on_the mystery of consciousness

8/12/2019 On_The Mystery of Consciousness

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The Mystery of ConsciousnessBy John R. Searle

There is no general agreement in the interdisciplinary field known as consciousnessresearch studies (or consciousness studies or consciousness research; take your

pick).on exactly what the word consciousness means. This lack has not prevented aflourishing of such research, especially during the last two decades, any more than theasence of a generally agreed upon definition of the word life has hindered theflourishing of the field of iology.

The situation for consciousness research is actually more extreme than that, remindingone of the proverial story of the four lind men and the elephant. !ersons claiming to etalking aout the mysteries of consciousness or to have solved them often seem to etalking right past each other aout some very different things.

This ook contains reviews, originally written for the "ew #ork $eview of %ooks, of six

significant ooks or sets of ooks y ma&or authors in the field. 'dditionally, it containssummaries of the views of the reviewer, ohn earle, a professor of !hilosophy at%erkeley and himself a ma&or figure in the field. Together they cover many, though y nomeans all, of the differing views on the nature of consciousness and why it is a mystery, ifindeed it is.

*t is my hope that this ook may serve as a sort of +liffs "otes, providing summaries ofthe essential points in texts without having to read the original ook entire. -ne thing itdoes offer that a +liffs "otes can not is, in two cases, sets of letters heatedly exchangedetween the reviewer and the person reviewed following a reviews original pulication. *have read some ut y no means all of these ook reviewed ooks, and do hope that

anyone who has read one or more of them will participate actively in our discussion andcorrect me if at any point my interpretation seems to e wrong.

Some divisions within the conscious studies community and how they manifest here:

.' ma&or division in the consciousness studies community exists on this uestion. *f wecould learn enough aout rain functioning to completely descrie and predict the entirechain of events from sensation and prior rain state through ehavior and new rain stateand do it every time would we then have created a complete description of consciousness.ome argue that if we were ale to do this not only would we still not have a completedescription of consciousness ut possily we would e no further towards one than we

were efore. ome claim this final knowledge will always e eyond our understanding.

urprisingly perhaps, none of those who hold this latter view today do so ecause theyelieve in what is now known as sustance dualism, the idea that our physical rainsare somehow connected to non/physical minds. *n a very road sense all persons * knowof who are currently participating in consciousness studies deates are what weretraditionally called materialists. 0hy some of them would deny the possiility ofcompletely understanding consciousness through traditional, materialistic scientific

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research and even refuse to e called materialists, sometimes throwing the word at theiropponents as an accusation, is a matter much more sutle.

!hilosopher 2aniel 2ennett has descried these two groups neutrally as the ' team andthe % team. !sychologist 2aniel 0egner has descried them less neutrally as the

roo/geeks and the ad scientists, using the insult that each group would most likelythrow at the other as an identifier. The roo/geeks are the ones who elieve that such acomplete sensation3rain3ehavior description, if could it e created, would e a completedescription of consciousness. The ad scientists are the ones who think such adescription would e insufficient and sometimes accuse the roo/geeks of actuallydenying the existence of consciousness even as they claim to study it.

*n this ook ohn earle himself serves as a nice example of the latter group whileaccusing 2ennett of eing a memer of the former, one reason for the heartedness of theirincluded exchange of letters. *n general, oth serve, to me, as exhiitions of a type ofthinking aout consciousness that attempts to deal with seemingly fundamental issues

which would exist as prolems regardless of the detailed nature of the rain or the detailsof most ehavior. *ssues. The true relationship etween su&ectivity and o&ectivity andthe possiility of ever doing scientific research on the latter is a common point ofcontention for these people.

eemingly at the opposite end of adeuacy for experimental research &ust now are theneuroscientists and clinical neurologists studying &ust what effect various regions of therain have on consciousness and how they coordinate their efforts. *n this ook, ir4rancis +rick, *srael $osenfield and to some extent 5erald 6delman seem to fit.7owever, rain scans and pathological dissections are not the only ways to studyconsciousness, even today. ome researchers elieve that a more thorough understandingof the at a more fundamental iological level, elementary nerve nets within rain regionsand the su/cellular functioning of neurons themselves (possily those of the other kindsof cells which together make up ninety percent of rain tissue as well) is needed. Thecon&ectures of mathematician3physicist $oger !enrose and some of the work of rainscientist 5erald 6delman serve as examples of this kind of research in this ook.

