To me, consciousness is 'the' great mystery of life. How is it possible for me to be aware of myself, to have memories, to learn and refine skills, to have opinions gleaned from knowledge, to have passions and prejudices. My personal consciousness, like every human person's consciousness, is tangible and highly individual in its manifestation.
Traditional neuroscience has no answer for this question. The assumption has always been that everything that defines each of us as a separate individual resides in the brain. Somehow, it is assumed, there are physical structures in our brains in which our memories and our intellect reside. The problem is no one has been able to identify any such structures. Neuroscientists at universities around the world have focused on the consciousness problem for many decades. They have employed the most sophisticated tools to study the human brain, to image it down to the individual neuronal cell structure. What they have identified are locations in the brain and processes in the brain that are linked to various somatic and autonomic life processes. On that level, the brain is well understood. But consciousness... still a complete mystery, despite a massive effort by researchers to locate it in the brain, and to understand it.
The great British scientist and philosopher, J.S.B. Haldane (1892-1964) once said "Life is not only stranger than we know, but stranger than we can know." When he said that, he could easily have been talking about consciousness.
The celebrated physician and neuroscientist, Robert Lanza, and biologist, Rupert Sheldrake each have come up with very interesting ideas related to the nature of consciousness. I have written several blogs about their work.
I pulled the article below from
The Guardian webpage.
_______________
Why Can't the World's Greatest Minds Solve the Mystery of Consciousness?
By Oliver Burkeman (1/21/2015)
One spring
morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of
being inside your head, looking out – or, to use the kind of language that
might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didn’t
realise it at the time, the young Australian academic was about to ignite a war
between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a central mystery
of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and
revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.
The scholars
gathered at the University of Arizona – for what would later go down as a
landmark conference on the subject – knew they were doing something edgy: in
many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take
seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their
reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s,
hadn’t proved thrilling. “Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and
boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,” recalled Stuart
Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. “As the organiser,
I’m looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless.” He
grew worried. “But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that
was Dave.” With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the
27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert.
“He comes on stage, hair down to his butt, he’s prancing around like Mick
Jagger,” Hameroff said. “But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes
up.”
Philosophers
and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes
human beings more than complex robots
The brain,
Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists
busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to
jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the
room at a noisy party? But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of
things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out. There was
only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said. It was a puzzle so
bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it
with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those
complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why
aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of
responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an
inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of
moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as
mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the
body to which it is attached?
What jolted
Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. “At
the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night,
eavesdropping,” Hameroff said. “And everyone was like: ‘Oh! The Hard Problem!
The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!’” Philosophers had pondered the
so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. But Chalmers’s particular manner of
reviving it “reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the
field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that we’re dealing with here?”
Two decades
later, we know an astonishing amount about the brain: you can’t follow the news
for a week without encountering at least one more tale about scientists
discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or laziness, or love at
first sight, or regret – and that’s only the research that makes the headlines.
Meanwhile, the field of artificial intelligence – which focuses on
recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like
to be one – has advanced stupendously. But like an obnoxious relative who
invites himself to stay for a week and then won’t leave, the Hard Problem
remains. When I stubbed my toe on the leg of the dining table this morning, as
any student of the brain could tell you, nerve fibres called “C-fibres” shot a
message to my spinal cord, sending neurotransmitters to the part of my brain
called the thalamus, which activated (among other things) my limbic system.
Fine. But how come all that was accompanied by an agonising flash of pain? And
what is pain, anyway?
Questions
like these, which straddle the border between science and philosophy, make some
experts openly angry. They have caused others to argue that conscious
sensations, such as pain, don’t really exist, no matter what I felt as I hopped
in anguish around the kitchen; or, alternatively, that plants and trees must
also be conscious. The Hard Problem has prompted arguments in serious journals
about what is going on in the mind of a zombie, or – to quote the title of a
famous 1974 paper by the philosopher Thomas Nagel – the question “What is it like to
be a bat?” Some argue that the problem marks the boundary not just of what we
currently know, but of what science could ever explain. On the other hand, in
recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that it may
finally be about to be solved – but only if we are willing to accept the
profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might soon
become conscious, too.
Next week,
the conundrum will move further into public awareness with the opening of Tom
Stoppard’s new play, The Hard Problem, at the National Theatre – the
first play Stoppard has written for the National since 2006, and the last that
the theatre’s head, Nicholas Hytner, will direct before leaving his post in
March. The 77-year-old playwright has revealed little about the play’s
contents, except that it concerns the question of “what consciousness is and
why it exists”, considered from the perspective of a young researcher played by
Olivia Vinall. Speaking to the Daily Mail, Stoppard also clarified a potential
misinterpretation of the title. “It’s not about erectile dysfunction,” he said.
