Consciousness: Are dreams not a form of consciousness?

Antonio Damasio, Wikimedia Commons

Reviewing Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain ("What Was I Thinking", New York Times November 26, 2010), philosopher Ned Block is left with questions about the author's materialist perspective, as opposed to heartily endorsing it:

Damasio also stumbles over dreaming. In dreams, phenomenal consciousness can be very vivid even when the rational processes of self-consciousness are much diminished. Damasio describes dreams as “mind processes unassisted by consciousness.” Recognizing that the reader will be puzzled by this claim, he describes dreaming as “paradoxical” since the mental processes in dreaming are “not guided by a regular, properly functioning self of the kind we deploy when we reflect and deliberate.” But dreaming is paradoxical only if one has a model of phenomenal consciousness based on self-consciousness — on knowledge, rationality, reflection and wakefulness.

Many people find that dreams represent their emotional experiences in stories and pictures, so it is unclear why they do not represent a form of consciousness, except that that would interfere with Dr. Damasio's theory. Block notes,

Damasio’s refusal to regard phenomenal consciousness (without the involvement of the inflated self) as real consciousness could be used to justify the brutalization of cows and chickens on the grounds that they are not self-conscious and therefore not conscious. Damasio, in response to those who have raised such criticisms in the past, declares that in fact he thinks it “highly likely” that animals do have consciousness. But this doesn’t square with the demanding theory he advances in his book, on the basis of which he denies consciousness in dreams and in “vegetative state” patients who can answer questions. He owes us an explanation of why he thinks chickens are conscious even though dreamers and the question-answering patients are not.

Yes, I'd say so. There's lots of evidence that some types of animals exercise some types of consciousness. It's good to see reviewers raising these questions about materialist works. Too often all we've heard from ompliant reviewers is predictable social noise: "Wow! Astonishing! Right on! Preach it, brother!" on behalf of a highly conventional materialist tract.

Neuroscience: Man was conscious 23 years ... but who except him knew?

At the Mail Online, Allan Hall reports (November 23, 2009) on the case of a man who was conscious for 23 years, but no one knew because he was paralyzed.

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.

'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.

Read more here.

It sounds like a horror film, and he could maybe get rich on the film rights.

Seriously, I think doctors should be much more careful with the "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) diagnoses than they sometimes are - if consequences follow. Some people - like Rom Houben, above - can be conscious without being mobile. We aren't even sure what consciousness is , after all, so why be definitive about who has it?

Here are some more articles about persistent vegetative state:

Is the patient vegetative or minimally conscious?

Neuroscience: Can locked-in sufferers tweet, using brain signals alone?

Another "human vegetable" turns out to be wired for thought

Consciousness: Conference offers challenging new ideas

The Metanexus Institute offers an interesting sounding conference July 18-21 in Phoenix, Arizona, details here: A number of the speakers seem to want to develop a theory of consciousness that is materialist but does not fall into the "there is no self and no free will" trap. Eric Weislogel writes, reviewing a book:

Campbell is one of many proponents of non-reductive physicalism. Non-reductive physicalism is purportedly an alternative to reductive physicalism, but one which does not revert to dualism. It is best not to think of non-reductive physicalism as a theory in its own right. Think, instead, of non-reductive physicalism as a disideratum, as a standard by which to judge how satisfactory to our intuitions is any particular theory of mental causation. The tenets of non-reductive physicalism represent our basic intellectual commitments going into the question from the start. What are those tenets?

First, there is the commitment to non-reductionist explanations of consciousness, of mental states, and of mental causality. We will not be satisfied with any theory that explains away thought, consciousness, intentionality, desire, creativity, or moral responsibility as mere illusion. We are committed, for example, to the idea that our wanting a drink is causally connected to our getting a drink. We are committed to the idea that our desire for that which is not our own is causally connected to our stealing that thing and that we are responsible for that theft.

So he wants to maintain that the self and free will really exist, but that a materialist account of them can ultimately work.

That I doubt. The whole point of materialist accounts is reductive.

