Category: Consciousness

Notes on Consciousness

I have been reading fairly extensively in the literature on consciousness. Stuff written over the past thirty years by philosophers and neuro-biologists. This post simply aims to get down a few specifics about what consciousness is.

This post is derived from two sources: Nicholas Humphrey, Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023) and Walter Veit, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023). Both Humphrey and Veit are Darwinians who aim to give an account of how consciousness emerged in the course of evolutionary history. I may take up their Darwinism (which is problematic in my eyes) in a later post. For now I just want to get to how they describe consciousness, since I think they are both admirably clear on that issue and basically convincing. I don’t presume to assess whether they are right. Neither of them (and as far as my reading goes no one else in the world either) has a slam dunk physiological/neurochemical account of consciousness. Instead, they both rely on a phenomenological description (what consciousness feels like and is experienced as) and a functional description (what consciousness does).

Let’s start with Veit. He offers five fundamental functions for consciousness:

1) sensory experience. Consciousness entails being able to process various stimuli that originate outside the organism as well as internal stimuli (such as the sensation of hunger);

2) evaluative. Consciousness provides the ability of an organism to evaluate its environment and react accordingly. That is, the organism does not just receive sensory signals, but also evaluates them.

3) the integration of experiences in the present moment. Consciousness unifies; it takes incoming signals that might be visual, auditory, scents etc. and organizes them into an holistic understanding of the present, of what is before the organism and how its various components stand in relation to one another.

4) the integration of experience across time. Consciousness also unifies across time, weaving together the various experiences at specific moments into a history (or narrative) that specifies the relations between the particulars of individual experiences. (I find this function dubious. Or, better, I would not make such an easy assumption of unity, even if the effort to unify does exist. However, it also seems to me that efforts to unify are also more than happy to dismiss various experiences as irrelevant within certain narrative frames. So, yes, we deploy narratives to organize experiences over time, but I don’t think of the narratives as holistic in the sense of incorporating everything. Lots of stuff doesn’t fit with lots of other stuff, even as some things do go together.)

5) Self-consciousness. This, of course, is the biggie, the holy grail of consciousness studies. How to explain its existence—either by specifying its function in a Darwinian account or by providing a bio-chemical account of its existence. It is a matter of faith for just about everyone writing about consciousness that there is a material, bio-chemical cause of consciousness. Materialism (no non-material facts or substances; thus consciousness must be a material thing) and naturalism (everything that exists does so–and originates–within a natural frame; nothing extraneous to nature) are the default positions for 95% of contemporary philosophers and scientists. But no one has come particularly close to providing such a materialistic account of consciousness, so that a skeptic like Colin McGinn argues that no such account is likely to be given within (to pick an arbitrary number) the next 100 years. Materialism, in other words, is an unproved axiom, an item of faith that gets the whole game rolling.

Humphrey is good at describing self-consciousness. He zeroes in on “sensations” and “qualia.” He writes: “Sensations are basically mental states . . . that track what’s happening at our sense organs.. . . They provide us, as subjects, with information about the quality of the sensory stimulus, its distribution and intensity, its bodily location, and–especially—how we evaluate it: the pain is in my toe and horrible; the red light is at my eyes and stirs me up. But ‘tracking’ this information is only half the story. For, as we can each of us attest, sensations have a qualitative dimension that sets them apart from all other mental states and attitudes. There’s something that our pains, smells, sights, and so on have in common that our thoughts, beliefs, wishes and so on don’t”(2). That something extra is what Humphrey (following common philosophical usage) calls “qualia.” Sights and smells have a bodily dimension that beliefs and wishes seem to lack. (I think this statement wrong, as I will discuss below.) Consciousness for Humphrey is tied to the ability to track, to register, the “feel” of sensations, to not only see the Van Gogh painting, but to register the sensation that accompanies seeing it.

Qualia, then, refers to the “phenomenal quality” of sensations. (page 3). Which leads Humphrey (for a variety of reasons that are generated by empirical studies of things like “blind sight”) to distinguish between “cognitive consciousness” and “phenomenal consciousness.” There is plenty of evidence that most organisms can process and then respond to information provided by their senses. But for Humphrey at least there is not evidence that starfish have any consciousness of the “feel” of perceptual experience even as they do respond to sensory input. For biological reasons, he thinks phenomenal consciousness is only available to warm-blooded animals.

He tells us that “consciousness of the kind we are talking about” is present when “sensations [are] represented as having phenomenal properties” (139).