Stoppard’s
work has long focused on grand, existential themes, so the subject is fitting:
when conversation turns to the Hard Problem, even the most stubborn
rationalists lapse quickly into musings on the meaning of life. Christof Koch, the chief scientific officer at
the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a key player in the Obama
administration’s multibillion-dollar initiative to map the human brain, is
about as credible as neuroscientists get. But, he told me in December: “I think
the earliest desire that drove me to study consciousness was that I wanted,
secretly, to show myself that it couldn’t be explained scientifically. I was
raised Roman Catholic, and I wanted to find a place where I could say: OK,
here, God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people.” Koch
assured me that he had long ago abandoned such improbable notions. Then, not
much later, and in all seriousness, he said that on the basis of his recent
research he thought it wasn’t impossible that his iPhone might have feelings.
In all
seriousness, Koch said he thought it wasn't impossible that his iPhone might
have feelings
* * *
By the time
Chalmers delivered his speech in Tucson, science had been vigorously attempting
to ignore the problem of consciousness for a long time. The source of the
animosity dates back to the 1600s, when René Descartes identified the dilemma
that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. On the one hand, Descartes
realised, nothing is more obvious and undeniable than the fact that you’re
conscious. In theory, everything else you think you know about the world could
be an elaborate illusion cooked up to deceive you – at this point, present-day
writers invariably invoke The Matrix – but your consciousness itself can’t be
illusory. On the other hand, this most certain and familiar of phenomena obeys
none of the usual rules of science. It doesn’t seem to be physical. It can’t be
observed, except from within, by the conscious person. It can’t even really be
described. The mind, Descartes concluded, must be made of some special,
immaterial stuff that didn’t abide by the laws of nature; it had been
bequeathed to us by God.
This
religious and rather hand-wavy position, known as Cartesian dualism, remained
the governing assumption into the 18th century and the early days of modern
brain study. But it was always bound to grow unacceptable to an increasingly
secular scientific establishment that took physicalism – the position that only
physical things exist – as its most basic principle. And yet, even as
neuroscience gathered pace in the 20th century, no convincing alternative explanation
was forthcoming. So little by little, the topic became taboo. Few people
doubted that the brain and mind were very closely linked: if you question this,
try stabbing your brain repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and see what happens
to your consciousness. But how they were linked – or if they were
somehow exactly the same thing – seemed a mystery best left to philosophers in
their armchairs. As late as 1989, writing in the International Dictionary of
Psychology, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherland could irascibly declare of
consciousness that “it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or
why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”
It was only
in 1990 that Francis Crick, the joint discoverer of the double
helix, used his position of eminence to break ranks. Neuroscience was far
enough along by now, he declared in a slightly tetchy paper co-written with
Christof Koch, that consciousness could no longer be ignored. “It is
remarkable,” they began, “that most of the work in both cognitive science and
the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousness” – partly, they
suspected, “because most workers in these areas cannot see any useful way of
approaching the problem”. They presented their own “sketch of a theory”,
arguing that certain neurons, firing at certain frequencies, might somehow be the
cause of our inner awareness – though it was not clear how.
“People thought I was crazy to be getting
involved,” Koch recalled. “A senior colleague took me out to lunch and said,
yes, he had the utmost respect for Francis, but Francis was a Nobel laureate
and a half-god and he could do whatever he wanted, whereas I didn’t have tenure
yet, so I should be incredibly careful. Stick to more mainstream science! These
fringey things – why not leave them until retirement, when you’re coming close
to death, and you can worry about the soul and stuff like that?”
It was around
this time that David Chalmers started talking about zombies.
* * *
As a child,
Chalmers was short-sighted in one eye, and he vividly recalls the day he was
first fitted with glasses to rectify the problem. “Suddenly I had proper
binocular vision,” he said. “And the world just popped out. It was
three-dimensional to me in a way it hadn’t been.” He thought about that moment
frequently as he grew older. Of course, you could tell a simple mechanical
story about what was going on in the lens of his glasses, his eyeball, his
retina, and his brain. “But how does that explain the way the world just pops
out like that?” To a physicalist, the glasses-eyeball-retina story is the only
story. But to a thinker of Chalmers’s persuasion, it was clear that it wasn’t
enough: it told you what the machinery of the eye was doing, but it didn’t
begin to explain that sudden, breathtaking experience of depth and clarity.