Here is an explanation: If I offer to explain why ants feed and defend their queen instead of killing and eating her, you will not value my explanation if I describe their actions as guided by loyalty. You likely doubt that ant minds host such a concept. You want a reductive explanation.

However, most people think that "loyalty" might be an actual cause of human behaviour. Yet loyalty is an abstract concept. Any approach that attempts to explain loyalty in a material or physical way will end up being reductive, no matter how the explainer talks around the point.

Now, there is, ofc ourse, a difference between being reductive and being vulgar. A "selfish gene" explanation for loyalty is vulgar as well as reductive.

I am glad these cognitive philosophers as so anxious to avoid the Gadarene descent into vulgarity chronicled in - and illustrated by - the pop science media.

Consciousness: Is there no such thing as a self?

A friend draws my attention to this musing by Bradlaugh at "Secular Right: Reality & Reason" on Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Ego Tunnel, which I have not yet read. Bradlaugh quotes,

We may no longer be able to regard our own consciousness as a legitimate vehicle for our metaphysical hopes and desires. … Max Weber famously spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” as rationalization and science led Europe and America into modern industrial society, pushing back religion and all “magical” theories about reality. Now we are witnessing the disenchantment of the self.

One of the many dangers in this process is that if we remove the magic from our image of ourselves, we may also remove it from our image of others. We could become disenchanted with one another …

Hmmm. I get disenchanted with other people all the time, as I assume they do with me. However, I am pretty sure that's not what the philosopher means. Here's Publishers Weekly:

Consciousness, mind, brain, self: the relations among these four entities are explored by German cognitive scientist and theoretical philosopher Metzinger, who argues that, in fact, there is no such thing as a self.

If so, Metzinger seems to be adopting the same strategy as Alva Noe, whom I have read and reviewed, noting,

Noë seems to want to move away from reductive explanations, but not away from the materialism that underlies them. So he ends up with non-reductive explanations that still don’t explain. By the time he ends up arguing that most human language is like dogs barking, he sounds like the people he critiques.

Given that there is no reductive way of understanding consciousness or self, the temptation to deny their existence beckons.

But what, then denies its existence? A self must exist in order to deny itself. I am told that Metzinger makes the intriguing suggestion that consciousness limits what we can experience, which is surely correct because we can only experience by focusing, and focusing excludes far more than it includes.

Review: Alva Noe's "Out of Our Heads"

Here is my review of Alva Noe's Out of Our Heads at MercatorNet:

He raises vital issues but, unfortunately, he fails to offer a convincing solution. Arguing that consciousness must be understood as involving the body and the environment as well as the brain, he offers platitudes such as, “Where do you stop and where does the rest of the world begin?”

An interesting question, but if consciousness is real — and not well described by materialist theory — we are no closer to an answer even if our brains, bodies, and environment are all one world. He offers only a different description of the problem.

Noë seems to want to move away from reductive explanations, but not away from the materialism that underlies them. So he ends up with non-reductive explanations that still don’t explain. By the time he ends up arguing that most human language is like dogs barking, he sounds like the people he critiques.

Consciousness: Where does consciousness come from?, new paper asks

In this preprint from PLOS, we are informed that "Consciousness arises as an emergent property of the human mind." Not "Consciousness arises as an emergent property of the human brain." The authors have an interesting theory you can read there:

The present work suggests that, rather than hoping for a putative unique marker - the neural correlate of consciousness - a more mature view of conscious processing should consider that it relates to a brain-scale distributed pattern of coherent brain activation," explained neuroscientist Lionel Naccache, one of the authors of the paper.

In other words, there isn't a neurological equivalent of a light switch that wwe turn on when we wake up in the morning.

It's intersting, though, how often that illusion creeps into our language, as in "He saw the light at last about Dora"or "He was out like a light."

See also: Consciousness: Best understood as like dancing, not digesting?; Consciousness: Pioneer neurosurgeon on a key question regarding our minds - double consciousness; Andrew Newberg on the problem of measuring consciousness; Consciousness: Half an oaf is better than none?; Consciousness: So familiar and yet so puzzling; Consciousness: Belated "sublimely ridiculous" award for 2006; Philosophy of Mind: In case you wondered whether you are conscious and reading this; Consciousness: Recent public squabble between philosophers of mind rates better than most sitcoms

(Note: The illustration above, from Scholarpedia, attempts to offer an account of consciousness, via researchers Mormann and Koch.)

