146. A CONSCIOUSNESS READER
In the previous post, we visited Edgar Mitchell’s take on consciousness. In Meghan O’Gieblyn’s article “Do We Have Minds of Our Own?”, she shares some additional current views about consciousness. This post includes selected gleanings from that article
“If the current science of consciousness frequently strikes us as counterintuitive, it’s because even the most promising theories often fail to account for how we actually experience our interior lives.
“In order to do science, we’ve had to dismiss the mind. This was, in any case, the bargain that was made in the seventeenth century, when Descartes and Galileo deemed consciousness a subjective phenomenon unfit for empirical study. If the world was to be reducible to physical causation, then all mental experiences — intention, agency, purpose, meaning — must be secondary qualities, inexplicable within the framework of materialism. And so the world was divided in two: mind and matter.”
“Artificial intelligence can now beat us in chess and Go; it can predict the onset of cancer as well as human oncologists [can] and recognize financial fraud more accurately than professional auditors. But, if intelligence and reason can be performed without subjective awareness, then what is responsible for consciousness?”
“In his new book, Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience, the neuroscientist and psychologist Michael Graziano writes that consciousness is simply a mental illusion, a simplified interface that humans evolved as a survival strategy in order to model the processes of the brain. He calls this the ‘attention schema.’ According to Graziano’s theory, the attention schema is an attribute of the brain that allows us to monitor mental activity — tracking where our focus is directed and helping us predict where it might be drawn in the future — much the way that other mental models oversee, for instance, the position of our arms and legs in space.”
“The recent vogue for ‘mindfulness’ implies that we are passive observers of an essentially mechanistic existence — that consciousness can only be summoned fleetingly, through great effort. Plagued by a midday funk, we are often quicker to attribute it to bad gut flora or having consumed gluten than to the theatre of beliefs and ideas.”
“Another option, perhaps the only other option, is to conclude that mind is one with the material world — that everything, in other words, is conscious. This may sound like New Age bunk, but a version of this concept, called integrated information theory, or I.I.T., is widely considered one of the field’s most promising theories in recent years. One of its pioneers, the neuroscientist Christof Koch, has a new book entitled The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed, in which he argues that consciousness is not unique to humans but exists throughout the animal kingdom and the insect world, and even at the microphysical level. Koch … has long argued that animals share consciousness with humans; this new book extends consciousness further down the chain of being.
“Central to I.I.T. is the notion that consciousness is not an either/or state but a continuum — some ‘systems,’ in other words, are more conscious than others. Koch proposes that all sorts of things we have long thought of as inert might have ‘a tiny glow of experience,’ including honeybees, jellyfish, and cerebral organoids grown from stem cells. Even atoms and quarks may be forms of ‘enminded matter.’
“Another term for this is panpsychism — the belief that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature. In the final chapters of the book, Koch commits himself to this philosophy, claiming his place among a lineage of thinkers — including Leibniz, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead — who similarly believed that matter and soul were one substance. … In the book’s last chapter, he confesses to finding spiritual sustenance in the possibility that humans are not the lone form of consciousness in an otherwise dead cosmos. ‘I now know that I live in a universe in which the inner light of experience is far, far more widespread than assumed within standard Western canon,’ he writes. Koch admits that when he speaks publicly on these ideas, he often gets ‘you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-stares.’”
“If the current science of consciousness frequently strikes us as counterintuitive, if not outright crazy, it’s because even the most promising theories often fail to account for how we actually experience our interior lives. ‘The result,’ Tim Parks writes in his new book, Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness, ‘is that we regularly find ourselves signing up to explanations of reality that seem a million miles from our experience.’”
“For Parks, our subjective understanding of our minds is trustworthy, at least to a degree; he admonishes the reader to weigh every scientific theory against their knowledge of ‘what it’s really like being alive.’”
“In his [Donald Hoffman’s] recent book, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, he argues that we must restart science on an entirely different footing, beginning with the brute fact that our minds exist, and determining, from there, what we can recover from evolutionary theory, quantum physics, and the rest. Theories such as Hoffman’s amount to a return of idealism — the notion that physical reality cannot be strictly separated from the mind — a philosophy that has been out of fashion since the rise of analytic philosophy, in the early twentieth century. But if idealism keeps resurfacing in Western thought, it may be because we find Descartes and Galileo’s original dismissal of the mind deeply unsatisfying. Consciousness, after all, is the sole apparatus that connects us to the external world — the only way we know anything about what we have agreed to call ‘reality.’”
Q: Do you connect with any of these views?