Chalmers’s “zombie” thought experiment is his attempt to show why the
mechanical account is not enough – why the mystery of conscious awareness goes
deeper than a purely material science can explain.
“Look, I’m
not a zombie, and I pray that you’re not a zombie,” Chalmers said, one Sunday
before Christmas, “but the point is that evolution could have produced
zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!” We were drinking
espressos in his faculty apartment at New York University, where he recently
took up a full-time post at what is widely considered the leading philosophy
department in the Anglophone world; boxes of his belongings, shipped over from
Australia, lay unpacked around his living-room. Chalmers, now 48, recently cut
his hair in a concession to academic respectability, and he wears less denim,
but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever. The zombie scenario goes as
follows: imagine that you have a doppelgänger. This person physically resembles
you in every respect, and behaves identically to you; he or she holds
conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The
sole difference is that the doppelgänger has no consciousness; this – as
opposed to a groaning, blood-spattered walking corpse from a movie – is what
philosophers mean by a “zombie”.
Such
non-conscious humanoids don’t exist, of course. (Or perhaps it would be better
to say that I know I’m not one, anyhow; I could never know for certain that you
aren’t.) But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could.
Evolution might have produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same
as humans, capable of everything humans can do, except with no spark of
awareness inside. As Chalmers explained: “I’m talking to you now, and I can see
how you’re behaving; I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly what’s going
on in your brain – yet it seems it could be consistent with all that evidence
that you have no consciousness at all.” If you were approached by me and my
doppelgänger, not knowing which was which, not even the most powerful brain
scanner in existence could tell us apart. And the fact that one can even imagine
this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness can’t just be made of
ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra –
an additional ingredient in nature.
Chalmers
recently cut his hair and he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as
heavy-metal as ever
It would be
understating things a bit to say that this argument wasn’t universally
well-received when Chalmers began to advance it, most prominently in his 1996
book The
Conscious Mind. The withering tone of the philosopher Massimo
Pigliucci sums up the thousands of words that have been written attacking the
zombie notion: “Let’s relegate zombies to B-movies and try to be a little more
serious about our philosophy, shall we?” Yes, it may be true that most of us,
in our daily lives, think of consciousness as something over and above our
physical being – as if your mind were “a chauffeur inside your own body”, to
quote the spiritual author Alan Watts. But to accept this as a scientific
principle would mean rewriting the laws of physics. Everything we know about
the universe tells us that reality consists only of physical things: atoms and
their component particles, busily colliding and combining. Above all, critics
point out, if this non-physical mental stuff did exist, how could it cause
physical things to happen – as when the feeling of pain causes me to jerk my
fingers away from the saucepan’s edge?
Nonetheless,
just occasionally, science has dropped tantalising hints that this spooky extra
ingredient might be real. In the 1970s, at what was then the National Hospital
for Nervous Diseases in London, the neurologist Lawrence Weiskrantz encountered
a patient, known as “DB”, with a blind spot in his left visual field, caused by
brain damage. Weiskrantz showed him patterns of striped lines, positioned so
that they fell on his area of blindness, then asked him to say whether the
stripes were vertical or horizontal. Naturally, DB protested that he could see
no stripes at all. But Weiskrantz insisted that he guess the answers anyway –
and DB got them right almost 90% of the time. Apparently, his brain was
perceiving the stripes without his mind being conscious of them. One
interpretation is that DB was a semi-zombie, with a brain like any other brain,
but partially lacking the magical add-on of consciousness.
Chalmers
knows how wildly improbable his ideas can seem, and takes this in his stride:
at philosophy conferences, he is fond of clambering on stage to sing The Zombie
Blues, a lament about the miseries of having no consciousness. (“I act like you
act / I do what you do / But I don’t know / What it’s like to be you.”) “The
conceit is: wouldn’t it be a drag to be a zombie? Consciousness is what makes
life worth living, and I don’t even have that: I’ve got the zombie blues.” The
song has improved since its debut more than a decade ago, when he used to try
to hold a tune. “Now I’ve realised it sounds better if you just shout,” he
said.
* * *
The
consciousness debates have provoked more mudslinging and fury than most in
modern philosophy, perhaps because of how baffling the problem is: opposing
combatants tend not merely to disagree, but to find each other’s positions
manifestly preposterous. An admittedly extreme example concerns the
Canadian-born philosopher Ted Honderich, whose book On Consciousness was
described, in an article by his fellow philosopher Colin McGinn
in 2007, as “banal and pointless”, “excruciating”, “absurd”, running “the full
gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad”. McGinn added, in a
footnote: “The review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it. The
editors asked me to ‘soften the tone’ of the original [and] I have done so.”