Consciousness: Best understood as like dancing, not digesting?

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë. Hill and Wang, 2009

Alva No, a University of California, Berkeley, philosopher and cognitive scientist, argues that after decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers "only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious ... has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue." The reason we have been unable to explain the neural basis of consciousness, he says, is that it does not take place in the brain.

Consciousness is not something that happens inside us but something we achieve
it is more like dancing than it is like the digestive process. To understand consciousness the fact that we think and feel and that a world shows up for us we need to look at a larger system of which the brain is only one element.
Consciousness requires the joint operation of brain, body and world. "You are
not your brain. The brain, rather, is part of what you are."

I must get this book and read it.

The typical materialist, of course, wants to understand consciousness as like digesting, not dancing - and that position has been a total flop that makes the American auto sector look prosperous.

Here's a review:

Although Noë is a philosopher, his argument is carefully built on scientific evidence, as he considers everything from studies of cells in the visual cortex to examples of neural plasticity. In each instance, he interprets the data in a startlingly original fashion, such as when he uses experiments showing that ferrets can learn to "see" with cells in their auditory cortex as proof that "there isn't anything special about the cells in the so-called visual cortex that makes them visual. Cells in the auditory cortex can be visual just as well. There is no necessary connection between the character of experience and the behavior of certain cells."

Certainly, many of the scientists cited by Noë would disagree with his interpretations, but that's part of what makes this book so important: It's an audacious retelling of the standard story, an exploration of the mind that questions some of our most cherished assumptions about what the mind is.

Consciousness: Pioneer neurosurgeon on a key question regarding our minds - double consciousness

A group of us were discussing the question of consciousness, and now American neurosurgeon Michael Egnor writes to remind me of the pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (first neurosurgeon in Montreal) who, he notes, "started his career as a materialist, and he was a passionate dualist at the end of his career." That must have been when he wrote his book The Mystery of the Mind (Princeton University Press, 1978). Egnor tells me,

Penfield was a neurosurgeon who pioneered the field of epilepsy surgery. He operated on thousands of patients who were awake (under local anesthesia), and were able to speak to him while he stimulated various regions of their brains.

Penfield found that he could invoke all sorts of things- movements, sensations, memories. But in every instance (hundreds of thousands of individual stimulations- in different locations in each patient- during his career), the patients were aware that the stimulation was being done to them, but not by them. There was a part of the mind that was independent of brain stimulation and that constituted a part of subjective experience that Penfield was not able to manipulate with his surgery.

I've performed some epilepsy surgery (although it's not my primary specialty), and my experience has been the same. Patients always know that the memory or sensation or movement is is imposed on them, not by them. Some colleagues who do specialize in epilepsy surgery have confirmed Penfield's observations as well.

Penfield called this "double consciousness", meaning that there was a part of subjective experience that he could invoke or modify materially, and a different part that was immune to such manipulation.

There probably has been no other person who has had Penfield's volume of direct experience with stimulation of the brain during consciousness (he probably did at least 10,000 such operations, perhaps more. He was practically the only person in the world doing this work in the early and mid 20th century.) He was a meticulous scientist (not that common among neurosurgeons, who tend to be 'cowboys').

He considered the strict materialist view of the mind to be utter nonsense.

My favourite Penfield quote is,

"Brain surgery is a terrible profession. If I did not feel it will become different in my lifetime, I should hate it." (1921)

Penfield died in 1976, before the Decade of the Brain, when the fact that brains constantly change and are changed very often by minds started to become generally known. If neurosurgery did not "become different" in his lifetime, it certainly did soon after.