4inally, there is the most traditional of experimental study of consciousness, the study ofthe ehavior of intact organisms (freuently college students taking !sychology 181)which was already going on in the laoratories of 0illiam ames and 0ilhelm 0undtwell efore the end of the nineteenth century. There are, unfortunately, no examples ofthis type of consciousness study in earles ook, ut most fortunately the current(2ecemer, 988:) issue of the cientific 'merican contains and excellent example underthe title of agic and the %rain which * shall e referring to later.

"o papers from the artificial intelligence community are included, yet the influence ofthat topic is pervasive. 't the philosophical end of things the uestion of whether or not acomputer could ever e conscious seems to come up aout as often a discussions aouto&ectivity and su&ectivity. 'rtificial *ntelligence does not seem to have much influenceon rain region studies, though computeri


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to it. 7owever, elow that level computer modeling is making a ig contriution withartificial neural networks having moved eyond rain research and into a numer ofapplications, some of them uite unexpected. 4urthermore, the power of massivelymultiprocessor computers (not artificially intelligent) is finally on the verge of permittingresearch on su/cellular processes y simulating the interactions of individual atoms.

4inally cognitive simulation of human psychology, originally named in the 1=>8s, isoften derided today as 5-4'*, standing for 5ood -ld 4ashion '*, ut like 5od it seemsto keep hanging around however many times it is declared dead.

Now on to the individual chapters in the boo! chapter by chapter"

#. John Searle and $the Chinese room% (The $ediscovery of ind and other works)

earles +hinese $oom thought experiment may e the most referred to and mostcritici


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version, which interested Turing more, real humans and 'rtificial *ntelligence programsall try to convince the &udges that they are really human.

6xperiments of this kind have actually een carried out numerous times since thepulication of Turings article. ee, for example, an article in the on/line maga


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a stomach. 0hile the +hinese room argument would seem to counter top/downarguments for consciousness eing derivale y writing programs to simulate externallyoservale ehavior, it does not seem to me that it counters the opposite, top/downthough experiment. -ne of creating simulated rains y simulating the interactions of theatoms that make up molecules and so on up.

Ep in this case would include a simulation not only an entire rain ut also as much ofthe rest of the nervous system, the ody and its environment as necessary to reach apoint where attachment to real world interfaces are possile. ome who have presentedthis argument have suggested that an appropriate real/world interface might e ahumanoid root with its sensors feeding into the simulated sensory nerves and thesimulated motor nerves feeding into the root odys effectors.

earle has countered this argument y saying that such a simulation would e only asimulation. #et in other places he proclaims himself a materialist which presumalymeans that he is not a vitalist who elieves that the physical laws governing iological

systems are somehow different from those governing non/iological ones. 't the sametime he has said repeatedly that he elieves consciousness might e caused y systemsmade of materials other than the normal iological ones. ight not one not say then thatsuch a simulation might e simply a consciousness causing system whose materials aresimulated atoms rather than real ones. 'spects of this argument will come up again whendiscussing earles review of 2avid +halmers ideas.

&. Sir 'rancis Cric and the $bindin(% problem(The cientific earch for the oul)

2espite its arresting title, +ricks ook is a very mainstream example of contemporary,experimental rain science studies. *n this case tracing the flow of information throughvarious speciali


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suggestive ecause he was sure through introspection that consciousness seems entirelyunary despite the ilateral structure of most of the ody with two arms, legs and eyes etc..

