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The “real” problem of consciousness: a review of Being You by Anil Seth

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In my fifth post in this series, I review Anil Seth’s 2021 book Being You. See here, here, here, and here for the previous posts. I read a Guardian review of this book in August 2021 which raved about it, as did various other reviewers. So, I went out and bought it, and when it came, I started to read it. It annoyed me so much (see below) that I put the book aside until recently. Seth is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, highly cited for his publications, and also a prolific popularizer of his views on consciousness (New Scientist, Scientific American, TED talks etc).

Seth starts well in the Prologue, with the comment that “consciousness is a mystery that matters. For each of us, our conscious experience is all there is. Without it there is nothing at all: no world, no self, no interior and no exterior.” But he continues with “For me, a source of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. The goal of consciousness science should not be ‑‑ at least not primarily ‑‑ to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place.”

The book is divided into four parts. In the first, Seth describes his approach to the study of consciousness. He also deals with attempts to measure the presence and level of consciousness. The second examines how the brain produces the contents of consciousness, and the third examines the sense of self and conscious selfhood. The fourth and final part, examines what his approach to the study of consciousness has to say about animal consciousness and the possibility of sentient machines.

The hard problem of consciousness

Seth defines consciousness as “any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. …. Whenever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness.” He quotes Chalmers’ description of “the hard problem” before going on to say that his preferred philosophical position, and the default assumption of many neuroscientists is physicalism (synonymous with materialism, the view that consciousness is an emergent property of arrangements of physical stuff). At the other extreme to physicalism is idealism, the idea that consciousness or mind is the ultimate source of reality and matter emerges from mind. Seth then notes that various forms of dualism “sit awkwardly in the middle” and few philosophers or scientists now sign up for dualistic views. He doesn’t explicitly mention Chalmers’ naturalistic dualism, though he does describe functionalism as an influential form of physicalism. Functionalism is the idea that consciousness does not depend on what a system is made of, but only on what the system does, on the functions it performs. Chalmers is actually a functionalist, though not a physicalist.

Seth also mentions panpsychism and mysterianism. Panpsychism is summarily dismissed as not leading to any testable hypotheses, and mysterianism as unjustly pessimistic.

He then defends physicalism through an attack on so-called `zombie’ thought experiments. He argues, in my view fairly correctly, that the ability to imagine a philosophical zombie is an extremely weak argument that may have no bearing on the actual possibility of such a creature.  However, he does not mention any of Chalmers’ other four arguments for the non-supervention of consciousness on the physical. To my simple mind, Seth just assumes that consciousness is an emergent property of physical brains without argument and ignores completely the mystery of how a first-person subjective experience can emerge from an arrangement of physical things, by their nature objective and third-person. How can an interior emerge from exteriors: the hard problem.

The `real’ problem of consciousness

Seth then explains that his aim is to address the “real” problem of consciousness, not the hard problem. According to the “real problem”, the main aims of consciousness science are to explain why a particular conscious experience is the way it is, in terms of physical mechanisms and processes in the brain and body. Why does a particular pattern of brain activity map to a particular kind of conscious experience? 

This is of course an interesting question, but for me Seth is essentially avoiding the hard problem. He recognizes it exists (unlike Dennett) but simply decides that science should be about what seems tractable to him, and that is mapping and understanding the correlations between the brain activity and the conscious experience. As Chalmers also recognized, of course consciousness is systematically associated with physical structures and functions (see previous post). Seth is dismissive of the hard problem, saying: “the real problem is distinct from the hard problem, because it is not, at least in the first instance, about explaining why and how consciousness is part of the universe in the first place. It does not hunt for a special sauce that can magic consciousness from mere mechanism.”

In the rest of this first part of the book, Seth sets out to identify various neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). He first examines the search for NCC to identify how conscious someone is, on a scale from complete absence of conscious experience (eg. in a coma or under anaesthesia) all the way to “vivid states of awareness that accompany normal waking life”. No mention of altered or non-ordinary states. A chapter follows in which Seth describes various advances in using EEG, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyse brain function and identify levels of consciousness in terms of a measure of the “algorithmic complexity” of certain brain waves./i

Seth describes meeting the psychedelics research Robin Carhart-Harris and applying his “algorithmic complexity” measure of consciousness level to the brain scans of people who had taken psychedelics. He found that the level was increased relative to the baseline level of waking rest. Seth describes several similar measures of brain order-disorder and says none of them work very well. I’m not surprised, the theory itself is misguided and probably has little or nothing to do with consciousness.

