain sciences are figuring out what causes cognitive illusions such as the stable and substantial self that we take ourselves to have. The illusion of a moment of conscious decision is also getting revealed to be the product of complex neurological processes only partially rising to our conscious awareness. Assumptions about what free will must be like aren’t receiving confirmations from the study of the brain, either. Some defenders of self-consciousness and free will are resorting to the tactic of seeking allies in strange places, such as quantum physics or holistic world views. Those tactics are easily discredited with some applied skepticism and genuine science, as the next chapters will demonstrate. Fearful about the encroachments from science on territory long held by ideology, defenders of pristine self-consciousness and pure free will have retreated to audacious claims about science’s inability to know much about the self and free will, but that desperate move towards the metaphysical high ground only leaves their positions unsupported by evidence, reason, or science.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Irvine examines the chances for any “scientific” utility to consciousness in her book Consciousness as a Scientific Concept (Berlin and New York: Springer, 2013).
2. Petra Stoerig, “Hunting the Ghost: Toward a Neuroscience of Consciousness,” in The Cambridge Companion to Consciousness, eds. Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 707–30.
3. See Colwyn Trevarthen and Vasudevi Reddy, “Consciousness in Infants,” in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, eds. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 41–57. Philip Zelazo, Helena Hong Gao, and Rebecca Todd, “The Development of Consciousness,” in The Cambridge Companion to Consciousness, eds. Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 405–32; and I. Brinck and R. Liljenfors, “The Developmental Origin of Metacognition,” Infant and Child Development 22 (2013): 85–101.
4. R. Glenn Northcutt, “Understanding Vertebrate Brain Evolution,” Integrative and Comparative Biology 42.4 (2002): 750.
5. V. S. Ramanchandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New York: Norton, 2011).
6. William Uttal, Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
7. Antonio Damasio and Kaspar Meyer, “Consciousness: An Overview of the Phenomenon and of Its Possible Neural Basis,” in The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009).
8. Evan G. Antzoulatosemail and Earl K. Milleremail, “Increases in Functional Connectivity between Prefrontal Cortex and Striatum during Category Learning,” Neuron (2014): DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.05.005. Maël Donoso, Anne Collins, and Etienne Koechlin, “Foundations of human reasoning in the prefrontal cortex,” Science (May 29, 2014): DOI 10.1126/science.1252254.
9. Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “What is the function of the claustrum?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 360 no. 1458 (29 June 2005): 1271–79. Mohammad Koubeissia, Fabrice Bartolomeib, Abdelrahman Beltagyd, and Fabienne Picarde, “Electrical stimulation of a small brain area reversibly disrupts consciousness,” Epilepsy & Behavior 37 (August 2014): 32–35.
10. William James, “The Stream of Consciousness,” in Psychology: Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt, 1892).
11. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
12. Thomas C. Dalton and Victor W. Bergenn, Early Experience, The Brain, and Consciousness (New York: Psychology Press, 2007); Leonora Weil et al., “The development of metacognitive ability in adolescence,” Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013) 264–71.
13. Marie Vandekerckhove and Jaak Panksepp. “The flow of anoetic to noetic and autonoetic consciousness: A vision of unknowing (anoetic) and knowing (noetic) consciousness in the remembrance of things past and imagined futures,” Consciousness and Cognition 18 (2009) 1018–28.
14. Bernard J. Baars, S. Franklin, and T. Z. Ramsoy, “Global workspace dynamics: cortical ‘binding and propagation’ enables conscious contents,” Frontiers of Psychology 4 (2013).
15. Hal Blumenfeld, “The Neurological Examination of Consciousness,” in The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology, eds. Steven Laureys and Giulio Tononi (Amsterdam: Academic Press, 2009).
16. Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 32.
17. Hal Blumenfeld, “The Neurological Examination of Consciousness,” in The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology, eds. Steven Laureys and Giulio Tononi (London: Academic Press, 2009), 15–30.
18. Srivas Chennu, Paola Finoia, Evelyn Kamau, Martin M. Monti, Judith Allanson, John D. Pickard, Adrian M. Owen, and Tristan A. Bekinschtein, “Dissociable Endogenous and Exogenous Attention in Disorders of Consciousness,” NeuroImage: Clinical (2013). DOI: 10.1016/j.nicl.2013.10.008.
19. William Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
20. Petra Stoerig, “Hunting the Ghost: Toward a Neuroscience of Consciousness,” in The Cambridge Companion to Consciousness, eds. Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
21. See for example Christof Koch and Francis Crick, “On the Zombie Within.” Nature 411 (June 2001): 893.
22. David Eagleman agrees with Crick and Koch’s view of sentience in his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Random House, 2011).
23. This view, originating with James-Lange theory of emotion dating from the late 19th century, remains one of the more well-confirmed psychological hypotheses tracing back to that era. See David Sander, “Models of Emotion: the Affective Neuroscience Approach,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Human Affective Neuroscience, eds. J. L. Armony and P. Vuilleumier (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5–53.
24. Jesse M. Bering and David F. Bjorklund, “The Serpent’s Gift: Evolutionary Psychology and Consciousness,” in The Cambridge Companion to Consciousness, eds. Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 597–629.
25. Consult Thomas Polger, “Rethinking the Evolution of Consciousness,” in Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, eds. M. Velmans and S. Schneider (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 72–84.
26. Michael Corballis, “The Evolution of Consciousness,” in The Cambridge Companion to Consciousness, eds. Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 571–630.
27. Neuropsychologist Richard Gregory explores the fascinating aspects of convincing visual illusions in Seeing Through Illusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
28. Peter Brugger, “From phantom limb to phantom body: Varieties of extracorporeal awareness,” in Human Body Perception from the Inside Out, eds. G. Knoblich, I. Thornton, M. Grosjean, and M. Shiffrar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 171–209. See also Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, chap. 1: “Phantom Limbs and Plastic Brains.”
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br /> 29. Peter Brugger, “Phantom limb, phantom body, phantom self: A phenomenology of ‘body hallucinations’, in Hallucinations: Research and Practice, eds. Jan Dirk Blom and Iris Sommer (Berlin and New York: Springer, 2012), 203–18. David Eagleman relates many more accounts of mistaken cognition in Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Random House, 2011).
30. Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).
Further Reading
Bayne, Tim, and Jordi Fernández. Delusion and Self-Deception: Affective and Motivational Influences on Belief Formation. New York: Psychology Press, 2011.
