SIEIV: Brains and Zombies: The Location of Consciousness (Or Is It?)

Good morning/afternoon/night...

If you’re wondering, consciousness is still a mystery. No recent nobel prize winners for a solution to it. Let’s talk further about what it is to be a body and mind with consciousness, which at first glance is what we seem to be. 

Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body? -Morrissey, that melancholy and somewhat controversial English singer-songwriter is fond of that question.

To clarify and hopefully address any confusion in the last episode, let’s define as best we can the terms mind, body, and consciousness.

Your mind is the thinking part of your being. It contains your thoughts and beliefs. When you count to ten, you do that with your mind. And you can doubt with your mind, as Descartes did. Descartes managed to doubt the entirety of existence, but when he tried to doubt his own mind, he realized that he was doubting his mind with his mind, therefore his mind had to exist. Descartes believed his mind and body had to be separate things - he was a dualist of mind and body - because he could doubt one and not the other.

And there is something it’s like to have a mind. You are experiencing having a mind at this very moment, in addition to experiencing having a body. That subjective experience is consciousness. I have a tendency to think of the mind and consciousness as one and the same thing, but it may help to separate these words. There are many ways in which the word consciousness is used - it can mean awareness, wakefulness, ability to process information. But those senses of the word do not address the Hard Problem of Consciousness - namely, what is it like to have subjective experience? Following David Chalmers, I want to describe the other senses of the word consciousness as being things that the mind does - the mind is aware, the mind can process information. But consciousness itself - that’s a deeper mystery yet.

For unknown reasons our individual consciousness is attached to these bodies of ours. Maybe the most mysterious question of all is why we’re experiencing the world as the person we are in the first place, and not as someone else experiencing being someone else. What is the reason why I am the person I am?

Others might say that question is meaningless:

“Because if you were someone else, you would be someone else”. I don’t think that question can be written off so easily, but what do I know.

Our mind, our headspace, seems to be the center of the sensations we feel from all parts of our body. The body is physical - we know this because it extends into space and is governed by the laws of cause and effect. We feel a gust of wind - caused by weather patterns dictated by physics. We hear math problems spoken out loud - carried by vibrations in the air to our ears, which are converted into neural signals - and somehow, we then use our minds to solve these problems. But this interaction isn’t just one way - after our minds process the math problem, the mind exerts influence over the body - we use our mouths to produce vibrations in the air carrying the correct (or maybe incorrect) answer back to the questioner.

Whatever the mind turns out to be, a good theory of mind will address the interaction of mind and body.

If you’re in the physicalist camp, you want the mind to be physical. Calling the mind something separate from the body is absurd. The body is the mind. Your brain is the mind. This statement is so obvious to many in the scientific community that even saying it out loud is silly to them. And it’s quite possibly true - if the mind is an information-processing center, perhaps very sophisticated physical reactions could change input to output as we see with language processing. There are literally -literally, what kind of person says literally- literally mountains of experimental data showing that the information-processing mind can be altered with changes to the brain. This is not trivial if you’re a mind-body dualist - there is a proven interaction between mind and body that you need to explain.

Explaining the mind with physics-good, that’s very good. What I take issue with is adding another layer on top of the physical mind-body picture - when it is assumed that consciousness is physical. I want to convince you to think otherwise - that it’s not so obvious after all, and that our experience of ourselves should not simply be assumed to be a process in the brain.

Let’s entertain for the purpose of argument the thought that consciousness is a physical thing.

To start with what we know, our brains are composed of cells, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of protons and neutrons and smaller units than those, apparently. And there’s fields of energy and fundamental forces...it’s complicated, right? Whatever your stance on modern physics is, everything breaks down in some way. Because our experiences are tied to ourselves, and ourselves alone, it seems right to say that physics wants to claim that consciousness is a brain. This would allow for consciousness to be divided down to the level of atoms and beyond, and manipulated using math and stuff, while still maintaining our unique individual perspectives.

“But of course, consciousness is the brain. That’s simply obvious. Empirical data, dot dot dot”. Reeeeaaaally? Then, where, pray tell, in the brain is consciousness?

Let me throw a few ideas out there, all valid:

Theory 1: Consciousness may be a pattern interweaving in some way through the brain. I’m simplifying here, but neurons communicate electrochemically at the junctions between cells. Consciousness could be something like a collection of these communications overlaid on top of the cells. This theory has the advantage of freedom from any particular cells. Cell death isn’t so important for consciousness so long as the pattern continues. It’s an abstraction though - while the pattern may still be able to be manipulated using physics, it’s not so obvious that it would be equatable to a brain.

On the other hand, consciousness may in fact be tied to specific cells in a region or distributed throughout the brain. If this is true, then we are in a way not our bodies. The I that feels would be able to be separated entirely from the rest of the physical form. And a more terrifying thought, sophisticated torture may be able to eliminate consciousness-producing cells one by one, slowly dissolving your sense of self until nothing is left. Just something to think about.

Another theory: consciousness may be a collection of feelings and sensations throughout your entire body. This view is called embodied cognition, and I’m fairly new to the concept so bear with me.

It takes the question: where do we draw the line between ourselves and not ourselves? And flips it on its head. When you get a papercut, it’s not just your brain involved in that feeling. Even your red blood cells play a part in the causal chain of neural responses. Consciousness could be embodied in your entire body. I like this theory particularly because it can equate the loss of sensory apparatus with the loss of subjective experience. When you lose your hearing, that loss is itself a loss of consciousness because your hearing was your consciousness. It has perhaps less desirable implications with regard to size. It would seem to be the case that the larger something is, the more consciousness it would have. Andre the Giant was then one of the most subjectively rich human beings to ever experience the world. Peter Dinklage, on the other hand, would have markedly less consciousness. Not a perfect theory, but it’s something to work with.