In the next Chapter, Seth reviews an even more elaborate information-based measure Φ (phi), which is supposed to be the additional amount of information generated by the system as a whole, over and above the information generated by its parts. Apart from the fact that Φ cannot be calculated or measured for a brain (which Seth admits), its proponents make the claim that Φ (or integrated information) is identical to consciousness. This claim is completely unbased in any evidence, theory or argument and strikes me as typical of people who want their science to be “physics-like” and simply borrow concepts such as entropy and claim they explain something else.

This is the point I got to in my first attempt to read the book where I got so annoyed that I put it down for over a year. This sort of idiocy could only be dreamed up by the one third of people who simply don’t think the hard problem really exists, and that of course includes most neuroscientists.

Creating the contents of consciousness

On my second reading, I pushed past the Φ nonsense into the second part of the book, which how the brain creates the contents of consciousness. In brief, Seth argues (correctly) that the contents of consciousness are essentially controlled hallucinations, in which the brain generates predicted perceptions about the causes of sensory inputs, and continually corrects and updates these perceptions as new or clearer sensory inputs become available. What we perceive is tied to, controlled by, causes in the world, but is not just a reflection of “things out there”.

Seth examines how this occurs for various senses, including a few beyond the traditional “five senses” such as proprioception. I found these chapters very interesting.

A brief aside now. He discusses our sense of time and states categorically that we have no internal pacemaker, our time perception comes from a “best guess” about the rate of change of sensory signals, without any need for an inner clock. He quotes a number of experiments that he thinks confirms this. But my direct experience contradicts this.

My first example is a time when I was had a fairly large garden project and used self-hypnosis to give myself a command to wake at 5 am each morning to do a couple of hours work on it. I did not want to use an alarm clock so as not to disturb my wife. I actually woke within a minute or two of five o’clock almost every day for over two months. My second example is an experience I have often had when using an alarm clock to wake each morning for work. Every now and then I experience a period of several days, sometimes more, where I wake each morning one minute before the alarm goes off. I either have an accurate internal clock or while asleep my brain is able to tap into sensory signals of some sort and very accurately predict how much time is passing, to the minute. I mention this because it seems to me a typical example where neurologists extrapolate unjustified conclusions from fairly primitive experiments on limited samples and do not think to review the broader experiences of large numbers of people or identify individuals who may have outlier abilities.

This second part is well worth reading, and I agree with most of it, but it has little to do with the hard problem, though Seth thinks it makes the hard problem a non-problem. I am guessing that like the philosophers Seth has no experience with meditation, or of consciousness when its contents drop away. As I described in my previous post, it is possible to eventually turn your conscious attention away from other sensory contents and thought and back on itself. To sit simply aware of awareness. That is the fundamental essence of the hard problem: how does that awareness arise. It simply cannot be an emergent property arising from the brain and its production of perceptions because the awareness that experiences those perceptions is not those perceptions and remains when perceptions of everything except first-person awareness drop away.

The illusion of the self

In the third part of the book, Seth examines the sense of a “self” that we usually feel is what is experiencing consciousness. He notes that Buddhists have “long argued that there is no such thing as a permanent self and through meditation have attempted to reach entirely selfless states of consciousness” though he does not seem to understand that many meditators do reach such selfless states, albeit usually only for a short period of time. It’s the selfless stage of consciousness that is rarely reached.  The experience of selfless states is empirical evidence, albeit first-person data not the outside observer data that Seth is more comfortable with as a scientist. Seth also notes that psychedelics can result in experiences of no-self (and in my experience, also in drastically altered senses of self).

Seth identifies several types of selfhood that we experience: the embodied self (our experience of our body) the perspectival self (our first-person perspective), the volitional self (our perception that we have free will), the social self (how I perceive that others perceive me) and the narrative self (our remembered past and anticipated future). Seth argues (convincingly to me) that these diverse elements of selfhood are normally bound together in a unified experience, together with a perception (not really accurate) that our selfhood is enduring and little changing. He argues that the brain has evolved to produce this sense of selfhood in a similar way to how it produces predicted perceptions as a tool to enhance the survival of the individual. The self is another controlled hallucination that operates to support the fundamental biological drive to survive and reproduce.

Seth appears to think that losing the sense of the reality of the self is bodily regulation gone deeply awry, a severe psychiatric problem. That may be the case in some specific psychiatric conditions but is certainly not the experience of meditators who taste the no-self state, quite the opposite.