Related features:

Neuroplasticity: Growing recognition greets Canadian psychiatrist Norman Doidge's new book

More on Norman Doidge and the brain that changes itself

Psychiatrist Jeff Schwartz speaks on what drugs can do for you - and what you and your mind must do for yourself

It used to be all my mom-';s fault and now it's all my brain's fault? Naw!

Change your mind, change your brain - Smithsonian conference

Consciousness: A physicist on the recent New Scientist flap on non-materialist neuroscience

Andrew Newberg and the problem of measuring consciousness

I will shortly introduce the Afternoon panel at the recent Mind-Body Symposium at the United Nations, September 11, 2008. (For the Morning Panel, go here.)

But first I want to comment on an exchange during the discussion between philosopher Elie During and MD neuroscientist Andrew Newberg. The subject is how to measure consciousness.

Elie During: Let me put it differently: in order to be scientific about consciousness and so-called spiritual experiences, do we need measurement? And if so, why? The feeling we sometimes get when reading the scientific literature on consciousness is that as long as it is not being somehow measured, a fact cannot be scientifically relevant. Is this true, is it still the case or are we past this? Doesn’t the “paradigm shift” you were mentioning earlier imply a different kind of science, one that does not rely so much on measurement? What else could it possibly be based on?

Andrew Newberg: I think it may still rely on measurement of some kind, but it may be going in the direction that you are talking about. I think that the spiritual perspective, the spiritual approach to learning and deriving information, as well as the scientific pursuit of that, are both valuable and important, and each has its specific uses. I’m not sure yet what exactly it would look like, but my goal has always been to find ways of integrating them in a manner that will enable us to discover what the best kind of measurement is. And that measurement may ultimately be a spiritual measurement, not a scientific one, or it may be much more of a physiological one.

All of my own training has been in the humanities, specifically in the little cluster of disciplines around English language and literature.

In language, incompetence is much easier to measure than competence. For example, if a person's grasp of English grammar is imperfect, I can spot and score errors. But where the grasp is perfect, there is nothing to spot or score. So the text looks blank, even though it is obviously full of meaning.

It is much easier to explain what is wrong with bad writing than what is right with good writing. Good writers can differ vastly in style.

A writing teacher like me can praise the writer's style ("crisp", "sensitive") but that is not nearly as specific as the terms in which we diagnose bad writing (= "She avoids the progressive tenses, probably because she was never taught to use them correctly in her "English as a Second Language Program" or "He does not transition effectively from one thought to another, probably because he does not know many transitional phrases.") Provided with specifics, a teacher moves from diagnosis to remedy fairly easily.

But what made George Orwell a peerless stylist? (Wherever possible, I assign "Politics and the English Language" as compulsory reading, to rid myself of reasons to scream at students.) J.R.R. Tolkien was also an excellent writer, but very different from Orwell (and always aware of the roots of English embedded deep in Anglo-Saxon). C.S. Lewis was different again; his writing reflects the classical rhetorical tradition.

You see? I can make observations about great writers, but I cannot simply grade them, the way I could grade "Johnny's" essay as a D-minus, recommending Johnny to the remedial writing program before his bad habits become entrenched.

Now, let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that consciousness - in which the ability to use language originates - behaves the same way as language. Using our present tools, it is difficult to measure when it is working well but easy to measure when it is working badly. In that case, loss of consciousness or lapses in consciousness would be much easier to measure and describe than consciousness itself.

Does that mean that consciousness doesn't exist? Of course not, any more than my inability to describe good writing as specifically as I can describe bad writing means that no one ever wrote well. That is not surprising because current methods of measurement are essentially the measurement of lapses or errors.

Where writing - which is an outcome of consciousness - has passed beyond mere lapses or errors, measurement fails; only description remains. Is it reasonable to think that consciousness is like that?

If so, where consciousness is a strong signal - like good reception on your TV - you won't notice it because you are paying attention to the program, not the reception. But when the reception is bad, you notice the reception, not the program.

In that case, the problem isn't really with the science of measurement, but with a faulty conception of what consciousness is. When we come to understand better what consciousness is, we will develop better means of measuring it. But I doubt that those means will be based on any materialist theory.

Consciousness: Half an oaf is better than none?