Here’s Humphries three stages of consciousness; he thinks they are evolutionary stages even as there are also organisms in 2023 who are living examples of each stage. “(a) First came sentition—an evaluative motor response to sensory stimulation. 9b) Then came sensation, when animals discovered how to monitor this response so as to arrive at a mental representation of what the stimulations means to them. [Cognitive consciousness.] (c) Then, once the process was privatized and feedback loops established, came phenomenal sensation, with the representation taking on a whole new look” (146).

He elaborates: stage one includes “animals with elementary uncentralized nervous systems, whose behavior is largely reflex and does not involve creative processing of information: for example, sea anemones, starfish, earthworms, slugs” (146).

Stage two are the “’Sub-Sentients.’ They do form mental representations of sensory stimulation and what it means but their sensations lack a phenomenal dimension. I would expect this group to include animals with developed brains that may be capable of intelligent behavior that requires cognitive consciousness. . . . They will, however, have a limited sense of themselves as individuals and will not attribute selfhood or mental states to others; for example, honeybees, octopuses, goldfish, frogs” (147).

Finally, at stage three, we get the “true ‘Sentients.’ They uniquely represent what’s happening at their sense organs as having phenomenal depth. . . . They will be highly intelligent, especially in the social sphere, and have a strong sense of their own individual selfhood; for example: dogs, chimpanzees. parrots, humans” (147).

Note that Humphrey thinks “privatization” is a crucial step toward full phenomenal consciousness. There must be the sense of my sensation and its “feel” as belonging to me. It’s my pain, not yours. But, of course, we can say the same about my thoughts, beliefs, wishes, and desires. It seems odd to claim wishes and beliefs don’t have a “feel” attached to them. Surely, there is a sensation that has a phenomenal quality attached to it when I feel jealous or in love or believe in my country right or wrong. And even though it is difficult, we like to think that evaluation (and subsequent revision) of our beliefs and desires is possible, just as we evaluate (and sometimes revise) what we take to be sensory information.

Humphrey, with his privatization thesis, is strongly committed to self-consciousness. Many of those who write about consciousness take the more Humean position that the “self” is, at the very least, problematic. There is no underlying substance or thing to the temporal flow of sensations, of experience. But Humphrey appears to believe that you can’t have phenomenal awareness unless there is a self to whom the sensations that are registered belongs. I think it fair to say, although he never explicitly says this, that his position is that there is no phenomenal consciousness without selfhood. Phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition of selfhood (as I understand his work). Maybe better to say that phenomenal consciousness creates selfhood. Where phenomenal consciousness is, the self will also be. No phenomenal consciousness without a self accompanying it. Pushing back a bit from the entanglement of phenomenal consciousness with selfhood, all kinds of environmental and biological things have to be in place for phenomenal consciousness to emerge in evolutionary history and to be present in organisms today. That’s Humphrey’s position.

Veit would seem equally committed to a fairly robust notion of the self. Once he assigns consciousness the task of unifying experiences across time, he is flying in the face of Humean atomism. And, of course, Veit accepts without much discussion the basic idea of “self-consciousness.” This is Nagel’s famous “what it feels like to be a bat.” We don’t only have a sensation related to eating a taco; we also have a sensation related to being one’s self. My selfhood has a “feel” to it—and the ability to register and reflect on that “feel” is part of what it is to be conscious. Consciousness is of the self as well as of things that exist outside of and apart from my body.

I am just reporting here. I don’t have enough footing in this whole field to even know what I think is true and what I think dubious. Veit’s five-fold list of functions seems useful to me just because it puts some flesh on the bones, at least points us to some of the capabilities we would be talking about when we appeal to consciousness. And Humphrey’s focus on qualia, on the phenomenal, usefully specifies the on-the-ground experience that undergirds the assertion that consciousness exists in the face of skeptics who think it does not. (Hume may have been skeptical about the self; but he was not skeptical about consciousness; his very distinction between “impressions” and “ideas” presupposes consciousness as the faculty that works upon the “impressions” offered by the encounter with the world.)

One final point for now. Bentham said the only relevant question to ask when developing a hierarchy of beings, from the “lowest” forms to the “higher”, was whether a given being could suffer. All the rest was sophistry in his view. Our relation to other entities should be governed by their ability to suffer. We can do whatever we want to stones because they are insensate. But if clams and goldfish experience pain as something akin to the unpleasant experience we call pain, then we have as absolute an obligation to avoid inflicting pain on them as we do on a two year old human. Nothing in Humphrey’s distinction between stage two and stage three animals suggests that stage two animals are incapable of suffering. The stage one case is a bit more ambiguous; I don’t know what he would say about earthworms and pain.

