OM 3: The Mystery of Consciousness

THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Modern science may delve into the recesses of the brain,
but can it explain the phenomenon of consciousness?

Scientific psychology, as the well known saying goes, having first lost its soul, later its consciousness, seems finally to lose its mind altogether," I wrote philosopher Herbert Feigl, director of the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. He thus summarizes one of the most fundamental trends in modern thought-the reduction of all spiritual and mental phenomena exclusively to bio-chemical brain functions.

Some philosophers have enthusiastically assisted in this task. Gilbert Ryle, renowned professor of metaphysical philosophy at Oxford University, says about the idea that the mind is something nonphysical, "I shall speak of it with deliberate abusiveness, as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.' I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail, but in principle."

One philosophical school, the eliminative materialists, goes so far as to advocate completely dropping words such as consciousness, feeling, seeing, or pain from the vocabulary of scientific discussion. They claim that these words are purely subjective and thus have no real meaning, even though this is contrary to all practical experience. Describing this approach, philosopher Richard Rorty of Princeton states that a representative of this view would say to someone, "It would make life simpler for us if you would in the future say, 'My C-fibers are firing' instead of saying 'I'm in pain.'"

The philosophers, however, are merely following the lead of modern science, which from its very beginnings has been mechanistic. In 1750 the French physician de La Mettrie wrote, "Let us conclude boldly then, that man is a machine." And in more recent times we find Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins proclaiming, "We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."

Scientist Herbert L. Melzer writes in The Chemistry of Human Behavior: "The full range of those emotional and intellectual capabilities which we regard as uniquely human originates in an incredibly complex overlay of neurochemical organization upon highly specialized morphological structures. … We do not need to mean anything more by the term mind than the total organization of functions, memories, and capabilities that characterize any particular brain." Many scientists are not troubled by the profoundly depersonalizing social and psychological effects of this view. Professor John Taylor of King's College, London, states: "The mind appears now to be a near-powerless 'epiphenomenon' of the physical brain." He adds that realization of this fact "will cause a complete destruction of people's understanding of their place in the world, as well as undermining the traditional institutions of society." What solution does he propose? He simply urges that we "start to prepare people to live in a deterministic world.'"

Major movements in modern psychology have also taken a strictly mechanistic approach to mental phenomena. John B. Watson, a professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University, was the founder of the behaviorist school. About consciousness, he wrote, "It has never been seen, touched, smelled, tasted, or moved. It is a plain assumption just as unprovable as the old concept of the soul." Carrying this further, the most famous behavioral pyschologist, B. F. Skinner, once declared that he would abolish what he calls "the inner man … the man defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity." He further stated, "His abolition has been long overdue. … he has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes."

Sigmund Freud's psychology was also based upon an essentially materialistic view of human nature. Early in his career, Freud, then a neuroanatomist, embarked upon an ambitious project to demonstrate that mental phenomena were directly produced by an organic mechanism. Although he eventually gave up the attempt, he remained convinced about his hypothesis. "I … have no desire at all," he wrote to a colleague, "to leave the psychology hanging in the air with no organic basis. But beyond the feeling of conviction [that there must be such a basis], I have nothing, either theoretical or therapeutic, to work on, and so I must behave as if I were confronted by psychological factors only. I have no idea why I cannot yet fit it together."

In recent times, some scientists have decided that if man is no more than a sophisticated thinking machine it might be possible for them to build such machines themselves. A leader in computer research, Marvin Minsky of M.I.T., believes that a machine will soon be created with "the general intelligence of an average human being. … The machine will be able to educate itself. … In a few months it will be at genius level. … A few months after that its power will be incalculable." Then Minsky adds, "If we are lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets."

Convinced that the new technology of artificial intelligence will enable man to replace almost everything. Professor Arthur Harkins, director of the Graduate Futures Program at the University of Minnesota, shows that by the year 2000, people will be getting married to robots and society will begin to ponder the definition of "human." This vision of a future adorned with humanoid computers may appear titillating to science-fiction buffs, but how well does it tally with what it really means to be human? Our thoughts, feelings, and desires lie at the very heart of what we all call the human experience. In their hasty dash to equate sophisticated machines with human beings, many philosophers, psychologists, and scientists have trampled upon some fundamental distinctions between the two.

The reason for their confusion can be traced to the basic strategy of modern science, which holds that everything can be explained according to relatively simple physical laws. Armed with this mechanistic assumption scientists can embark upon a study of the brain with the reasonable hope of eventually being able to account for, control, and duplicate all of its functions, including what we call consciousness.

But what if a nonphysical vital principle or force were involved? Then the investigative task becomes hopelessly complicated. So most scientists stick to the strategy of insisting that the brain can be explained by simple physical laws and proceed with their theories and experiments. As B. F. Skinner says in Beyond Freedom and Dignity, "Only then can we turn from the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable."

There is, however, more to the human mind than information processing. It is consciousness itself that is the foundation of all experience, but no one can describe it by numerical expressions in the same way as chemical reactions, the force of gravity, and other physical phenomena. Yet just because it cannot be measured by quantitative means in no way denies its existence-consciousness can clearly be known by experience.