My chief difficulty with materialist theories of consciousness is the apparent fact that human consciousness got started rather suddenly, and was not really the result of a long slow series of primate steps.

We do not go from the fruit-throwing ape to the cave paintings in a long, slow series of steps.

Therefore, this is NOT the sequence:

ape
brute
oaf
not just an oaf
not quite an oaf
somewhat less oafish

[ ... ]

a bit less oafish than when last noticed
many oafish characteristics have been lost
not nearly the oaf he used to be

[ ... ... ... ] (and finally!)

if we have him over for dinner, we can seat him at the table instead of tying him in the yard with a bowl of water and a biscuit

The quest: Given that this story never happened, what did?

Other Mindful Hack stories on consciousness:

The difference between thinking and consciousness

Consciousness: So familiar and yet so puzzling?

The Spiritual Brain: Vindicating Alfred Russel Wallace?

Belated sublimely ridiculous award for 2006

Materialists start to come to grips with global failure but materialism dies hard

Mind vs. meat vs. computers: The differences

Consciousness: Recent public squabble between philosophers of mind rates better than most sitcoms

Interview with Spiritual Brain authors Mario and Denyse at campus Web site

Books: New physics takes on the human mind

Is consciousness a trick to ensure survival?

The Spiritual Brain reviewed in Jesuit thinkmag America

Consciousness: So familiar and yet so puzzling ...

In The Return of Religion in Axess magazine, philosopher Roger Scruton observes,

Consciousness is more familiar to us than any other feature of our world, since it is the route by which anything at all becomes familiar. But this is what makes consciousness so hard to pinpoint. Look for it wherever you like, you encounter only its objects - a face, a dream, a memory, a colour, a pain, a melody, a problem, but nowhere the consciousness that shines on them. Trying to grasp it is like trying to observe your own observing, as though you were to look with your own eyes at your own eyes without using a mirror. Not surprisingly, therefore, the thought of consciousness gives rise to peculiar metaphysical anxieties, which we try to allay with images of the soul, the mind, the self, the 'subject of consciousness', the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside.

However, Scruton does not think that that works very well.

But these traditional 'solutions' merely duplicate the problem. We cast no light on the consciousness of a human being simply by re-describing it as the consciousness of some inner homunculus - be it a soul, a mind or a self. On the contrary, by placing that homunculus in some private, inaccessible and possibly immaterial realm, we merely compound the mystery.

Actually, consciousness is immaterial whether we like it or not. Your idea of red - or mine - are both immaterial. They have material correlates - that is, they relate to material things, including red objects, eyes and neurons in the brain. But the concepts are not material in themselves.

Scruton, usually a clear thinker, makes his effort to defend religion (the primary purpose of his piece) unnecessarily difficult, by agreeing in advance to two mistaken concepts - that the evangelical atheists are right in their general picture of the universe and that they are not religious.

Surprisingly, he even endorses Richard Dawkins’s "selfish gene" (you are merely a robot that your selfish genes use to replicate themselves) - a concept that is increasingly regarded as an embarrassment to evolution theory.

He then announces that this concept presents no problem for traditional religion. Huh?

Unfortunately, his idea of traditional religion turns out merely to be sentimental longing for the comforts of an exploded belief system - which is certainly not how we see it at my church, where traditional religion is a living presence and the selfish gene isn't.

Meanwhile, an American lawyer friend, John Calvert, writes me to point out the second serious flaw in Scruton's understanding of religion.

According to a popular dictionary religion is a set of beliefs about the cause, nature and purpose of life.

Dawkins, et al are promoting a set of beliefs about the cause, nature and purpose of life, predicated on a dogma - scientific materialism. Hence, they are also promoting a religion in the Constitutional sense and in its functional sense. Atheism and its sister religion of Secular Humanism function in the very same manner as traditional theistic religion.

The Supreme Court and most other courts have recognized that in a pluralistic society, religion must be defined functionally and inclusively. An exclusive definition of religion discriminates by limiting it to only theistic beliefs.