This part of the book finishes with yet another chapter on a pretend-physics theory of living organisms and a chapter on free will. The free will chapter is excellent and thought-provoking but I will leave that topic for a later post.

Animal and machine consciousness

The last part of the book examines the issue of whether other animals are conscious and whether machines can be conscious. The animal chapter is a fascinating read. Other than mammals which Seth argues likely mostly have some form of consciousness as their brains are so similar to ours, Seth explores the very alien consciousness of the octopus and this is indeed a fascinating read. Highly recommended.

The chapter on machine consciousness makes the very valid point that intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing and many make the assumption that achieving artificial general intelligence will automatically bring consciousness. Seth is sceptical and also is agnostic on the requirement of functionalism, the idea that consciousness depends only on function not on the material from which a system is made. Another excellent discussion, which I mainly leave for a separate post on machine consciousness.

In summary

Anil Seth is one of the one-third of people who simply don’t “get” the hard problem of consciousness. He thinks progress on his “real” problems will not solve but dissolve the hard problem. The parts of the book where he delves into pretend physics theories of consciousness are annoying and silly. But the rest of the book where he addresses the way that the brain produces perceptions via “controlled hallucinations” and that the sense of self is one of these controlled hallucinations is an excellent and enjoyable read. I learnt a lot about how visual and other illusions provide evidence of how the brain produces perceptions adjusted for its best guesses of the errors in the sensory inputs.

Seth has looked at some aspects of psychedelic experiences, though he largely ignores the very large body of subjective first-person evidence of non-ordinary states of consciousness and the theoretical work to develop maps of states and stages of consciousness.  He also completely ignores first-person evidence from meditative experiences, and indeed seems to see the Buddhist insight that the self is an illusion as a belief not as a result of empirical observations.

A book well worth reading but try not to let the sections on pretend-physics grand theories put you off completely. Take them lightly or skip them; the rest of the book is full of fascinating information and arguments.

The hard problem of consciousness: David Chalmers and The Conscious Mind

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In my fourth post in this series, I review David Chalmer’s 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. See here, here and here for the previous posts. This is a long and often technical book (about 395 pages) though Chalmers has kindly flagged the Chapters and Sections that he recommends non-philosophers read and has asterisked the headings of Sections that he considers technical details likely of interest only to philosophers. I read some but not all asterisked sections, and I have to say that it is indeed the most technical and “academic” work of philosophy I have read in decades.  But let’s dive into it.

The hard problem of consciousness

It was like a breath of fresh air to read the introductory chapter. Instead of dismissing consciousness as an illusion, Chalmers sees it as the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe. He coined the phrase “the hard problem” around 1994 and it caught on. In contrast to the hard problem of why we have first-person experience, issues such as how the brain processes environmental stimuli, or how it integrates information into a coherent whole, might be called “easy” problems, and many books about consciousness, such as Dennett’s, are largely about the easy problems. Consciousness remains a big, deep mystery about which science has almost nothing to say, and where there is no agreement even in the broad about how consciousness occurs.

Chalmers says he has found that around one-third of people think that solving the easy problems explains everything that needs to be explained about consciousness, and around two thirds hold that there is a further “hard” problem. This ratio is fairly constant across academics and students in a variety of fields.  He sets out explicitly to address the hard problem and to develop at least a basis for a scientific theory of consciousness though he recognizes that it is not open to investigation by the usual scientific methods.

He outlines a set of constraints within which attempts to obey in this quest. First, to take consciousness seriously and not redefine it as something else (as per Dennett). Second, to take science seriously in the domains where it has authority. Third, to take consciousness to be a natural phenomenon.

Two fundamental questions about consciousness

In the Introduction and Chapter 1, Chalmers clarifies what he means by consciousness. It’s the way we experience the world, the way it feels to us subjectively. Using the phrase Nagel made famous in 1974, Chalmers says “We can say that a being is consciousness if there is something it is like to be that being …”

Chalmers identifies two fundamental questions about consciousness that we currently cannot answer. (1) Why does conscious experience exist and how does it arise in physical systems, and (2) why do conscious experiences have their particular nature? Why does the experience of red differ from the experience of blue? 

First, Chalmers draws our attention to the range of conscious experiences by presenting a set of examples ranging from visual experiences, through mental imagery, to emotions, and to our sense of self. It seems odd that he completely ignores non-ordinary states of consciousness though he touches on changes in consciousness with a discussion of how his visual experience dramatically changed as a child when he was fitted with glasses.