Panpsychism and the Philosophers Pondering Consciousness

“In a 2019 essay David Chalmers notes that when he was in graduate school, there was a saying about philosophers. ‘One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up an idealist.’ Although Chalmers cannot account for where the truism originated, he argues that its logic is more or less intuitive. In the beginning one is impressed by the success of science and its ability to reduce everything to causal mechanism. Then, once it becomes clear that materialism has not managed to explain consciousness, dualism begins to seem more attractive. Eventually, the inelegance of dualism leads one to a greater appreciation for the inscrutability of matter, which leads to an embrace of panpsychism. By taking each of these frameworks to their logical unsatisfying conclusions, ‘one comes to think that there is little reason to believe in anything beyond consciousness and that the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness.’ This is idealism.” (Quoted from Meghan O’Gieblyn, God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning, first paragraph of Chapter 10, publication date: 2021).

I take Chalmers here to be joking, to be offering this little journey as a reductio. What could be more absurd, more illustrative of human pretension, than to end up claiming consciousness is all there is? We spin the whole universe out of our own brains.

But Chalmers is a philosopher—so maybe I am wrong and he is dead serious. (My last two posts have considered how seriously philosophers are addicted to being serious.) Ever since Thales philosophers have been searching for that one definitive thing that everything else boils down to. The perennial problem of the One and the Many. The search for some fundamental stuff is on.

Note the language of the quoted passage. Nothing about how what we encounter is experience contributes to the position a philosopher takes. At issue is whether a claim is logical, if it avoids being “inelegant.” Yes, there is a nod to that one mysterious phenomenon—consciousness—that throws a spanner in the works. How can it be explained, accounted for? Only, the joke goes, by asserting its dominance over all the rest.

My beef here has three prongs. First, philosophers believe they can think their way to the answer. Quantum theory alone should suggest that “logic” and “elegance” and “non-contradiction” are not likely to win the day when trying to explain “inscrutable matter.”

Two, the search for a “primitive.” Most philosophers start out with a strong bias toward some version of monism. It’s just a question of identifying the correct basic thing from which all else emanates. Except for a few apostates (and it is one of the glories of the philosophic tradition that it constantly generates dissidents), most philosophers abhor dualism, not to mention the messy horror that is pluralism. The inelegance of dualism just fries their order-seeking souls.

Here’s a wonderful William James passage on the philosopher’s avoidance of mess.

“The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination. The world to which your philosophy-professor introduces you is simple, clean, and noble. The contradictions of real life are absent from it. Its architecture is classic. Principles of reason trace its outlines, logical necessities cement its parts. Purity and dignity are what it most expresses. It is a kind of marble temple shining on a hill. In point of fact it is less an account of the actual world than a clear addition built upon it, a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe, it is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape” (Pragmatism, p. 15 in the Penguin edition.)

Third, the focus on origins, on the generative. William James said that his pragmatism concerned itself not with “first things,” but with consequences, with the “fruits” of experience or situations. He offers “an attitude of orientation: . . . the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (p. 29, Pragmatism, Penguin Edition).

James, of course, was living in the aftermath of the Darwinian revolution—which should mean, among many other things, introducing a strong dose of temporality into our accounts of how we got to our current pass. Panpsychism—the notion that consciousness is inherent in all matter—seems to me to have given up on the possibility of telling any kind of evolutionary story about how consciousness comes into existence. Rather, since we have consciousness now, it must have always been there. Yes, I understand that the panpsychist will say it was only there in potential, that everything necessary for its emergence was always already in place, but that it would take certain triggering events to bring it into full actual presence. The principled claim here is that all the materials of life are there from the outset; there can be nothing new. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Take that claim as axiomatic and panpsychism stands on fairly solid ground.

The panpsychist is then at one with Spinoza. There is an eternal substance and all that history yields are modes in which that substance is expressed (or instantiated). But everything can be traced back to that substance.

