SIEIII: The Very Basics of Consciousness: What is a Mind?

Question: What is a mind?

Answer: I am? You are? Or am I a body? Are you an embodied mind or a body with a mind?

What in the name of God is going on here? What is all this nonsense of existence?

That was seven questions in a row. This is going to be a fun episode, dear listener.

If you’ll remember from the last show, we briefly touched on Descartes and his formulation “Cogito ergo sum”, or “I think, therefore I am”.
I am. This is the one thing out of anything that we can know to be true. Even if everything that we see and touch is a deception, our being something is real. We are a thinking thing, at bare minimum.

An immediate question that comes from this realization is: what, then, am I really? I have a body, which seems to behave largely in the way that I direct it to. And I have sensations that come from this body and influence my thoughts. What’s going on there? Do we live where “soul meets body”, as Death Cab for Cutie so eloquently put it? The intuition that we have a soul at all traces back to ancient times. Plato and Aristotle, the two granddaddys of Western philosophy, disputed and debated every topic they could seem to find. But neither was willing to deny the existence of our soul.

If you’re not a religious or spiritual type of person, talk of souls may disinterest you. But think of it like this: you are something inside your head right now. You can count numbers with your thoughts that don’t actually exist anywhere in reality. Whatever that head space is where you’re doing the counting, that’s what is meant by your soul. It can be called the mind, or consciousness. And it’s a little unnerving to start to pay attention to your mind. We’re going to go deeper into the nature of your mind, and why your body seems to be along for the ride. Though, please note, everything said here is up for debate.

Descartes thought, you, are two. The argument goes, if we can doubt the existence of the physical world, but not the fact of our mental being, then the two must be fundamentally different things. Whatever the mental is, it’s not physical, and it’s not physical because it does not behave in the way physical things behave. We can divide the physical, like a wood beam, with a saw. It would seem we cannot divide our mind with a saw. And don’t picture a brain being sawed in half, that’s gross. Your thoughts themselves do not extend into space, at least not in the same way a wooden board does. So, because the two are wholly distinct, they must be governed by separate laws and should be evaluated as such. The dual approach to mind and body as separate entities to be studied is called dualism.

Quick note on descriptions like dualism: Philosophers have a tendency to create confusing labels for concepts to condense arguments, and over time academic philosophy becomes increasingly jargony. I don’t want this show to be jargony. One, because I am only an apprentice in the field, and two, because it’s not helpful for people who can’t follow along. I’m going to do my best to avoid jargon.

So, dualism of mind and body is an attractive idea in the same way our dualism in modern physics is attractive. There are two basic theories in physics covering much of what we know: the theory of general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics. ( *throat clear* Disclaimer: I am in no way qualified to teach anyone about anything related to physics). Alright, so: general relativity comes from Einstein and explains things at the largest scales of the universe. Think stars and starstuff and gravity. Quantum mechanics on the other hand explains the behavior of the smallest of particles using funky concepts I really don’t understand. Both theories work in their respective environments at making predictions and doing sciency stuff. Similarly, mind-body dualists believe the mind and body are governed by different laws of nature. Naturally, the body is governed by the laws of physics, while the mind is in some way outside those laws, governed by God or the eternal, or maybe Santa Claus. The problem though that dualists run into is getting those two different areas of existence to intersect. Same goes for physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics still have not been reconciled. The so-called “theory of everything” is like the Holy Grail for physicists. Good luck, Indy.

Descartes is rather infamous for asserting that the hormone secreting pineal gland in the brain, is the point at which the mind and body intersect. Ever see an “incense” shop with a decorative painting dedicated to the pineal gland? Yeah, thanks for that Descartes. It was actually Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia who called Descartes out on his pineal gland handwaving. Princess E as far as I know never published works of her own, so all we really know of her views is from her letters and correspondences. It’s too bad. She demonstrated a strong philosophical mindset.

Descartes and Elisabeth wrote letters back and forth, in which Elisabeth systematically dismantled Descartes’ argument in the most excruciatingly polite way possible. Elisabeth pointed out that showing the mechanics of the intersection of mind and body does not explain how they intersect in the first place.

Descartes missed the point entirely, only writing in ever-finer detail about the flow of spirit particles in the brain and whatever. But the mind-body problem is this: how can the physical and the nonphysical possibly interact when they occupy two entirely separate areas of existence? And, so far, I haven’t found a satisfactory answer to that problem. Maybe one doesn’t exist.

So what do we do with dualism and the mind-body problem? Well, the rise of materialist objective science quickly overtook the world in the past centuries with its emphasis on the material as opposed to the spooky spiritual, supernatural soul stuff. 

Materialism in this sense is a bit different from the kind emphasized in Madonna’s hit single, though Madonna was actually putting forward a very bold philosophical hypothesis: “We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl”. Are you really though, Madonna? 

See, materialism goes hand in hand with physicalism: the idea that everything is physical in nature and can be described by the laws of physics. The mind itself, and consciousness, must be explainable in terms of physics and material substance if physicalism is to be true. Cognitive science operates with an implicit bias toward this picture. And we can demonstrate that changes in the physical world change conscious experience. 