Atheism and Secular Humanism have both been held to be religions. They are in fact organized religions that meet in churches, have manifestos, ethical and moral tenets, priests and Sunday school teachers.

Yes, precisely. "Religion" includes materialist atheism and secular humanism because they act as a set of beliefs about the cause, nature and purpose of life.

The fact that the zealots of these relatively new religions attack traditional religions is more or less what you might expect.

Consciousness: Belated "sublimely ridiculous" award for 2006

It's too bad I wasn't giving out a "completely ridiculous" award for comments on consciousness in 2006. This one, from theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, would be a slam dunk:

Our starting assumption as scientists ought to be that on some level consciousness has to be an illusion. The reason is obvious: If nothing in the physical world can have the features that consciousness seems to have, then consciousness cannot exist as a thing in the physical world. So while we should concede that as conscious subjects we do have a valid experience of there being something in our minds that the rules of the physical universe doesn't apply to, this has to be all it is - the experience of something in our minds."
Nicholas Humphrey, "Consciousness: The Achilles Heel of Darwinism? Thank God, Not Quite", in John Brockman (ed.), Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement (Vintage, 2006), pp. 58-9. Original emphasis.

Actually, consciousness isn't the Achilles heel of Darwinism; it is Darwinism's grave. Here's the Humphrey paper, which appeared in this book:



Hat tip: Krauze at Telic Thoughts

Philosophy of Mind: In case you wondered whether you are conscious and reading this ...

This preprint is an academic argument (I think) for the actual existence of consciousness (as opposed to the materialist view that consciousness is merely an illusion) that you do not want to try at a party this Saturday night:

Is Consciousness primary?

Abstract:
Six arguments against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis are reviewed. These arguments arise from epistemology, phenomenology, neuropsychology, and philosophy of quantum mechanics. It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused (not even a variety of Spinoza's attractive double-aspect theory). Instead, an alternative stance, inspired from F. Varela's neurophenomenology is advocated. This unfamiliar stance involves (i) a complete redefinition of the boundary between unquestioned assumptions and relevant questions ; (ii) a descent towards the common ground of the statements of phenomenology and objective natural science : a practice motivated by the quest of an expanding circle of intersubjective agreement. (By Michel Bitbol (2008))

Actually, there is hardly a materialist explanation for consciousness that is even worth discussing, as Mario and I point out in The Spiritual Brain, because the phenomenon is non-material in principle.

For instance, as John Searle, among others, has said,

“The most striking feature is how much of mainstream [materialistic] philosophy of mind is obviously false….[I]n the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states…are routinely denied by many…of the advanced thinkers in the subject.”

-- John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.

Well, those who cannot account for something deny it.

Some recent Mindful Hack stories on consciousness:

Mind vs. meat vs. computers: The differences

Consciousness: Recent public squabble between philosophers of mind rates better than most sitcoms

Interview with Spiritual Brain authors Mario and Denyse at campus Web site

Books: New physics takes on the human mind

Is consciousness a trick to ensure survival?

The Spiritual Brain reviewed in Jesuit thinkmag America

Thoughts for the day: Reasons not to be a materialist if you have a mind

Unless, that is, you have a grant and must spend it advocating materialism. Even so, consider what you are up against:

“The most striking feature is how much of mainstream [materialistic] philosophy of mind is obviously false….[I]n the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states…are routinely denied by many…of the advanced thinkers in the subject.”
-- John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.

“It is not that we know what would explain consciousness but are having trouble finding the evidence to select one explanation over the others; rather, we have no idea what an explanation of consciousness would even look like.”--Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 61.

“We don’t know… how a brain (or anything else that is physical) could manage to be a locus of conscious experience. This last is, surely, among the ultimate metaphysical mysteries; don’t bet on anyone ever solving it.”
--Jerry Fodor, In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 83.

Actually if you say silly enough things, you could end up working against materialism, which might be a good idea.

Consciousness: Recent public squabble between philosophers of mind rates better than most sitcoms

Better even than a Britcom, which it actually is.