This leads into an important distinction that he makes between the psychological concept of mind and the phenomenal concept of mind. The phenomenal aspect of mind is conscious experience. The psychological aspect of mind refers to the mental states construed as the (ultimately physical) states relevant to the causation and explanation of behavior. It matters little or not at all whether these mental states are conscious or not. The materialist hopes that the phenomenal and psychological minds turn out to be the same thing, Chalmers argues that they are different things, a form of dualism.

Chalmers approaches the study of consciousness from a completely nonspiritual, nonreligious perspective. The dualism he advocates is governed by natural laws, it is just that these natural laws extend beyond the laws of our current sciences. He is not a mysterian, someone who throws their hands up and say that consciousness is a fundamental mystery outside the reach of human understanding. Rather he wants to understand and explain consciousness as a natural phenomenon.

Zombies and other arguments against a reductive materialist explanation

Chalmers argument against a materialist explanation of consciousness relies heavily on two things: supervenience and logically possible worlds. The definition of logical supervenience is as follows: B facts/properties logically supervene on A facts if no two logically possible worlds are identical with respect to their A facts while differing in their B facts. A phenomenon is reductively explainable in terms of low level physical facts if and only if it logically supervenes on those properties.

These issues are dealt with in detail in a long and philosophically technical chapter 2. Its worth reading to get a grasp of Chalmers’ arguments in following chapters, but it is a heavy read with technical terms such as “intension” and “instantiation” much used.

Chalmers then argues that everything in our world logically supervenes on the low-level physical facts except for consciousness. He actually gives five arguments in Chapter 3 for this conclusion. The first and third, which I find the most compelling, are the zombie argument and the epistemic asymmetry argument.

The zombie argument is that it is logically possible to imagine zombies who are just like us, fuctionally, psychologically and behaviourally, but yet have no phenomenal mind, no experiences, nothing that it is like to be them. These are often referred to as philosophical zombies, as opposed to the Hollywood zombies who are functionally impaired. It is logically possible to imagine a world physically identical to ours inhabited by philosophical zombies. Therefore consciousness does not supervene on the physical facts. So consciousness cannot be reductively explained in terms of the physical and materialism is false.

The epistemic asymmetry argument stems from the fact that we know about it only through our own experience. Even if we had a completed theory of cognition (and biochemistry, chemistry, and physics) that information would not lead us to postulate consciousness. There is also the problem of other minds. Even if we know everything physical about other creatures, we do not know for certain if they are conscious. There is no problem with physical things like “other lives”, or other “economies” or “other heights”. Chalmers argues there is no epistemic asymmetry in these cases precisely because they are logically supervenient on the physical.

Chalmers concludes that consciousness cannot be logically supervenient “because a logically supervenient property can be detected straightforwardly on the basis of external evidence, and there is no special role for the first-person case.”  This is as close as Chalmers comes in the whole book to saying in straightforward jargon-free terms why consciousness cannot be reduced to the physical. The physical is objective, third-person, the “outside”. Consciousness is subjective, first-person, the “inside”. It seems quite obvious to me that the subjective cannot derive from the objective, the first-person from the third-person, the inside from the outside.

Chalmers’ five arguments are all “intuition” pumps to help the skeptical see that consciousness does not logically supervene. Briefly, his other three arguments are:

2. The inverted spectrum. Imagine someone physically identical to you, but with different conscious experiences. For example, their experience of the colour spectrum is inverted relative to yours.

4. Someone raised in a black and white room could have complete knowledge of neuroscience but still have no idea what it is like to see green or any other colour.

5. The lack of any remotely plausible analysis of consciousness that can explain even in outline how it arises from non-conscious processes.

In the rest of Chapter 3, Chalmers examines in detail and refutes all the various objections that he thinks might be raised against his arguments and conclusion. As Dennett, caustically but wittily has said, “Chalmers never leaps to conclusions; he oozes to conclusions, checking off all the caveats and pitfalls and possible sources of error along the way with exemplary caution.” Dennett has concluded that nothing can shake Chalmers intuition that consciousness is not reductive to the physical, because he has presented excellent versions himself of every one of Dennett’s objections and failed to convince himself. Dennett in quite an entertaining attack then suggests a number of reasons Chalmers may “cling like a limpet” to dualism. These include that it is a parody of academic philosophic scholarship, or that it is a philosopher performing (I am a philosopher and this is what philosophers do). See Dennett’s 2012 article “The mystery of David Chalmers” for these and other entertaining observations.