Probing someone’s brain with an electrode can make someone experience altered states of being, which is enough for most scientists to operate with the assumption that consciousness is a physical part of the brain. But I at least have a strong intuition that consciousness is not physical in the same way that a brain is physical. And I have that thought because my experience of, say, a rose, is not the same thing as a physical rose. If you probe my brain with electrodes so as to produce in my conscious experience a rose in my hand, nowhere in reality does a rose actually exist in my hand except in my consciousness. The rose in my consciousness cannot be divided in two by a saw. If I tried to take a saw to the mental rose, I may just end up cutting my hand off. What physicalists need to do is create a theory of consciousness that can be brought down to the level of physical interactions, but maintains the properties of consciousness that we all intimately understand to be true.

An additional challenge is that the mind is subjective where the body is objective. The physical world is objective, so explanations of the physical world should be objective as well. Measurements in a beaker are the same for all observers. But, close your eyes, and you still have subjective experience. There’s something it’s like to be you with your thoughts without eyesight. In fact, in an isolation chamber all senses of the outside world are dulled as much as possible. Sight, sound, touch are eliminated as you float in a black, silent tank. What do you have left in such a place except for your mind? It’s the one thing that cannot be eliminated, so long as you are alive. That experience of yourself as yourself may be impossible to explain objectively.

The reason why comes from Thomas Nagel, a modern philosopher, who wrote the paper What is it like to be a bat? It’s a relatively short paper, but revolutionary. He asks, as you might guess, what is it like to be a bat? Can we imagine it, having the conscious experience of being a bat? Well, sort of. We can understand basic feelings like hunger and pain, but one thing completely unfamiliar to our species is echolocation. We have no idea what that’s like for a bat to experience echolocation. So, in order to know what it’s like to be a bat, we need to know what it’s like to be a bat as a bat. Not as a human coming from our big brain thought experiments, but as an actual bat. And if we are a bat, then we are obviously not human and don’t care in the least about the petty experiments humans are trying to run to gain objective truth. There are bugs to eat.

It doesn’t seem to work either if you somehow turn someone into a bat, and then turn them back into a human. They would still be trying to explain what it’s like to be a bat, as a bat, as a human.

Crossing the threshold from subjective to objective is a big hurdle. Some have said too big. Between the two positions of dualism and physicalism, there are many, many varieties and counter-positions. For example, Dan Dennett, a contemporary philosopher, explains in papers and Ted talks that the mystery of consciousness is actually just an illusion. Your idea of subjective experience that you have right now of being yourself is nothing more than a linguistic confusion. Your experience is actually perfectly explainable, we just don’t have the right words for it. The entire concept of subjective experience is essentially meaningless in Dennett’s picture, as the world of objective facts is all that we actually know. Dennett’s argument is much more complex than that, but the point is:

Most people reject Dennett’s idea because consciousness and subjective experience is so obvious that any argument against it is simply impossible. But these views exist, primarily because no one knows what consciousness is, and so no one knows exactly what consciousness isn’t.

What I find most interesting in the entire philosophy of mind is that no position is absolutely compelling, even though we all know what it is to have subjective experience. Whatever you’re doing right now, besides listening to my voice, you know what you’re doing, and you’re going through the experience of it. Such a mystery, it really blows my mind sometimes.

To close out this episode, I’ll leave you with my personal favorite philosopher of mind: David Chalmers from the land down under.

Chalmers was influenced by Thomas Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat” argument. The problem of conscious experience, when viewed objectively by physics, cannot actually be solved objectively. Cognitive neuroscience can likely explain so many things about our mind, including behavior, attention, reaction to stimuli, the list goes on. However, what it cannot explain is the hard problem of consciousness: why do we experience things as ourselves?

Chalmers takes these concerns into consideration, and suggests we consider a dualistic theory of mind and body. Yes, Chalmers is a modern-day dualist of mind and body, though not entirely the same as Descartes. Chalmers would rather have us take consciousness to be one of the fundamental forces of the universe. We already have four such forces in standard physics: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. If we cannot fit consciousness into one of these categories, then we should make it its own category and continue study from there. The mind and body would then be separate, but hopefully unified under a new science. Whether that picture of science is satisfying, I haven’t myself decided. If the content of his argument interests you at all, I highly recommend his paper Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness.

But, as there’s always a but, if we can’t in fact explain consciousness with physics as they are now, then our understanding of the world is essentially nothing. We would need to overturn much of our current worldview paradigm for a radical shift in all of science if consciousness turns out to be unexplainable in its current state. Some may think that would be great. I assure you it would be chaotic, and perhaps necessary. Perhaps not. So to keep our heads relatively stable, physicalism is yet attractive. If you found any of the arguments laid out here interesting or revolutionary, I highly encourage you to look into them more. No one has any idea what they’re doing here. The next Einstein may in fact be the person that solves consciousness.

This all goes to show that, whatever you are, you are more mysterious and incomprehensible than anything you’ve ever known.

This has been Tony Talks Back. Thanks for listening.