The hard problem of consciousness from the perspective of language
How we use words shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. An old adage that illustrates this is the catalogue of words for snow in the Inuktitut language used by the Inuit of the Canadian Arctic. The languages contains a variety of words, many with unrelated roots to describe, in the words of the anthropologist Hugh Brody:
…snow that is falling, fine snow in good weather, freshly fallen snow, snow cover, soft snow that makes walking difficult, soft snowbank, hard and crystalline snow, snow that has thawed and refrozen, snow that has been rained on, powdery snow, windblown snow, fine snow with which the wind has covered an object, hard snow that yields to the weight of footsteps, snow that is being melted to make drinking water, a mix of snow and water for glazing sledge runners, wet snow that is falling, snow that is right for snow house building. Also, Inuktitut has a number of verbs that use snow as their root…1
For hunting societies for whom survival depends on lateral knowledge rather than hierarchical ordering and control, it matters that what we think of as subcategories of the same thing are are significantly distinct, different in kind.
To give a reverse example in the Hebrew language the word ‘ruach’ (ר֖וּחַ), which corresponds to the word ‘pneuma’ in Greek, can be used to mean ‘wind’, ‘breath’ or ‘spirit’. If you read for example the fairly well known passage in Ezekiel 37 where a valley of dry bones is brought back to life, in English you will see the words wind, breath and spirit that appear to refer to distinct things yet in Hebrew are using the same word (הָר֑וּחַ). What we classify as distinct concepts or things was then understood under the larger umbrella of something like a “life force”, or “spirit”. In the same way that for us, unrelated Inuktitut words for snow related phenomena are all simply ‘kinds of precipitation’, wind and breath are ‘kinds of spirit or life’.
Why does this matter? Language is one way of approaching what in philosophy is called the ‘hard problem of consciousness’, a term coined by the philosopher David Chalmers for the problem of how brain science seems to run up against a category problem when it comes to explaining consciousness. Firstly operational, that we don’t exactly understand why the brain’s processes need to actually be perceived by a perceiver, but more importantly a category distinction: if the entire operation of the brain can be explained by the process of interacting atoms/particles/cells then where does the actual is-ness of first person perception fit in? Nothing in a physicalist explanation would or could make reference to the fact that there is something that it is like to be something, only to the something itself.
There is a scene in C.S. Lewis novel ‘The Voyage of the Dawn Treader’ where the sailors of a ship arrive at the edge of the sea, the end of the world — a wall of water ascending to the sky. This seems to be something like what happens when science tries to approach consciousness. It becomes clear that the language of science just isn’t categorically adequate to account for it. Or to put it another way, it becomes clear that science as an epistemology is a heuristic, not a total way of understanding things.
To put it simply we can think about it like this. Science essentially says “let’s imagine the world is composed of stuff, that can be understood by reference to the smallest conceivable level of operation and law, and is and must be exclusively objective”. In other words we conceive of the world as a world of objects. When you understand that this is what science is, you understand why it simply reaches a wall when it comes to consciousness. Object cannot explain subject, the subjective cannot be made objective, the qualitative cannot be made quantitive, what something is like cannot be reduced to what something is made of or the laws that compose it.
In the modern age, for many, the scientific approach has in the words of the philosopher David Bentley Hart “Hypertrophied into a worldview”2. The world as material has become so powerful as a tool that people come to believe it is the only way to see the world, such that philosophers like Daniel Dennett simply deny the hard problem of consciousness exists. It’s just a kind of insignificant add on, an epiphenomenon, like smoke rising up from a far away battle.
This is perhaps illustrated by the fear that we are going to produce conscious AI. As if simply creating machine complexity in increasing quantity will produce a qualitative change. Who has proved consciousness could ever be emitted or possessed by a machine capable of a kind of algorithmic self reference? No one, the belief is a belief, an adherence to the simple ignoring of the very absurdity of being a subject in an objective world.
To return to language — In the Upanishads three concepts or words emerge that describe our predicament in the world, ‘maya’, ‘karma’ and ‘brahman’. ‘Maya’ describes something like the entanglement of illusion that we find ourselves in, our attachment or belief of the ‘reality’ of this being part of the root of suffering. ‘Karma’ describes the moral law of accumulation by which souls transmigrate through reality, and ‘Brahman’ describes the absolute, total reality. This perspective is the inverse of how many in the modern world see things. In Vedanta the belief in the world as objective and attachment to it is the root cause of suffering, and freedom lies in understanding that the ‘atman’ (self, might be a translation, but as the Upanishads make clear, this is not the self as we understand it, the ‘thinker’ or the ‘doer’, but the conscious perceiver, subjectivity) within us is fundamentally a part of brahman. The law of Karma also means that within this entanglement something of the rule or structure of things is fundamentally moral. This is an idea mirrored in western culture probably best represented by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante creates a schema of the entire universe as represented by a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise, a schema where justice is fully laid out and the world is presented as a place where moral action is the highest kind of meaning, or outcome. Like Karma, moral law is what constructs the universe. Moral being is primary.
I should put my cards on the table and say I believe this to be fundamentally true. And I think in a vestigial way we all still do. Our sense of justice, social or global motivates endless anger and argument on social media, protests on the streets. Our intuitions tell us that right and wrong, goodness and morality are not just things we say that don’t really have meaning, but components of being, part of the fabric of our reality.
Materialism has no place for this. When we in the modern world use a word like ‘reality’ we think of it as referring to a world composed of ‘stuff’ or ‘things’, from which a conscious person arises. The primacy of the objective has proven immensely powerful as a model in the material world, we have abundant technology and healthcare and much to rejoice for. But we also have a meaning problem, and as we saw, a category problem. Depression and anxiety rates continue to increase3 and it seems our world is fragmenting as the vestige of old value systems began to decay. Squabbles about issues such as gender remind us that we don’t have answers to basic questions like ‘what is the self?’, even ‘what are we doing here?’ And we don’t even know how to properly ask the questions let alone begin to answer them. It seems that the hard problem of consciousness is more than just a niche philosophical debate, but rather a problem with our entire worldview.
To take this further, the fundamental way we use and understand language has become defined by this worldview. Within the world of religion, where myth and metaphor is primary we cannot accept the terms myth and metaphor within the precondition that they have the word ‘just’ before them. Texts within religion, rather then being seen as what they are, a structure of language, are ‘objectified’, and essentially converted into competing scientific theories. Their theological, poetic, mythic, transcendent content is put on a shelf while we watch debates with Dawkins and the latest Christian stepping up to argue how the world was in fact made six thousand years ago, shortly before God flooded it for forty days. An objective world is a world stripped of the sacred and the transcendent, even sadly sometimes for those who still claim to be believers. Maybe words such as ‘spirit’, ‘maya’ or ‘karma’ say more to us than we can with our limited vocabulary of serious self reference. We need a transformation in language. We need to relearn that words make our world, help us reach out into reality, and we can find a world rich and alive with meaning, where the moral subordinates the physical and justice reigns over the blind world of things.
References
1: Hugh Brody — The Other Side Of Eden
2: David Bentley Hart — God — Being, Consciousness, Bliss
3: https://www.businessinsider.com/depression-rates-by-age-young-people-2019-3?r=US&IR=T