A hilarious public feud between two philosophers - Ted Honderich and Colin McGinn over consciousness (as recounted by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian Unlimited), mainly shows how little is known of the subject:

The row started decades ago over a girl (well, that's the claim, anyway) and culminated with a damning review of yet another book on consciousness:

"Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others)."

Meanwhile, Jeffries asks the dissed author Honderich for a response:

What does the man on the receiving end think of this review? "It is a cold, calculated attempt to murder a philosopher's reputation," says Honderich. The review has reignited a feud between the two philosophers that shows how bitter, unforgiving and (to outsiders) unwittingly hilarious academic disputes can be. It certainly makes the bear pit that is journalism seem like sunshine and lollipops by comparison.

and, last I heard, he wanted compensation from the journal.

In case you thought philosophy of mind was boring ...

Chill, guys. Books on consciousness are difficult by their nature. We all know we're conscious, but what does that mean? Maybe they should just have kept going on about the girl?

Is human consciousness a trick to ensure survival?

Commenter ST quotes psychologist Nicholas Humphrey at Edge, saying:

I believe that human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror and why is s/he doing it? The conjuror is natural selection, and the purpose has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance—so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.

Now, like the commenter, I am pretty skeptical when I read stuff like that, and there is an amazing amount of it out there right now.

One aspect of the question of consciousness that is worth commenting on is the assumption that the advent of consciousness improved human survival chances. Of course it did in the long run; otherwise we would not be as numerous as we are. But it didn't do so in the short run, or not noticeably. The short run matters because Darwinian evolution, by its very nature, is not goal-directed, so the Darwinist must show that consciousness also aids survival in the short run. And that is far from clear.

To see what I mean, read J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, an account of the earliest known religions. When humans became conscious of such matters as future risk and inevitable death, they seem to have developed manage them. Some of these beliefs and rituals (washing, for example) may have been useful, but others were time sinks (menstrual taboos, ancestor worship, etc.) Many practices, such as human sacrifice and the execution of violators of a taboo, etc., surely decreased the human population, as would any form of religious or ideological warfare. All these net population decreases are direct outcomes of human consciousness that would not occur in a non-conscious species.

Once humans became conscious, there was no going back, to be sure, but there was certainly a long period when it was only intermittently "useful" in the Darwinian sense - which suggests in turn that consciousness did not develop in a Darwinian way.

Visual art as old as human consciousness

Peter Campbell, writing in London Review of Books about Julian Bell's new art book, Mirror of the World, observes, observes,

Mirror of the World begins with the startlingly realistic images of people and animals found on cave walls in Europe and on rock faces in Africa. They suggest that visual art can draw on an ability to find pleasure in representation that is as old as the human race, and that the move from schemata to images which depend on detailed observation came very early. Both Gombrich and Bell illustrate naturalistic heads in three dimensions from South America (Moche pots from Peru) and Africa (a bronze head from Ife). These scotch the notion that, once achieved, naturalism will always successfully challenge formalism and distortion. Some things asked of images can be arrived at only by flattening, distorting and decorating: the cartoonist’s truth, the mask-maker’s and the photographer’s are different. Bell is particularly good at finding reasons for un-naturalistic strangeness.

The main reason for un-naturalistic strangeness is to focus on something that nature does not focus on. Human consciousness, once achieved, does not ascend some perpetual ladder of capabilities. Technology improves, but apart from that, we decide what we want to think about. The cave painters of Lascaux probably had different intentions from the sculptor of the "world's oldest" abstract art. Let alone, the sculptor of the Willendorf Venus.

Consciousness - can it be a material phenomenon?

Granville Sewell has an interesting post and thread over at Uncommon Descent on consciousness, and the lack of an adequate current explanation for it. Here was my comment:

In The Spiritual Brain, Mario Beauregard and I devote Chapter 5 to the problem of materialist explanations of consciousness, as per Edelman, Koch, et cetera.

There are various materialist theories of consciousness. None address the "how" question effectively - probably because consciousness isn't a material phenomenon.

Materialists keep looking for material causes for the same reason that the guy who lost a dollar on Maple Street is looking for it on Main Street - because there is more light there, not because he is more likely to find it there. Quite the opposite, actually.