I am quite sure that Chalmers is largely correct in his conclusions, but rather than writing in clear language for a general intelligent reader as Anaka Harris does, Chalmers is indeed “doing what philosophers do” and doing it in excruciating detail.

Naturalistic dualism

In Chapter 4, Chalmers examines the implications of his conclusion that consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical, and not reducible to it.  However, consciousness is systematically associated with physical structures and functions. Chalmers develops this into the concept of “natural supervenience”, that there is an as yet unknown lawful association between the phenomenal mind and the psychological mind, between consciousness and physical processes. Again, a very technical and jargon-filled set of arguments. To my mind, its completely obvious that the inside (the first-person) is systematically associated with the outside (the third person).

Chalmers then suggests that a theory of consciousness could go one of two ways. First, that consciousness is a fundamental property alongside things such as charge, spin, etc. Second, that consciousness derives from some other class of more fundamental properties, which cannot be physical properties since consciousness is not supervenient on the physical.

Chalmers calls this position “naturalistic dualism” because it posits that everything is a result of basic properties and laws and is compatible with existing “physical” science. There need be nothing transcendental about consciousness, it is just another natural phenomenon. He then examines a range of possible objections to naturalistic dualism, particularly the concept of emergence of consciousness from complex systems, probably the dominant view among neuroscientists.  Like Annaka Harris, Chalmers rejects emergence on the grounds that consciousness is not supervenient on the physical and so cannot be emergent from it.  The first-person subjective cannot emerge from sufficiently complex arrangements of third-person objective things.

Annaka Harris says this much more clearly than Chalmers does: “when scientists assume they have bypassed the hard problem by describing consciousness as an emergent property — that is, a complex phenomenon not predicted by the constituent parts — they are changing the subject. All emergent phenomena — like ant colonies, snowflakes, and waves — are still descriptions of matter and how it behaves as witnessed from the outside. What a collection of matter is like from the inside and whether or not there is an experience associated with it is something the term “emergence” doesn’t cover. Calling consciousness an emergent phenomenon doesn’t actually explain anything, because to the observer, matter is behaving as it always does.”

Can consciousness play a causal role in events?

Next, Chalmers tackles the issue of whether consciousness is epiphenomenal. If all physical events are caused by physical causes, then consciousness cannot play a causal role in physical events, it is an epiphenomenon.  Chalmers examines a number of potential strategies for avoiding epiphenomenalism but concludes that none of them justify rejecting the conclusion that consciousness is mostly epiphenomenal, perhaps with some subtle exceptions.  This clearly is fundamental to the issue of whether or not we have free will, and I find it odd that Chalmers does not discuss free will directly. He is on record as saying he does not have strong feelings about free will. In any case, I will leave the issue of free will for a following post to examine.

In Chapter 7, Chalmers examines the issue of phenomenological judgements. This refers to when we use our cognition (thinking functions) to make judgements about the experience of consciousness. Chalmers argues that phenomenal judgements are themselves cognitive acts, and so fall within the domain of psychology and thus are not mysterious, potentially explicable scientifically, unlike consciousness. This leads to a paradox since our claims about consciousness should be reductively explicable in terms of cognitive science whereas consciousness is not.

Chalmers then argues that our judgements (and the things we say about the experience of consciousness) would be the same whether or not we actually experience consciousness. In other words, the zombie will describe experiences of consciousness exactly in the way that we do, although he does not experience consciousness.  This simply makes no sense at all to me and seems like a convincing argument that the complete philosophical zombie is actually not a logical possibility. A zombie cannot report his experiences of consciousness in the same way that I do. In other words, there is an area where consciousness plays a causal role in behaviour.

Annaka Harris makes exactly the same point: “consciousness seems to play a role in behaviour when we think and talk about the mystery of consciousness. When I contemplate “what it’s like” to be something, that experience of consciousness presumably affects the subsequent processing taking place in my brain. And almost nothing I think or say when contemplating consciousness would make any sense coming from a system without it. How could an unconscious robot (or a philosophical zombie) contemplate conscious experience itself without having it in the first place?”

Why does Chalmers ignore the evidence from meditation?

