Solving the Problem of Consciousness?

The progress of science in the last 400 years is mind blowing.

Who would have thought we’d be able to trace the history of our universe to its origins 14 billion years ago? Science has increased the length and the quality of our lives, and the technology that is commonplace in the modern world would have seemed like magic to our ancestors.

For all of these reasons and more, science is rightly celebrated and revered. However, a healthy pro-science attitude is not the same thing as “scientism,” which is the view that the scientific method is the only way to establish truth. As the problem of consciousness is revealing, there may be a limit to what we can learn through science alone.

Perhaps the most worked out form of scientism was the early 20th-century movement known as logical positivism. The logical positivists signed up to the “verification principle,” according to which a sentence whose truth can’t be tested through observation and experiments was either logically trivial or meaningless gibberish. With this weapon, they hoped to dismiss all metaphysical questions as not merely false but nonsense.

These days, logical positivism is almost universally rejected by philosophers. For one thing, logical positivism is self-defeating, as the verification principle itself cannot be scientifically tested, and so can be true only if it’s meaningless. Indeed, something like this problem haunts all unqualified forms of scientism. There is no scientific experiment we could do to prove that scientism is true; and hence if scientism is true, then its truth cannot be established.

In spite of all of these deep problems, much of society assumes scientism to be true. Most people in the UK are totally unaware that “metaphysics” goes on in almost every philosophy department in the country. By metaphysics, philosophers don’t mean anything spooky or supernatural; this is just the technical term for philosophical, as opposed to scientific, inquiry into the nature of reality.

Truth without science

How is it possible to find out about reality without doing science? The distinguishing feature of philosophical theories is that they are “empirically equivalent,” which means you can’t decide between them with an experiment.

Take the example of my area of research: the philosophy of consciousness. Some philosophers think that consciousness emerges from physical processes in the brain—this is the “physicalist” position. Others think it’s the other way around: consciousness is primary, and the physical world emerges from consciousness.

A version of this is the “panpsychist“ view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality, with the word deriving from the two Greek words pan (all) and psyche (soul or mind).

Still others think that both consciousness and the physical world are fundamental but radically different—this is the view of the “dualist.” Crucially, you can’t distinguish between these views with an experiment, because, for any scientific data, each of the views will interpret that data in their own terms.

For example, suppose we discover scientifically that a certain form of brain activity is correlated with the conscious experience of an organism.

The physicalist will interpret this as the form of organization which turns non-conscious physical processes—such as electrical signals between brain cells—into conscious experience, whereas the panpsychist will interpret it as the form of organization which unifies individual conscious particles into one larger conscious system. Thus we find two very different philosophical interpretations of the same scientific data.

If we can’t work out which view is right with an experiment, how can we choose between them? In fact, the selection process is not so dissimilar from what we find in science. As well as appealing to experimental data, scientists also appeal to the theoretical virtues of a theory, for example how simple, elegant and unified it is.

Philosophers too can appeal to theoretical virtues in justifying their favored position. For example, considerations of simplicity seems to count against the dualist theory of consciousness, which is less simple than its rivals in so far as it posits two kinds of fundamental stuff—physical stuff and consciousness—whereas physicalism and panpsychism are equally simple in positing just one kind of fundamental stuff (either physical stuff or consciousness).

It could also be that some theories are incoherent, but in subtle ways that require careful analysis to uncover. For example, I have argued that physicalist views of consciousness are incoherent (although—like much in philosophy—this is controversial).

There is no guarantee that these methods will yield a clear winner. It could be that on certain philosophical issues, there are multiple, coherent, and equally simple rival theories, in which case we should be agnostic about which is correct. This would in itself be a significant philosophical finding concerning the limits of human knowledge.

Philosophy can be frustrating because there is so much disagreement. However, this is also true in many areas of science, such as history or economics. And there are some questions on which there is a modest consensus, for example, on the topic of free will.

A tendency to mix up philosophy with a growing anti-science movement undermines the united front against the real and harmful opposition to science we find in climate change denial and anti-vax conspiracies.

Like it or not, we can’t avoid philosophy.

When we try to do so, all that happens is we end up with bad philosophy. The first line of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s book “The Grand Design” boldly declared: “Philosophy is dead.” The book then went on to indulge in some incredibly crude philosophical discussions of free will and objectivity.