%y the time +rick egan his work on rains and consciousness much was known aoutthe visual pathways from retinas through the occipital loe at the ack of the head and

various mid/rain structures including the thalamus on multiple ranching andintersection routes up to and within the cereral cortex. *n fact, more was known then andproaly still is now aout information flow within the visual system than aout anyother sense, making it an excellent focus for study.

The inding prolem as +rick reduced it to a rain function prolem was the prolemof how neurons temporarily ecome active as a unit. -ther researchers had alreadysuggested that the solution might involve the synchroni


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5iven the readth of 6delmans interests it was necessary for earle in reviewing severalof his ooks together to skip around somewhat and * shall do the same. 7owever, arecurrent theme in his work has een processes of self/organi


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this ook was written such work has een extended into constructing real roots capaleof exploring the real (laoratory) world and at times interacting with humans there.

4rom these approaches and results 6delman has moved up to con&ecturing similarself/organi


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* have a ook on 5odels theorem which * very much wish * could lay my hands on &ustnow to give here as a citation. The reason is that it contains as an appendix a translationfrom the original 5erman of the complete theorem done y Gurt 5odel himself when hewas a 4ellow at the !rinceton *nstitute of 'dvanced tudies, in the early sixties. Thecomplete paper is aout thirty/five pages long and like much in pure mathematics is

actually more tedious than difficult.

0hat 5odel demonstrated in that paper was a way (&ust one of many) to encode any finitestring of characters in a finite alphaet as a numer consisting of the product otained ymultiplying together a collection of prime numers (numers greater than one with nodivisors except themselves and one) with the position of a prime in the seuence ofprimes starting with the numer two representing the position of a character and thenumer of times that prime occurs representing the value of the character in that position.

7eres an exampleA assume we have a two or more letter alphaet with the value of thefirst letter, call it ', eing one and the value of the second letter, call it %, eing two.

5iven those definitions the 5odel numer for the two character string '% can ecalculated a followsA the first position is represented y a two, the first of all primenumers, and the value of the character, ', in that position is one, so we have one two.The second position is represented y three, the second prime numer the seuence of allprime numers, and the value of the character, %, in that position is two, so we are goingto have two threes. The 5odel numer for our string '% is therefore going to e 9 x (@ x@) or 9 x = or 1:, and given the numer 1: we could work ackward and unamiguouslydiscover that the original string consisted of '%.

7aving devised his coding scheme and assigned values to a minimal set of logicaloperators plus some variales what 5odel did next was devise seuences of arithmeticoperations which would do the same as the normal character manipulations in symoliclogic or, more precisely, second order prepositional calculus. That was the hard part. 0ithall of this paraphernalia in hand he could then show how to represent a self/contradictory,self/referential statement of the sort exemplified a few paragraphs ack and he was done.' way of always eing ale to create an unprovale and also undisprovale statement inany such numer system or one containing it had now een demonstrated.

!eople have een using 5odels theorem to try to prove that there are limits on whatcomputers can do that humans are not su&ect to since at least the 1=D8s. They haveusually failed ecause ehavior L human or machine L is usually imitated y simulation,not y proving astract properties. 'lan Turing himself disproved some of these earlyattempts that were already around in his time. $oger !enrose has given the est attemptto use 5odels theorem in this way that * have ever come across. *t has not convinced me,ut it is long and sutle enough so that * could not reproduce or critiue it without having!enrose ook at hand to go y, which * do not currently have.

%acking away for a moment and ack to the sort of issues that often preoccupy earle itis never clear to me &ust what !enrose means y seeing the truth of 5odels theorem. *fhe means a ehavior such a reading a statement or set of statements and then printing out

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some kind of statement of the result, something that either a human or a machine,conscious or unconscious in the latter case, can do. %ut &ust what would those inputstatements and the output statement look like in detail. * do not know, and if !enrose does* wish he would pulish them as examples in some new ook.