Most people who have had sufficient training in meditation realize that an experience of consciousness needn’t be accompanied by thoughts—or any input to the senses, for that matter. I have experienced what it is like to be acutely aware of my subjective awareness in the absence of any content such as thought, sights, sounds, or other perceptions. I have practiced for many hours to become aware of my awareness as an observer of thoughts and sensory perception, that is separate from them. And then to take that awareness and turn it back on itself, letting thoughts and sensory perceptions fall away.  While I might have difficulty finding words that can convey a sense of that experience, there are many such descriptions in the Zen literature, for example. I really don’t see how a zombie could carry out such a program, or report the experiences that result, let alone in similar terms to what I might report. 

Chalmers’ explanation for how a zombie is still conceivable in theory is that the language and concepts of consciousness could be built into the program of a zombie. The unstated implication is that we could also have the same language and concepts of consciousness built into us.  And the implication of that is that we also are not actually conscious, but our sense of the inexplicable wonder of consciousness is actually an illusion built into us somehow by evolutionary processes.  This totally destroys Chalmers claim that consciousness is not reducible. The idea that its logically possible for zombies to replicate the outcomes of a long-term meditation practice seems nonsensical to me.

Chalmers would seem to have no real experience of meditation. In a 2017 interview with Chalmers, John Horgan reported that Chalmers has “never had the patience” for meditation, and he has doubts about basic Buddhist claims, such as anatta, the doctrine that the self does not really exist.

I find this astonishing. Chalmers has made the nature of consciousness his life’s work and understands intellectually that consciousness cannot be investigated using the third-person objective methods of science. But he apparently does not have the patience to investigate the very sophisticated first-person methods that have been developed over thousands of years to exactly investigate the nature of consciousness. While Chalmers is of course entirely free to doubt that the self does not really exist, it seems enormously arrogant to do this while dismissing the no-self experiences of many people, including myself, through meditation or through exploration with psychedelics.

Does functional organization fully determine conscious experience?

In chapters 6 and 7, Chalmers starts to outline a possible approach to developing a naturalistic dualist theory of consciousness. He argues for a general principle that consciousness is an organizational invariant, i.e., that “functional organization fully determines conscious experience. In other words, if a silicon brain is organized identically to a human brain, it will also be conscious. He did not present any evidence for this claim that I could see, and I don’t find it plausible. In another review, Eric Dietrich comments that this principle is unintuitive and not widely believed among philosophers.

Chalmers gives some thought experiments to argue for this principle: his examples show that, without it, humans could be massively mistaken about their experience of qualia (whether absent, fading or dancing). I found all these thought experiments unconvincing, not least because once Chalmers has decided that zombies can be programmed to think they are conscious even when they are not, then humans can also be massively mistaken about their actual experiences and his arguments self-implode.

Panpsychism: maybe not as silly as people tend to assume

Chapter 8 is even more speculative. Chalmers proposes that the basic stuff of the universe is information and that has two aspects: a phenomenal and a physical aspect. He largely lost me here. I did not find it at all compelling. But this leads him to consider panpsychism, since even simple systems containing information must then have associated experience. Of course, the experience of a simple system will not be associated with a mental life, a sense of self, or memory.

I discussed panpsychism in my previous post about Annaka Harris’s book, and that it is largely dismissed as ridiculous by scientists, who imagine it implies rocks must have human-like consciousness. Chalmers makes all the same points, very clearly, and also notes that panpsychism avoids the need to have consciousness wink-in or switch-on at some particular level of complexity. Rather it may be a universal property, with very simple systems having very simple phenomenology and very complex systems having very complex phenomenology.

Chalmers also discusses the possibility that we have various information-processing systems in the brain with associated consciousness, to which we do not have access.  This indeed is what has been found in some split-brain patients. Chalmers concludes that his theory results in a variant of “outrageous” panpsychism, but it is a view that can grow surprisingly satisfying with reflection. I am inclined to agree with him.

In conclusion

The two final chapters deal with conscious machines and strong artificial intelligence (chapter 9) and quantum mechanics and consciousness (chapter 10). I will leave these subjects for later discussion.

While Chalmers does indeed take consciousness seriously and recognize that it is fundamentally different to physical functions and cannot be reductively explained, most of his philosophic machinery and some of the principles he argued for in the second half of the books I found unconvincing. Consciousness exists in the real world, it is our primary experience and in fact ALL our experiences of physical systems are mediated through consciousness. So consciousness must be explored using evidence, not by using thought experiments of what is guessed to be logically possible. And the primary evidence is direct personal exploration of consciousness through tools like meditation, breathwork, psychedelics. None of which Chalmers appears to have any interest in or experience with.  Sure, these first-person experiences are much more difficult to work with than the objective observational tools of current science, but philosophical thought experiments about “logically possible” worlds are even less adequate for understanding such an important aspect of our reality.

