Consciousness Unexplained

I sat through some videos on You-Tube yesterday of interviews with E.O.Wilson, Daniel Dennet, Richard Dawkins etc. The hard line materialists. They are tedious though so have not watched them all. Its not that they are exactly wrong, and the interviewer was the more tedious, but it is just naive and childish.

I consider myself in a position to comment on materialist belief because at 36 the larger part of my life so far has been caught up in this same desire to explain the exciting and mysterious phenomena of the world in rational terms... especially consciousness. A few years of thinking and you will probably have been through most of the loops and issues of this subject and realise how enormous it is. I will tackle "consciousness explained" by Daniel Dennett (typically only having read half) to explain the naivity of materialists. I'll use some Buddhism to show how un-naive that is.

Let us begin with what Daniel Dennett believes (and that is his root weakness: he believes something!).

Firstly consciousness is the awareness of things existing which we realise we didn't have when we awake from a dreamless sleep. The "being there" right now of the world around us as Heideggar would put it.

His big advance is the rejection of the "Cartesian Theatre". This is the thinking persons belief that within each one of us is a unique subjective view of the world. We can retreat into this inside world and dream, or look at the things outside and think silently to ourselves and no-one can ever find us in there. The obvious problem here is "who" or "what" is doing the "looking"? All we have done is take the issue of consciousness and pulled it inside without actually tackling it at all.

You may not understand this stage. Another belief is that what we see is what is really there. However a moments thought shows that what I think is the "real world" is more accurately my "experience" of the real world. If I put tinted sun-glasses on the whole world changes colour. I know that the world hasn't really changed colour its just my experience has changed colour - but where has the untinted "real" world gone? Its not there anymore. All I can see is the tinted world. The real world has become just a belief or idea that were I too take the glasses off then the tinting would go. So we understand that what I am actually conscious of is my "experience" and the "real world" is some idea I have of something else "objective" beyond my consciousness. This is the beginning of the retreat into the Cartesian Theatre where at rock bottom we are like a pilot of a submarine with only TV screens of data input of the "outside" world. Of course you see that this does not explain consciousness at all because the pilot must be conscious to look at all this data coming in.

A lot of ideas about mind are like this. It is the idea that the world that we see is actually a model made up by our brain about the outside world. A brain is seen as a very powerful simulator processing incoming data and quickly modelling all that data to get a "representation" of the outside world so that it can make predictions about the future and respond to "reality". Two enormous problems. Dennett askes what "use" would conscious be to such a brain? The second problem he hasn't fully articulated. He does question the meaning of "outside" and "inside" in his book but this goes much further. A model is "of" something. Thus the computer scientist has the data of the phenomenon and then instructs a computer to replicate that data. However the scientist himself only has his brain so he only knows the "model". What is the "real world" then that he is supposed to be modelling and how would he know whether it model well or not? We saw above that when we put on shades we don't get 2 worlds (one unshaded and one shaded) we get only 1 shaded world and an "idea" of the unshaded real world. Likewise how can you have a "real world" and a "model" as two things when everything you know is just a model? Isn't the so called "real world" just a model of a model! and so even less real than the model! Its a loop and self defeating and pointless and trap into which everyone falls when they start to think about the process of thinking and being itself. There is sadly no end to this mirroring and dog-chasing-its-tail behaviour. The issue of understanding ourselves oneself is doomed to obvious failure because whatever we decide is the foundation of ourself depends upon ourself already.

You simply cannot build the foundations to a house that already exists. If you are interesting in building foundations but find yourself in a house, you missed the job already. I can say categorically here that conscious humans have missed the building of the house because how are they going to understand consciousness when they already are conscious?

The dream of building someone elses foundations is not a problem. Mothers do it every day and we can replicate that process. But just because you can make a conscious being is insufficient to explain it because unlike other things consciousness is characterised by the existential Being of the consciousness. Its the non-theoretical actuality of being consciousness that by definition must be unthinkable and unmodellable by scientific modelling devices. Celluloid heros never die and neither do ideas, but real people do and that is why they can never be ideas. Dennett and his cohorts like us all are most likely running from death into safe and secure mental worlds and models where they have the illusion of immortality an unreality.

Returning to the issue of explaining conscious. This endless realm of thinking traps I will call the "mirror model of consciousness".