And then there’s the meta-problem: even if we can isolate a specific area of the body, and say “That’s it! That’s where consciousness is!”...how could we know for sure? But more on that later.

Perhaps it takes the sum total of our brain, nothing more or less, to create consciousness. But then people who have lobotomies wouldn’t be conscious, and that’s a problem of course. Ethically, morally, consciousness is one of those things that seems to determine how we determine right and wrong. The answer we choose to accept to this problem may be the most impactful choice, out of any choice, on our world view. So it’s important. Remember that.

Even with all the problems I’ve outlined, consciousness being physical isn’t ruled out. We can imagine at least hypothetically that science with its many tools may one day find the answer. But let’s assume that consciousness is nothing more than atoms or physical particles in our brain, and we’ve discovered through rigorous neurological study that some particular thing in our body is what produces subjective experience. If that consciousness thing is physical, then it must at least hypothetically be reproducible. So what happens if we reproduce it in a lab? What if we imbue an artificial intelligence with the consciousness thing? What if we put it in a computer? In a toaster? Would we know definitively that a toaster could and would have subjective experience? Would there be something it’s like to be a toaster? I think the answer is that, we still wouldn’t know. Even if we give a toaster in addition to the consciousness thing the ability to communicate and tell us that it’s conscious, it runs into another David Chalmers problem - the idea of a philosophical zombie.

Dan Dennett who I briefly touched on last episode despises the idea of a philosophical zombie. What is a p-zombie?

A p-zombie is not your typical brain-hungry undead. In fact, a p-zombie has a brain just like yours, a body just like yours, living in a world just like the one you’re living in. But, philosophical zombies do not have subjective experience. It’s a very strange thing to think about. If you can imagine, there is a hypothetical parallel zombie universe in which consciousness doesn’t exist. There is a copy of me, physically identical in every way, except I do not have experience. There is nothing it’s like to be me in the zombie universe.

Dennett for his part doesn’t want to play along with any game in which consciousness is some mysterious force. Some suppose that the very idea of a zombie universe is incoherent - that if an exact physical copy of you were to exist, then that copy would have conscious experience by definition. Lacking subjectivity would mean it’s not actually a perfect copy of you, because something is left out.

David Chalmers on the other hand thinks that the idea of a physical universe copied from our own but lacking subjective experience is logically consistent. Chalmers vs. Dennett is actually a very entertaining current debate. Dennett plays the part of the disgruntled old pragmatic man, whereas Chalmers is a younger upstart asking too many questions without answers. My sympathy lies with Chalmers, but it’s really up to you to make your own choices.

So, the conscious toaster. When it communicates with the world and expresses its feelings, and tells us that it can feel joy and pain, could we know that for sure? We’ve taken for granted that the thing in the toaster is the same thing in ourselves that grants us conscious experience.

You might be thinking, “Ah ha! But what if the consciousness thingy only works in specific environments like the human brain? Toasters don’t have hearts and lungs, etcetera…” True, but they are made of atoms. And consciousness, if it’s physical, will also be made of atoms. Or some other physics quackery. If we find the necessary and sufficient conditions for producing consciousness, and we put that in a toaster, then the toaster will be conscious. It’s absurd, I know. But the larger point is that we can’t know for certain that it is conscious. Which is also absurd, considering what I just argued for.

Think about Thomas NAgel and what it’s like to be a bat. We can’t actually imagine what it’s like to be a bat as a bat, much less what it’s like for a toaster to be a toaster. This is the subjective-objective divide.

Knowing that some certain mechanism produces consciousness is not the same as knowing that that thing has subjective experience. If you reproduce molecule by molecule the consciousness-producing substance, you still don’t know that it experiences anything. Namely, because you aren’t that thing. If you were that thing, then you wouldn’t be yourself, and the same problem arises vice-versa.

Now in the context of the philosophical zombie, if we can’t get inside the consciousness of the toaster, then we’ll have to trust its word that it’s conscious. But how can we do that, when an exact physical copy of the conscious toaster could exist, except completely lacking conscious experience? The zombie toaster would still say that it can feel pain, but it wouldn’t be. It would behave identically to its conscious counterpart. How could we ever know for certain that our creation is not a zombie?

The implications of the arguments here are impossible to overstate. Think of artificial intelligence in the context of our theory of consciousness. I know we haven’t really talked about or defined artificial intelligence, but for now think of it as complex information processing. If consciousness is like our first theory, a pattern of information processing in the brain, then it’s very likely that we will be able to create patterns mimicking the ones that produce our own consciousness, but in an artificial environment. Or if consciousness is tied to specific cells, then would transplanting those cells into an artificial body create a new you? Would it still be murder to dispose of your old body?

And also consider that we may never truly know whether artificial intelligence has subjective experience, for the same reason we can’t know if an imbued toaster would be conscious. Is it better to act as if they are conscious, and give them the rights of personhood regardless? As always, I don’t have the answers to these questions. And now that we’re talking about ethics and morality, it’s completely up to you what to decide and what to think is right and wrong. I hope that your choices are guided by wisdom, as I suspect these questions are not going away.

I’m Tony Remis. This has been Tony Talks Back.