(The attack may have been partly motivated by a passage in Honderich’s
autobiography, in which he mentions “my small colleague Colin McGinn”; at the
time, Honderich told this newspaper he’d enraged McGinn by referring to a
girlfriend of his as “not as plain as the old one”.)
McGinn, to
be fair, has made a career from such hatchet jobs. But strong feelings only
slightly more politely expressed are commonplace. Not everybody agrees there is
a Hard Problem to begin with – making the whole debate kickstarted by Chalmers
an exercise in pointlessness. Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and
professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we
think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the
spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesn’t actually give rise to
something called consciousness. Common sense may tell us there’s a subjective
world of inner experience – but then common sense told us that the sun orbits
the Earth, and that the world was flat. Consciousness, according to Dennett’s
theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just
makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on. To look for a
real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as
insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter,
must be made up of a peculiar substance named “fictoplasm”; the idea is absurd
and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the
point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and
head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying. To
Dennett’s opponents, he is simply denying the existence of something everyone
knows for certain: their inner experience of sights, smells, emotions and the
rest. (Chalmers has speculated, largely in jest, that Dennett himself might be
a zombie.) It’s like asserting that cancer doesn’t exist, then claiming you’ve
cured cancer; more than one critic of Dennett’s most famous book, Consciousness
Explained, has joked that its title ought to be Consciousness Explained Away.
Dennett’s reply is characteristically breezy: explaining things away, he
insists, is exactly what scientists do. When physicists first concluded that
the only difference between gold and silver was the number of subatomic
particles in their atoms, he writes, people could have felt cheated,
complaining that their special “goldness” and “silveriness” had been explained
away. But everybody now accepts that goldness and silveriness are really just
differences in atoms. However hard it feels to accept, we should concede that
consciousness is just the physical brain, doing what brains do.
“The history
of science is full of cases where people thought a phenomenon was
utterly unique, that there couldn’t be any possible mechanism for
it, that we might never solve it, that there was nothing in the
universe like it,” said Patricia Churchland of the University of California, a
self-described “neurophilosopher” and one of Chalmers’s most forthright
critics. Churchland’s opinion of the Hard Problem, which she expresses in
caustic vocal italics, is that it is nonsense, kept alive by philosophers who
fear that science might be about to eliminate one of the puzzles that has kept
them gainfully employed for years. Look at the precedents: in the 17th century,
scholars were convinced that light couldn’t possibly be physical – that it had
to be something occult, beyond the usual laws of nature. Or take life itself:
early scientists were convinced that there had to be some magical spirit – the
élan vital – that distinguished living beings from mere machines. But there
wasn’t, of course. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label
we give to certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually,
neuroscience will show that consciousness is just brain states. Churchland
said: “The history of science really gives you perspective on how easy it is to
talk ourselves into this sort of thinking – that if my big, wonderful brain
can’t envisage the solution, then it must be a really, really hard problem!”
Solutions
have regularly been floated: the literature is awash in references to “global
workspace theory”, “ego tunnels”, “microtubules”, and speculation that quantum
theory may provide a way forward. But the intractability of the arguments has
caused some thinkers, such as Colin McGinn, to raise an intriguing if
ultimately defeatist possibility: what if we’re just constitutionally incapable
of ever solving the Hard Problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us
solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular
reason to assume they should be capable of cracking every big philosophical
puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become known as
“mysterianism” – after the 1960s Michigan rock’n’roll band ? and the
Mysterians, who themselves borrowed the name from a work of Japanese sci-fi –
but the essence of it is that there’s actually no mystery to why consciousness
hasn’t been explained: it’s that humans aren’t up to the job. If we struggle to
understand what it could possibly mean for the mind to be physical, maybe
that’s because we are, to quote the American philosopher Josh Weisberg, in the
position of “squirrels trying to understand quantum mechanics”. In other words:
“It’s just not going to happen.”
* * *
Or maybe it
is: in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, Chalmers and
Koch among them, have begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre
that it has been neglected for more than a century, except among followers of
eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age. This is
“panpsychism”, the dizzying notion that everything in the universe might be
conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious when put into
certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds ridiculous: when he mentions
panpsychism, he has written, “I often encounter blank stares of
incomprehension.” But when it comes to grappling with the Hard Problem,
crazy-sounding theories are an occupational hazard. Besides, panpsychism might
help unravel an enigma that has attached to the study of consciousness from the
start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pigs probably have it,
and maybe birds, too – well, where does it stop?