Re natural selection, anyone can invent a just-so story about how a given trait (monogamy, polygamy, adultery, rape, serial spouse murder) can be explained by natural selection. A modest amount of imagination suffices to invent just the cave man scenario where that specific form of behaviour paid off. I don't know why the theorists don't just write Clan of the Cave Bear novels.

Consciousness is especially problematic for natural selection theorizing because - unlike sex - it is rare. Many mammals and birds, and perhaps some reptiles, probably have a limited form of consciousness. We humans are the only creatures we know of in which the trait is highly developed. So clearly it is not a common part of the vast arsenal of creaturely survival.

That shouldn't be a surprise. Mere "consciousness" of prey and predators can be achieved - as it in fact is - by vast varieties of life forms that do not have or need brains, let alone consciousness (in the human sense).

In fact, one can go further and point out that many threats to survival and reproduction (suicide, organized warfare, non-parenting lifestyles, et cetera) only become possible with the advent of consciousness.

In any event, consciousness probably occurred rather suddenly. What of the very old burials where the body is placed in the fetal position, or with grave goods suggesting that the dead would live again? If things like that occurred comparatively suddenly, the process was not Darwinian.

But remember, there is more light on Main Street ...

The thing to see is that materialism is not applied to consciousness because it is a useful paradigm but because it is the only paradigm the materialist has. He cannot allow himself to consider any other approach and will - as recent events show - attempt to prevent others from doing so.

Consciousness: How much depends on your brain?

Here's an interesting article by Bruce Bawer in Science News on the attempt to understand consciousness,

In October 2004, Swedish neuroscientist Bjorn Merker packed up his video camera and joined five families for a 1-week get-together in Florida that featured several visits to the garden of childhood delights known as Disney World. For Merker, though, the trip wasn't a vacation. With the parents' permission, he came to observe and document the behavior of one child in each family who had been born missing roughly 80 percent of his or her brain.

Overall, most interesting. I suspect that the effort to locate consciousness in one single area of the brain is doomed.

Consciousness: I think, therefore I hallucinate?

In recent years, many books have attempted to explain the "hard problem" of consciousness. There is an interesting review of Douglas Hofstadter's recent I am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007) by David Deutsch, in Physics Today. Hofstadter tries to understand consciousness as somehow generated by feedback loops in the brain.

I Am a Strange Loop is supposed to restate and explain his solution: in short, that a mind is a near-infinitely extendable, self-referential loop of symbols that suffers – or rather, benefits – from the hallucination of being an "I". Furthermore (Hofstadter says paradoxically), that hallucination is itself an "I". Hofstadter's "strange loop" is a bit like an ordinary feedback loop, such as the images in a pair of parallel mirrors facing each other, but instead of merely depicting itself physically, it symbolically refers to itself. And unlike ordinary self-referential statements, like this one, the symbol inside a brain that refers to itself as "I" is not used by anyone else: it is someone.

Deutsch finds the book unconvincing in part:

Strangely, Hofstadter's half of this theory of consciousness (the loopy half), is quite convincing. The unconvincing half is essentially philosopher Daniel Dennett's theory from his book Consciousness Explained (which critics have justly renamed Consciousness Denied) – namely that our opinion that we are conscious is simply mistaken. Hofstadter calls it the "I myth". We can, of course, be mistaken about anything, so here Dennett laid down a valuable marker: the true explanation of consciousness will have to refute his position.

Personally, I don't agree. The idea that consciousness is an illusion (in Dennett's sense) is a new one and the burden is on him to establish, not on others to disprove.

I suspect, and time will tell, that the computer analogy will fail in the long run to provide much insight into consciousness. Consciousness is precisely what computers do not have or evolve, or even need, it seems. Perhaps the attraction of the computer analogy lies in the possibility it offers of finding a mechanism of consciousness.

Materialists must always search for blind mechanisms and must always believe that they exist. Beyond that, in their view, there is only hallucination.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), anoverview of the intelligent design controversy, and of Faith@Science. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, detailing events of interest in the intelligent design controversy.