I am disinclined to this position. I am agnostic as to whether new matter can come into existence as opposed to an assertion that it was all there from the start. Which means I want to avoid some kind of substance/mode distinction where “substance” is the real stuff and “mode” just some emanation of substance. I want to avoid that kind of appearance/reality distinction altogether. What appears is real—as is evidenced by one’s responses to and engagements with what appears. To ask if what appears is “really real” seems fruitless to me (a deliberate echo of James’ injunction to look to the “fruits” of things, not their origin.) The key point is that the interactions of the “stuff” of which the world and experience is made keeps yielding novelties that exceed the ability of our principles or theories to predict. Theories, as what James calls “answers to enigmas” (Pragmatism, p. 28), always (finally) disappoint, always fail to answer our questions—because they always reduce complexity and multitudiousness to simplicities that don’t, when push comes to shove, do the job. The world exceeds the intellectual models we construct in an attempt to encompass it. There is, James insists, always “more.”

All of which is to say that consciousness emerges in particular circumstances and through particular interactions. Figuring out the actual form of that emergence has proved remarkably difficult—the “hard problem” that Chalmers famously identified almost forty years ago now. I will be discussing in subsequent posts some of these emergentist accounts.

For now, I will just identify two tracks on which the hard problem has been approached. The first is bio-chemical. There has been remarkable progress in setting out the bio-chemical processes by which sight works. What has proved more elusive (as Chalmers indicated) is nailing down the bio-chemical processes by which I self-consciously understand that I am currently seeing something. It’s this experience of an experiencing self that continues to defy a bio-chemical account. (With the consequence that some strict materialists then argue that this “self-consciousness” is an illusion. If the science can’t account for it, then it must not exist.)

The second track is Darwinian, where the effort is focused on providing an evolutionary account of the emergence of consciousness. The panpsychists are not necessarily opposed to a Darwinian account. They are just committed to insisting that some rudimentary consciousness is—or, even more minimally, the necessary ingredients for the recipe for consciousness being enacted are—always already present. What I am saying is that I don’t see 1) how it makes any difference if those elements were there from the beginning or only emerge later on and 2) how we could ever adjudicate disputes about this assertion about origins. Hence my agnosticism. And my suspicion that it’s one of the professional deformations of philosophy to spend so much time obsessing about getting an account of an origin that is also monistic. The messy world unfolds irrespective of whether there is some “fundamental stuff” and whether that stuff has always been there.

My position: matter is multi-faceted; its components share no fundamental, essential quality (so, for example, living and non-living things are both, in some sense, matter, but the differences between rocks and giraffes are more significant than some very abstract similarity they share); and the interactions among elements of this multitudinous matter keep producing things that surprise us, that are novelties. Probabilities are the best we can do by way of predicting the results of those interactions; there is not some straight-forward line of causation from origin point A to produced result E (with our being able to trace the path through B, C, and D that got us there.) Of course, after the fact we can often trace that path from A to E. But before the fact, E was only one possible outcome of starting from A, and we might be able to assess the probability of E’s occurrence, but cannot guarantee it—unless we stringently control what interactions A enters into. It is precisely the multiple things with which A will interact that makes prediction so uncertain once we are beyond laboratory controls.

Does that leave me throwing up my hands, and joining the likes of Colin McGinn and John Searle, who tend to believe we will never have a satisfactory account of consciousness. Certainly the insistence that “you scientists are guilty of hubris when you set out to explain everything” is familiar ground for humanists. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I don’t think that’s where I want to take my stand. There are, it seems to me, interesting things to say about consciousness, about its qualities, its emergence, its capabilities, about what enhances it and what disables it. I will try to consider some of these is subsequent posts. My point here is that panpsychism has just about nothing to say about these more concrete issues: that is, the capabilities of consciousness and how they can be activated or thwarted. Panpsychism exists on way too abstract a level, trying to answer global questions about origins and possibility that have little bite, little consequence, when more specific questions are taken up. And that I think the development of a theory like panpsychism comes from the philosopher’s bias toward identifying ultimate building blocks of the universe, a bias that yields speculation about fairly unanswerable questions, but (more crucially) yields answers that contribute little to more concrete engagements with the elements of experience.

To ask the William James question: what would be different about our experience of consciousness (and how we act as conscious beings) if panpsychism were true instead of dualism? I don’t see how it would make any difference at all. I might say: nice to know that consciousness is out there potentially in all matter (maybe I shouldn’t, like Dr. Johnson, kick rocks), but that offers me nothing in regards to how I think about my own consciousness and how I wish to activate it. It doesn’t help in the least for addressing the perplexing questions of how consciousness varies among the wide range of living creatures, from molds through plants through insects through vertebrates to humans.

I set out writing this post with the title “Panpsychism and Moral Realism.” But, obviously, never got to moral realism. So I will write about moral realism before eventually moving on to what seem to me more enlightening approaches than panpsychism to the enigmas of consciousness.