Growing up
as the child of German-born Catholics, Koch had a dachshund named Purzel.
According to the church, because he was a dog, that meant he didn’t have a
soul. But he whined when anxious and yelped when injured – “he certainly gave
every appearance of having a rich inner life”. These days we don’t much speak
of souls, but it is widely assumed that many non-human brains are conscious –
that a dog really does feel pain when he is hurt. The problem is that there
seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or sparrows or mice or
insects, or, for that matter, trees or rocks. Since we don’t know how the
brains of mammals create consciousness, we have no grounds for assuming it’s
only the brains of mammals that do so – or even that consciousness requires a
brain at all. Which is how Koch and Chalmers have both found themselves
arguing, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, that an ordinary
household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind you might find in your smoke
detector, might in principle be conscious.
The argument
unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain
fundamental aspects of reality – such as space, mass, or electrical charge –
just do exist. They can’t be explained as being the result of anything else.
Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that
consciousness could be like that, too – and that if it is, there is no
particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.
Koch’s
specific twist on this idea, developed with the neuroscientist and psychiatrist
Giulio Tononi, is narrower and more precise than traditional panpsychism. It is
the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that the
information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organised. The human
brain certainly fits the bill; so do the brains of cats and dogs, though their
consciousness probably doesn’t resemble ours. But in principle the same might
apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. (The ethical implications
are unsettling: might we owe the same care to conscious machines that we bestow
on animals? Koch, for his part, tries to avoid stepping on insects as he
walks.)
Unlike the
vast majority of musings on the Hard Problem, moreover, Tononi and Koch’s
“integrated information theory” has actually been tested. A team of researchers
led by Tononi has designed a device that stimulates the brain with electrical
voltage, to measure how interconnected and organised – how “integrated” – its
neural circuits are. Sure enough, when people fall into a deep sleep, or
receive an injection of anaesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness, the
device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Among patients
suffering “locked-in syndrome” – who are as conscious as the rest of us –
levels of brain integration remain high; among patients in coma – who aren’t –
it doesn’t. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, Koch argues and in theory
you could take any device, measure the complexity of the information contained
in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious.
But even if
one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be
conscious, could you ever know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone
itself could ever know that? Koch shrugged. “It’s like black holes,” he said.
“I’ve never been in a black hole. Personally, I have no experience of black
holes. But the theory [that predicts black holes] seems always to be true, so I
tend to accept it.”
It would be
satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually to
vanquish the Hard Problem. On the one hand, it wouldn’t require a belief in
spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics would
escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldn’t need to accept the
strange and soulless claim that consciousness doesn’t exist, when it’s so
obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, it’s everywhere. The
universe is throbbing with it.
Last June,
several of the most prominent combatants in the consciousness debates –
including Chalmers, Churchland and Dennett – boarded a tall-masted yacht for a
trip among the ice floes of Greenland. This conference-at-sea was funded by a
Russian internet entrepreneur, Dmitry Volkov, the founder of the Moscow Centre
for Consciousness Studies. About 30 academics and graduate students, plus crew,
spent a week gliding through dark waters, past looming snow-topped mountains
and glaciers, in a bracing chill conducive to focused thought, giving the
problem of consciousness another shot. In the mornings, they visited islands to
go hiking, or examine the ruins of ancient stone huts; in the afternoons, they
held conference sessions on the boat. For Chalmers, the setting only sharpened
the urgency of the mystery: how could you feel the Arctic wind on your face,
take in the visual sweep of vivid greys and whites and greens, and still claim
conscious experience was unreal, or that it was simply the result of ordinary
physical stuff, behaving ordinarily?
The question
was rhetorical. Dennett and Churchland were not converted; indeed, Chalmers has
no particular confidence that a consensus will emerge in the next century.
“Maybe there’ll be some amazing new development that leaves us all, now,
looking like pre-Darwinians arguing about biology,” he said. “But it wouldn’t
surprise me in the least if in 100 years, neuroscience is incredibly
sophisticated, if we have a complete map of the brain – and yet some people are
still saying, ‘Yes, but how does any of that give you consciousness?’ while
others are saying ‘No, no, no – that just is the consciousness!’” The
Greenland cruise concluded in collegial spirits, and mutual incomprehension.
It would be
poetic – albeit deeply frustrating – were it ultimately to prove that the one
thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be
out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one could argue that
nothing else could ever matter more – since anything at all that matters, in
life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Yet
there’s no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the
voyage towards that answer. Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the
Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we
would even recognize that we’d found it.