Consciousness Explained…..or Consciousness Ignored?

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In my third post on consciousness, I review Daniel Dennett’s 1991 book Consciousness Explained. My preliminary reading suggested this was an important contribution to the debate on the nature of consciousness.

His first chapter starts with the brain in the vat. He argues that the creation of all the inputs needed to fool the brain in the vat they were having real experiences is simply computationally impossible, due to the massive number of scenarios requiring inputs. And also claims that hallucinations are rarely “deep” in the sense of being solidly realized hallucinations that the person can interact with, walk around, view from different angles etc.

He seems to have a very limited understanding of the range of hallucinogenic experiences that people have, or for that matter, lucid dreams in which they can have detailed interactions, conversations etc with other dream characters and interact in detail with their dreamscape, including changing and influencing it.  He does have some interesting thoughts on how dreams can be randomly generated in a way which means they reflect the concerns of the dreamer, but have no “internal author”.

He later goes on to explain how brain processes use partial sensory information to fill in what we perceive as perceptions without gaps and holes. He goes to some length to explain how this could be done simply by creating the memory that it was done rather than that the brain has to construct a detailed “film” to be played in an internal “Cartesian theatre” for the mind to view it. Yet does not seem to twig that exactly this process can operate to create what we experience as extremely solidly realized hallucinations.

The book is around 500 pages in length and the bulk of it is about brain processes and how they construct our perceptions from partial inputs. He doesn’t really get to address the hard issues re consciousness until the last three chapters. 

For example, Dennett discusses how we see a continuous visual field with no blind spot. Is the brain taking the visual input and “filling in” the blind spot?  There are various other perceptual issues where what we “see” is minus the missing data in the visual input.  It seems fairly obvious to me that the brain simply has an instruction to ignore the missing stuff, or more correctly, without any actual input from that part of the field it simply ignores it, and we are unaware anything is missing. And after about 10 pages of discussing the issues with “filling in” he gets there. Perhaps I’ve picked up the solution to this question from more recent writing, and he is simply writing before much of this was explored.

But it is yet another example of how most of his quite lengthy book is devoted to discussing how the contents of consciousness are created, not discussing consciousness itself. His book was written before Chalmers in his 1996 book invented the term “hard problem of consciousness” and brought a lot of attention to it. He does address this issue in the last part of the book, and as I discuss below seems to completely dismiss it on the grounds that consciousness is an illusion.

Dennett is one of those infuriating philosophers who think that whatever half-baked assumption he has about the world can be stated as an obvious truth from which he then draws entirely unwarranted conclusions. For example, in Chapter 3 he tells us that most animals other than cats and dogs cannot enjoy what they do, and as an example says that birds cannot enjoy the sensation of flight. He goes on to conclude that humans are the only animals that can do things purely to have fun.

In Chapter 10, he tells us that the hallmark of consciousness is that they can be reported (barring aphasia, paralysis, or being bound and gagged).  The exceptions in brackets are his.  So he then concludes that conscious states must be accompanied by suitable higher-order thoughts. Apart from being a non-sequitur, he seems completely unaware of the extensive reporting of states of consciousness by humans which were not accompanied at the time by higher-order thoughts. In fact, I drop into such a state sometimes while meditating, when all thoughts may drop away for a period.

In Chapter 12, Qualia Disqualified turns to a discussion of qualia (for example the subjective experience of a colour). He makes the point that the affective or emotional properties of red are to a large extent programmed into the brain by evolution (red is universally a colour that alerts, perhaps because it is so different to the normal blue-green of the natural environment).  And the subjective response to red is not only a result of programmed instincts, but also of individual associations and quirks. He concludes that qualia for redness are JUST those complexes of dispositions evoked by the perception of “red” light. To quote:

“You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is. That “quale” of yours is a character in good standing in the fictional world of your heterophenomenology but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions.”

The phrase I have italicized astonishes me. “Just how it seems to you” is exactly what qualia refer to, the subjective individual experience of red.  But apparently this is “Not how it is”, as presumably that is the set of brain reactions and instincts triggered (a complex of dispositions that can in principle be at least partially observable by another person).

But! Qualia ARE the subjective experience, not the objective dispositions of the brain. Qualia are observed from the inside and indeed are exactly “just how it seems to me”, not the chemical and electrical processes of the brain “observed from outside”.  Here Dennett is essentially dismissing the whole experience of first person consciousness as “fictional” and what is real is the associated objectively observable phenomena.