This suggests a serious limitation of the mechanistic approach, namely, that it can only describe behavior connected with consciousness but not consciousness itself. Faced with this difficulty, many scientists, rather than admit that consciousness is beyond physical description, choose to characterize it as nothing more than a complex pattern of behavior. This misconception allows them to suppose that machines and computers of sufficient sophistication can become conscious.

But there are many clear and direct examples showing how conscious awareness is entirely different from the physical behavior associated with it. For instance, what happens when a person accidentally strikes his thumb with a hammer? Certain characteristic patterns of behavior result-the person may shout, wave his hand, grimace, etc.

An examination of the body's reaction will reveal chemical changes in the blood, patterns of electrochemical impulses in the brain, and so forth. While these measurable effects are part of the event, they are distinct from the experience of pain itself. Although everyone readily understands the sensation of pain because it is a common conscious experience, it cannot be defined in physical terms. Therefore science prefers to confine itself to what can by physically described-namely, patterns of electrochemical impulses. But if the brain is no more than an information processing device for these impulses, then what makes it any different from the machines the scientists themselves use to record experimental data from the brain?

The answer is clear-in describing the functioning of the machine we have no need to bring in any concept of pain. That is, we have no need to suppose that the machine feels pain. The same thing is true of a description of the brain. Yet we know from experience that a person feels pain. Therefore, the concept "experience of pain" is something independent and distinct from all our ideas and statements about the functioning of machines and of brains.

Let us imagine a second instance-a machine that when exposed to a red light would say, "I see a red light." Such a machine could be built by connecting a photocell with a red filter to an amplifier. When triggered, the amplifier would turn on a tape recorder that plays back the message, "I see a red light."

Although the machine declares that it sees a red light, no one in his right mind would imagine that it is actually "seeing" anything. Similarly, a tape recorder receives sound impulses but does not hear, and an automobile moves but does not itself experience motion. While machines perform certain activities that could duplicate those of a human being, all the actions of the machine are reducible to a mechanistic explanation. But in the case of a human being endowed with conscious awareness, physical description is inadequate to describe his personal experience. The human body behaves somewhat like a complex machine, and its actions can be described in physical, measurable terms to some extent. But beyond these physically quantifiable descriptions, which deal exclusively with the mechanics of behavior and perception, is the nonquantifiable realm of consciousness. Admittedly, science has succeeded in accounting for certain observable phenomena in strictly physical terms, but we should not extrapolate and conclude that everything-including consciousness-can be explained mechanistically. Other possibilities not only exist, but are frequently more reasonable and comprehensive, and we should remain open to consider them.

Even Thomas Huxley pointed out the irreducible nature of consciousness. He stated, "I understand the main tenet of materialism to be that there is nothing in the universe but matter and force; and that all the phenomena of nature are explicable by deduction from the properties assignable to these two primitive factors. … It seems to me pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness, which … I cannot see to be matter or force, or any conceivable modification of either."

Nevertheless, many scientists reject the idea that consciousness has any reality and remain determined to account for it in mechanistic terms.

A popular current theory known as functionalism, which provides a framework for research in artificial intelligence, relegates the activities of the mind to computerlike responses to external stimuli. The concept of consciousness is dismissed, and all human feelings and sensations are reduced to mathematical constructs.

For example, in the case of a headache, the experience of pain (which we naturally consider to be the headache) is not referred to at all. What then is a headache? Hard as this may be to believe, MIT artificial intelligence researcher Jerry A. Fodor, one of functionalism's main proponents, states, "To have a headache is to be disposed to exhibit a certain pattern of relations between the stimuli one encounters and the responses one exhibits." In other words, what he calls a headache is defined to be some brain software that makes us behave as if we have a headache. But pain itself is left out of the picture, because pain cannot be written into a computer program.

Due to this obvious failure to explain personal experiences, even Fodor, who is fully committed to a physical explanation of consciousness, admits that mechanistic theories such as functionalism are incomplete. He states, "Many psychologists who are inclined to accept the functionalistic framework are nonetheless worried about the failure of functionalism to reveal much about the nature of consciousness. Functionalists have made a few ingenious attempts to talk themselves and their colleagues out of this worry, but they have not, in my view, done so with much success. As matters stand, the problem of qualitative content [of consciousness] poses a serious threat to the assertion that functionalism can provide a general theory of the mental."

Because the issue of consciousness has raised a fundamental impasse in all mechanistic attempts to explain human existence, some scientists have rejected the widely accepted mechanistic viewpoint. Among the dissenters is renowned Nobel Laureate physicist Eugene Wigner. "There are two kinds of reality or existence; the existence of my consciousness and the reality or existence of everything else," states Wigner. "The latter reality is not absolute but only relative." Wigner observed that external, measurable phenomena are known to him only by virtue of his consciousness, and thus consciousness is, if anything, more real than these phenomena. After extensive researchin this area, Alan Gevins of EEG Systems Laboratory in San Francisco concluded that the mind may have transcendent qualities. Gevins says, "When it comes to creativity, inspiration, the more ethereal aspects of the mind-well, they might ultimately be mysterious. I'm not as firm as some of my colleagues in the belief that the mind can be reduced to a flow of electrons."