*f !enrose means understand in some su&ective sense L which * think he does not, ut&ust in case L then we are ack to earles argument from his first chapter that nocomputer can ever understand anything.

"ow finally on to the second half of !enrose assertion, that the aility of humans tounderstand 5odels theorem proves that they must e ale to do uantum informationprocessing of some kind. ?uantum information is a very real topic currently eingfrantically researched y the E "ational ecurity 'gency among others. This is ecauseit seems potentially capale of decomposing very large numers into their prime factors,and the inaility to do so in any reasonale amount of time is the key (pun unavoidaleC)to so/called trap/door algorithms. These in turn are the asis of cryptographic schemes

that allow someone to encrypt a message without a clue as to how to decrypt it and viceversa, and such codes are vital today to many oth military and commercial applications,

?uantum information processing is not a candidate to replace your !+ or even mostscientific super/computers. Their physical set/ups look like arrangements for veryexpensive physics experiments and asically are. The ways in which they will e usedwhen practical are likewise much more like physics experiments than like computerprogramming. ' ma&or prolem in making uantum computing practical is entangling(* wont go into that here. #ou should e ale to sort of guess at the meaning * hope, andfor exact definitions there are entire ooks out thereJ) enough atoms to represent enough/its (again, either guess or read) to do reuisite calculations while keeping themseparate from all other atoms for the entire (miniscule) time that the computations aregoing on.

!enrose thinks that water molecules isolated in the cytoskelatical tuules that helpneurons keep their shape could provide suitale environments in which this couldhappen. 0hen * first egan to read an article y him on this * suspected that was where hewas heading and was pleased with myself when proven right. +urrently, many experts aresaying that those microtuules would not e suitale for that purpose. orefundamentally, the uantum laws !enrose wants to depend on are not those currentlyknown ut new ones which he suspects may come to light from attempts to formulateuper 5ravity unified field theories, another topic that * am not going to even try to getinto hereJ

1. 2aniel 2ennett and consciousness re3ected or not (+onsciousness 6xplained et al.)*n this chapter of this ook earle states repeatedly and often condescendingly that2ennett does not elieve in consciousness, that he re&ects the idea of its existencecompletely. 2ennett sees it differently, 7e states that he does elieve in consciousness utthat its not what earle and many others intuitively think that it is. 7e states this not only

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in the ooks of his that earle reviewed ut also in an exchange of letters etween themfollowing earles review which, wonderfully and for a wonder, earle includes hereimmediately after the copy of his original review.

0hat 2ennett elieves and earle disagrees on seems actually to consist of two different

things. -ne is epistemic, i.e. a uestion of what can e known accurately and how.2ennett holds to the ehaviorist/methodology, which as earle takes pains to point outwas also held y 2ennetts philosophical mentor 5ilert $yle, which claims that relialescience can only e ased on things oservale in the third person, preferaly y severalpersons who can then compare their oservations. This puts him very suarely andproudly on the ' or roo/geek team explained in my introduction, the group thatelieves that if rain and ehavior could e completely explained that would also amountto a complete explanation of consciousness.

*n detail and in practice, what this methodological restriction says is that when we studyconsciousness we never actually do so directly. *nstead, it says, we inferthe

consciousness of experimental su&ects from their veral ehavior, rain scans etc. 0eshould always make this clear in research studies wherever there might e any confusion,which in practice seems to happen uite seldom. 0hat this methodological !uritanism,to use a term coined y one of its critics, excludes from good science is any first personreport y the experimenter of anything supposedly learned directly from his or herintrospective experience. To include such experiences scientifically they must ereported and evaluated in exactly the same way that a third person report from any otherexperimental su&ect would e.

ost of the time of course, almost all of us including committed ehavioristsintuitively (as 2ennett would proaly say) use a mixture of approaches. 0e infer thesu&ective states of others y comparing them to real or imagined su&ective states of ourown. Then we assume, unless the evidence forces us to think otherwise, that others havefunctioned internally and su&ectively pretty much as we know that we would have fromour direct and introspective examination of ourselves. $ecent neural research on othhumans and animals has shown that this process appears to occur at a very asic andoften unconscious level in so called mirror neurons that fire as if we were performingan act when we see someone else, even of a different species, doing so.