Consciousness has this alluring property to it that we seem to know that we are consciousness. Its single most defining quality is not that people are aware of things and can answer questions about the world, but that they are aware of themselves as conscious. Just processing data doesn't make us conscious - computers can do that - its that we know that we are processing data: we know that we know things. This has captivated me for a long time. It seems the key to consciousness is the process of knowing applied to itself. If we can process the information in our eye to see a bird to find out that it is a bird, and then process the fact that we are doing this then we would appear to be conscious. "What is that?", we are asked. "A bird", we answer. "What are you doing?", we are asked. "I am seeing a bird", we answer. This really sounds like consciousness in action. It leads (and I stopped reading when Dennett started to suggest it) to the idea that consciousness is a looping process in the brain.

Everything Dennett has absorbed from neuroscience, physiology and psychology is good science and fascinating reading. His arguments are sound to a point. However the suggestion that looping processes in the brain give consciousness is wild speculation. He even knows its a blind stab in the dark, the same one a million people thinking on this subject are bound to make. It's also junk, but it takes a long time to see this - it really is a hall of mirrors.

Consider two mirrors facing one another. The first mirror is reflected in the second mirror. The second mirror and the image of the first mirror are reflected in the first mirror and so it goes on ad infinitum. How many mirrors are there? Its still 2. You look into the mirror and its fascinating for your brain looking at all the reflections and images. You simply can't work out what is happening and which is the image of what or even how many there are. Its beautiful and spelling binding but don't let the fireworks change the fact its just two mirror.

Unfortunately I see Dennett doing the same thing. By having processing building up upon itself into ever higher orders of self-referentiality he's hoping to find some system which is strange enough to correspond with consciousness. If we take our head out of the mirrors for a second lets look at what we have got.

We know that consciousness is not at the simple material level else everything would be it. And we know that consciousness only corresponds to the tip of the iceberg of brain activity so its not the same as simple processing. This leaves the materialists only one place to look which is in higher processing. Even if they find a tight correlation why should that level of processing be consciousness and all the others be unconsciousness? Its not an explanation only a correlation. Opening the box at the end of this search for consciousness leaves not gold but just a picture of consciousness. A big disappointment. Below is less disappointing!

Q& A with Dennett.
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If we ask Dennett "where is consciousness?" he might have a revealing time answering it. He says "the brain". We ask him "where is thinking?". I think we will say the brain also. We ask him "where is seeing?". I think he will answer "the brain" also. Eventually we ask him "Where is the brain?". He should answer "the brain" too!! If he answers "inside the skull" then we ask him the previous questions again. Is consciousness really inside the skull? If it is then why are we conscious of things outside our skull!!! while unaware of what is inside the skull? (This identical line of questioning is reported in the Surangama Sutra to have been had by Buddha with Ananda 2600 years ago ... well worth the read)

Readers of Gilbert Ryle will notice a "category mistake" here. Dennett is using "brain" in two senses. Firstly it is the sense of physical organ and secondly our "experience". Actually they are different words.

The problem and the requirement for identity to say they are the same lies in Dennett's basic belief in "things". He belives the world is made of things. So he has a thing called consciousness and a thing called brain and he wants to know if they are the same or different.

Actually the world aint like that.

We know from the above discussion the dangers of making the "outside" and the "inside" different. The idea that consciousness is "inside" anything be it skull, brain, Cartesian Theatre is all blatant rubbish. Consciousness as Sartre writes about is obviously out there "in the world" mixing with the very things of which we are conscious... even the precious brains that Dennett talks about.

Its like a necker cube. Look one way and we're particular subjects looking upon a world from a unqiue perspective, and in the same frame we see a shift and see the world as a single objective place where many people live. The only difference is perspective or our Mind as Buddhism puts it.

Liberation must be this gradual dawning realisation that the mind preceeds all. It is totally untained by the events and expetiences, or thoughts or beliefs. Without mind what are all these anyway!

So for Mr Dennett and his cohorts (esp. Richard Dawkins) I imagine (but am interested to be mistaken) the future is not spectacular until the break through where Mind is put before the intriguing ideas about matter and things and the correct order reintroduced. Afterall some day Dennett will have to apply his ideas to himself and wonder how all that brain activity created itself ;-)