Confronting Consciousness
What Neuroscience Gets Wrong and How to Fix It
Scientific discoveries are often stumbled upon by chance. In 1928 Alexander Fleming had one of the most serendipitous in history when he came across a strain of mold that had spontaneously sprouted in his laboratory while he was away on vacation. Years later, the basic chemical structure of that mold would go on to save millions of lives as the world’s first antibiotic, penicillin. But not all scientific discoveries are so fortuitous — nor should we expect them to be. Scientists spend their working lives meticulously scrutinizing over theory and data to devise exact and controlled experiments that are intended to provide highly specific insights into phenomena of interest. Indeed, the story of penicillin itself is riddled with years of intensive scientific work to transform Fleming’s original “mold juice” into an efficacious drug. Sometimes scientists get lucky and stumble by chance upon great discoveries that no one sees coming; but aimlessly experimenting and waiting around for something miraculous to make itself known makes little sense.
What is odd, however, is that while scientists do usually practice directed and intentional science, the directive to do so too frequently scares us away from studying the most fascinating and demanding phenomena. Neuroscience, in particular, suffers from this ailment. Perhaps one of the most foundational and perplexing phenomena that faces humanity is that of consciousness: what is it and how is it possible? The last one hundred years of neuroscience and psychology have taught us that consciousness is somehow related to goings-on in the brain. Yet, scientifically speaking, that’s just about all that we know. Despite decades of rapid advancement in our understanding of the biology and anatomy of the nervous system, we still have practically no concrete insight into how brains give rise to subjective thoughts, experiences, and emotions. How it is possible that you feel in your mind a qualitative warmth when hugged by a loved one, for example, or a throbbing pain when stung by a bee is just as much a mystery today as it has ever been.
To make matters worse, while a select few neuroscientists have sought to bridge the gap between mind and brain, the overwhelming majority of us make embarrassingly little attempt to do so. Laboratory experiments are by and large directed towards understanding how biological parts mechanically interact to cause people and animals to behave in certain ways, rather than investigating how subjective, internal states of mind can possibly arise out of lumps of biological tissue. Indeed, the latter mysteries are not even so much as acknowledged by most neuroscientists. If neuroscientists believe that consciousness can be understood at all, most seem to be counting on it to make itself known in the absence of direct and intentional experimentation.
Why should a phenomenon as important and fundamental to the human experience as consciousness go so understudied? Perhaps it is because the modern scientist believes that studying consciousness — that placing it in the crosshairs of her experiments — is “unscientific.” The question of what it means to be a conscious, self-aware being is so fundamentally elusive that we struggle to know where or how to begin experimenting on it. As a result, consciousness has largely become a shamefully unscientific point of discussion among scientists.
I contend, however, that the study of consciousness is immensely important to humanity: understanding it is of universal and existential interest to every feeling and experiencing being in the universe. Moreover, as technology develops it is morally imperative that we understand which properties of brains and machines are sufficient to produce consciousness. As neuroscientists — experts in the brain — it is incumbent upon us to take the lead on these issues by making direct and intentional attempts towards unraveling the mystery of consciousness. If not us, who?
Certainly, confronting consciousness is a daunting undertaking. If practicing science is akin to wandering around in a dark room in search of a light switch to illuminate the mysteries around us, most scientists know to stick next to walls and feel around doors — places where light switches are generally found. But in the case of consciousness, we have no map of the room that we are in, and, worse, we don’t even know what the walls or doors might feel like were we to stumble across them. What, then, can the modern neuroscientist contribute to the understanding of consciousness? While ignorance may preclude us, for the time being, from devising directed experiments to pick apart its nature, we should nonetheless be actively attempting to figure out what the map of the dark room that we are in looks like. Neuroscientists ought to keep consciousness in mind as we study the brain. Moreover, we ought to take intentional action to begin engaging in centuries-old conversations about the relationship between mind and body. Coursework on philosophy of mind should be an integral part of every neuroscience education around the world. Discussions about how biological perspectives can lend unique insights into the fundamental underpinnings of the mind should be commonplace in neuroscience departments. We should regularly publish and debate neurobiologically-constrained theories of mind. It should no longer be taboo to discuss consciousness at scientific conferences and meetings.
Only by changing our collective attitude towards the study of consciousness and by taking intentional steps to begin discussing its underlying neurobiological mechanisms can we hope to make progress towards understanding what is perhaps the most intriguing mystery that nature has to offer. Indeed, it is the responsibility of the contemporary neuroscientist to apply her expertise on the brain to one of humanity’s most demanding and existentially significant questions about who we are.