2ennett does not deny that we use such methods or that they are freuently effective andhave stayed with us through evolution precisely ecause they so often are. 7e simplydenies that they constitute a valid scientific method of drawing scientifically accurateconclusions. earle, in contrast, seems to think that su&ective experience provides themost certain evidence that we have aout consciousness. This is not ecause it alwaysprovides us with an accurate representation of the outside world ut ecause we can notdeny the reality of our own thoughts and sensations as things that we have su&ectivelyexperienced.

This is emphatically not a new issue in the study of consciousness. 2escartes is stillrememered a third of a millennium later for having said, * think therefore * am.

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Enfortunately (and to me frustratingly) this is misrememered as eing the heart of hisphilosophy. *n fact it was simply the start of in example in chapter four of his 2iscourseon ethod of how his method for reaching reliale conclusions (which wasthe heart ofhis philosophy) could e applied to the prolem of metaphysics.

*n discovering this, as something that could not e douted (the first step in his methodhe was specifically contrasting its certainty with all other seemingly true ut potentiallyfallacious eliefs. 'n example was the elief that he had a ody and that there was anoutside world rather than, for instance, eing a spirit, alone in the universe who washaving a dream. (!roving that there did exist in the universe something esides himselfwas the next step in his example.) *n other words, he was concluding only that somethingexisted, not at all the nature of that something. This leads us nicely to the second of thetwo points aout consciousness on which 2ennett and earle disagree so violently.

The first point of their disagreement was3is epistemic, how to gain accurate (e a modernand say scientific) knowledge aout consciousness and how to make sure that it is

accurate. The second point of contention etween them is ontological, i.e. isconsciousness real and if so what does it mean to say that it is real. They do at leastagree that these are the two points in contention and use the same words for themJ

The reality of consciousness and what that means is a slippery issue now &ust as it haseen for centuries for people trying to understand 2escartes. 0hen it comes to 2ennettsviews on the matter *m inclined to say dont trust me too much; go and read his ooks,preferaly several of them. 4ortunately, in this little ook we also have the exchange ofletters etween the two men to go y. These are two men, oth considered to e currentlyeminent philosophers in the area of philosophy of mind, really seem to genuinely despiseeach other, perhaps somewhat ecause they oth are considered so eminent. 4orgettingthe relevance to the topic of consciousness, these letter might e read for fun simply asexamples of how right intellectuals can sometimes go at each other in pulic like smalloys in a schoolyard and apparently oth en&oy it.

0hat earle elieves aout consciousness seems to e easier to understand, he elieves itto e something unary and fundamental, not to e douted y anyone except as anexample of intellectual pathology, which is something he explicitly accuses 2ennett ofat one point in this pulished review. * always get a it edgy when * come across someoneemphatically asserting that something can not possily e douted y any sane person. *lean toward the modern methodological doctrine of falsaility, that something which cannot even potentially e proven to e false can proaly not e shown to e true in theusual sense either ut is perhaps an artifact of our language or some such. * do howeveruite agree with earle that those facts seem intuitively, unuestionaly true. !erhapssurprisingly, 2ennett agrees with that, he simply holds that such intuitions (he uses thatword) however hard to shake are in fact wrong.