He doubles down on this position by claiming that the qualophile will claim that the quale red could be changed without changing any of the associated dispositions. This is entirely beside the point. I would not make that claim, the inside and outside of something are not independent. But the fact that a change in the experience of a quale will likely be associated with some change in the brain functioning does not mean the first-person experience is a fiction (or non-existent) and all that is real is the third-person observations of brain states.

Now that he has concluded that qualia do not exist, it is not surprising that he further concludes that there is no hard problem of consciousness, and “philosophical zombies”, which are supposed to act like a human in every way while somehow lacking qualia, cannot exist. In his 1996 book (next on my reading list), David Chalmers argues that Dennett’s position is essentially a denial of consciousness and, perhaps jokingly, suggests that Dennett is a philosophical zombie.

Dennett spends quite a bit of time making the point that qualia are epiphenomenal in the philosophical sense that they are an effect which itself has no effects in the physical world. This implies that things would happen in exactly the same way without them. Hence there is no empirical reason for believing in them.  His sleight of hand here is slip in the “empirical” which is a reference to external third-person observations. The first-person experience that we all have is completely dismissed. If anything, his argument is a valid argument that we cannot tell whether someone else is a zombie or not. But for him, the “not” is not an option because qualia have been shown by him not to exist. 

To quote Dennett directly “Are zombies possible? They’re not just possible, they’re actual. We’re all zombies*. Nobody is conscious…..I can’t prove that no such sort of consciousness exists. I also cannot prove that gremlins don’t exist. The best I can do is show that there is no respectable motivation for believing in it.” The asterisk indicates a footnote in which Dennett says it would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context.  I think I have provided enough context!

To respond: it may not be “respectable” in some academic philosophical circles, but first person consciousness is intrinsic to my entire experience of reality, including the objective third-person observations which Dennett thinks are the only real aspect of reality.

In a somewhat refreshing interlude in Chapter 13, Dennett addresses the reality of the sense of being a “self” and concludes that it is a brain construct. His arguments are an extrapolation from his discussions of brain processes with no apparent awareness of the fact that many people have had direct experience of “no-self”.  He asks the question “are there conditions under which life goes on but no self emerges? Are there conditions under which more than oneself emerges? We can’t ethically conduct such experiments.” In fact, we can. Meditation, psychedelics, breath work and other practices can provide ethical experiments for altering brain states and consciousness. I have experienced the loss of a sense of self in meditative states, and I have experienced the emergence of multiple selves and radical changes in the sense of self while on psychedelic journeys. But that is for another post.

In the final chapter, Dennett attacks those who argue that its not possible to imagine how a software program running on a machine could become conscious. Dennett argues that any program complex enough to simulate conscious interaction with humans will be no different to humans (whose brain processes are all that is going on, and these are the equivalent of very complex programs). I remain totally unconvinced. He is completely dodging the hard question of the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious inputs. He also dismisses the possibility that it is impossible to imagine what its like to be a bat. Here, I am actually fairly sure Nagel was referring to the possibility of knowing (not imagining) what it was like to be a bat.

In conclusion, Dennett has a story which focuses mainly on how the brain creates the contents of consciousness. And for that topic, he does quote quite a bit of neuroscience research. But as the book was written in 1991 and there has been a huge increase in our understanding of brain processes in the decades since, this is not the book I would read for the neuroscience of how our brain processes perceptions for us to experience.

On the topic of consciousness itself, he really doesn’t explore any of the vast evidence on consciousness, altered states, psychedelics, meditation, breath work, etc. Dennett finishes the book claiming he has shown how consciousness is an illusion that can be explained in terms of unconscious events. Nope, not even close. As Annaka Harris has pointed out, consciousness is the one thing that can’t be an illusion – by definition. “An illusion can appear  within consciousness, but you are either experiencing something or you’re not  –  consciousness is necessary for an illusion to take place.” Having just now looked at the Wikipedia article on Consciousness Explained, I am in full agreement with the critics it quotes as saying that “Dennett is denying the existence of subjective conscious states, while giving the appearance of giving a scientific explanation of them.” In summary, I found the book a tedious read, unconvincing, disappointing, and dated.

Here are links to my previous posts in this series on consciousness.

Anneka Harris on the fundamental mystery of consciousness Oct 6 2022

What is consciousness Aug 26 2022