0hat does 2ennett elieve then aout consciousnessC 4or one thing he elieves what hecalls his multiple drafts theory aout it. *f * understand this (and * am not at all sure that* do) it takes the known fact of neurologically distriuted consciousness processing in the

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and con&ectures that it applies to su&ective states as well. This is not the sort ofconscious3unconscious distinction of 4reud as * understand it; it seems to have moresimilarity to the known separate minds within split rain patients, the veral on thedominant side and the silent ut visually and manipulatively acute one on the other.2ennett himself descries the separate conscious states he is talking aout as eing like

successive drafts of an article, hence the name. 7ow it is that we have the illusion of asingle stream of consciousness with no perception of these concurrent drafts either asthey are going on or after one is selected and others discarded (if indeed that is what hethinks happens) * do not understand. 7owever, it does seem to rule out their eing likedifferent personalities in a person with multiple personality disorder since in those casessome of the personalities are persistent and very much aware of each other even thoughonly one may e in control at a time.

The final point aout 2ennetts ideas that arouses earles wrath is his re&ection of thepossiility of philosophers


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5iven that earle so dislikes 2aniel 2ennett, a leader of the ' team roo/geeks, onemight expect him to like 2avid +halmers, a leader if the % team ad scientists, ut notso. This chapter on +halmers is, * think, the worst in this entire ook, saved somewhat ythe inclusion of a response y +halmers to the review at its end. 4or an excellent

summary of +halmers views see the transcript of his dialog with usan %lackmore in aook we discussed in this group a few months ago, +onversations on +onsciousness.

*n this chapter earle manages to drastically misstate not only +halmers views ut alsosome rather asic facts aout oth ehaviorism and functionalism as twentieth centuryintellectual movements. pecifically and to start with, * have never come across anythingy or aout any ehaviorist denying the existence of consciousness, though * have comeacross that charge many times. 0hat ehaviorists did consistently deny, rightly orwrongly, was the legitimacy of su&ective experience as suchas valid raw data forscientific investigations, a point &ust elaorated on with regard to 2aniel 2ennett.

4unctionalism, which is still around, astracts analogous properties from differentsituations and tries to explain those similarities as alternate ways of achieving analogousfunctional results. earle mentions electric and mechanical clocks in passing and showinghow similar su/functions in such physically different devices are achieved and why, forexample, explaining why oth need of some actuator with a very steady eat, whether ite a pendulum or an alternating current from a wall socket. 4unctionalism demonstratescorrelations not causation etween examined systems. echanical clocks with theirpendulums did not cause electric clocks that plug into '+ outlets, rather oth neededparts of some kind to accomplish an analogous function.

+halmers is most noted for having coined the phrase the hard prolem to contrast thedifficulty of explaining why we have consciousness at all, rather than eing consciouslessphilosophers


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*n investigating &ust how far down such dualism might e ale to extend, eyond the levelof lower animals +halmers asked whether inanimate o&ects might also have a consciousaspect of some sort. *n the ook reviewed y earle as well as in other places he has triedto imagine &ust what the phenomenological life of a thermostat might e like, very simplehe concluded. peculating still further, he asked whether consciousness might e a

fundamental property of this universe like space and time and coextensive with them.This is where the panpsychism comes inA if everything including empty space might havea conscious aspect of some sort wouldnt that imply a universal consciousness and whywould we not e aware of itC

uch a consciousness for most of the universe would e very uninteresting he felt, utwhen entangled with informationaly complex entities such as ourselves or even loweranimals it might manifest as the sort of consciousness that we would recogni


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2evelopmental studies of infants oth efore and after irth have usually reached similarconclusions, and psycho/linguist 5eorge Makoff has tried in a rather large ook todemonstrate that even seemingly very astract ranches of mathematics rely on, oftenunconscious, ody image metaphors for more than is customarily reali


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the current article each su&ect was shown a pair of photographs and asked which one heor she found more attractive. The photographs were then covered momentarily andswitched y the experimenter, using slight of hand. 6ach su&ect was then asked toexplain why he or she found the person in the selected photograph (really the person inthe photograph notselected) to e more attractive. -nly aout one forth of the su&ects

reali

on_the mystery of consciousness

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