If I wrote a book making controversial pronouncements on particle physics, it’d be rightly ridiculed, as I haven’t been trained in the relevant skills, haven’t read the literature, and haven’t had my views in this area subject to peer scrutiny. And yet there are many examples of scientists lacking any philosophical training publishing very poor books on philosophical topics without it impacting their credibility.

This might sound bitter. But I genuinely believe society would be deeply enriched by becoming more informed about philosophy. I have hope that we will one day move on from this “scientistic” period of history, and understand the crucial role both science and philosophy have to play in the noble project of finding out what reality is like.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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How Close Is Science to Solving the Problem of Consciousness?

© Provided by Discover Magazine

One of the most difficult problems in neuroscience and philosophy is the study of consciousness. How does consciousness arise from physical matter?

In a 1995 paper, philosopher David Chalmers dubbed this question “the hard problem.” The “easy” problem, he said, is figuring out how the brain does things like see, learn, think and make decisions.

While not exactly easy, at least these questions can be approached scientifically and, given the right techniques and technology, might eventually be solved. The “hard” problem, according to Chalmers, is figuring out why and how, when we see, learn, think and so on, we have a subjective experience.

Some experts think we’re getting close to solving that problem. Others think it might never be solved.

Competing Theories of Consciousness

Kristina Krasich speaks on ‘solving the problem of consciousness’ with Discover Magazine | Today at Elon | Elon University

Katrina Krasich is a neuroscientist at Elon University and a two-time winner of the Neurophilosophy of Free Will World Wide Competition. Krasich says there has been considerable progress in recent years on the “easy” problem.

“We’ve been at least able to assess what I will call enabling conditions,” she says, “what allows consciousness to emerge, or at the very least, what conditions prevent consciousness from occurring.” Much of this progress, Krasich says, is due to better technologies for studying the brain in action.

That still doesn’t tell us how we get from meat to mind, but many people in many different fields of study — neuroscience, philosophy, information science, mathematics, linguistics, psychology, physics and more — are working on it.

Integrated Information Theory

One of the most promising current theories of consciousness is integrated information theory (IIT), developed by Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. Consciousness, according to IIT, requires the integration of a huge amount of information.

Consciousness emerges in a system — in any system — when that information is sufficiently integrated. It’s not enough for a system to possess loads of information (as does your phone); it has to connect all that information meaningfully. And the more that information is integrated, the more conscious the being that integrates it.

IIT has received a lot of criticism because it allows for the possibility of consciousness, or at least a very rudimentary form of consciousness, in places we normally wouldn’t expect to find it — in a proton, for example. It’s somewhat like a neuroscientific version of panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is inherent in all matter.

Global Workspace Theory

A competing theory is known as Global Workspace Theory (GWT), first developed in the 1980s by Bernard Baars. GWT holds that consciousness is formed in an internal “workspace” as the brain processes information. According to GWT, consciousness is a byproduct of the information processing that underlies behavior.

Others are studying the workings of the brain using modern technologies, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and transcranial magnetic stimulation, in attempts to unravel the conundrum of consciousness. Some, including Chalmers, now co-director of NYU’s Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness, are even probing the connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics.

So, where do we stand?

The Quest for Neural Correlates of Consciousness

Much of today’s study of consciousness is focused on finding the neural correlates of consciousness — neural patterns in the brain associated with specific conscious experiences or states. – Search Videos (bing.com)

While attending the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in Bremen, Germany, in 1998, Chalmers and Christof Koch, a neuroscientist and champion of IIT, went out for drinks one evening and got to talking about the future of consciousness science.

Koch bet his friend a case of wine that within 25 years, science would have found clear (note the word ‘clear’) neural correlates of consciousness. Koch now insists he was genuinely convinced that science would meet that deadline, even if some of that conviction was due to youthful exuberance.

This June, at the 2023 conference of the ASSC — 25 years after the wager — the bet was settled. Experiments using fMRI and implanted brain electrodes looked at the brain patterns of human patients, and compared those to the conscious experience the patients reported when looking at pictures of faces and other objects. The results — presented at the conference — seemed to support some of the predictions of both GWT and IIT. However, the results were anything but clear.

Koch admitted that these results showed that no clear neural correlates had been found.

He graciously presented his friend with six bottles of 1978 Madeira. (Chalmers says he was delighted — he’d expected a 1998 vintage.) Koch also asked for a rematch, double or nothing. Within another 25 years, Koch wagered, clear evidence would be found. Chalmers didn’t hesitate to take the bet but says he’ll be happy if he loses this time and thinks that the chances he will lose are better now, owing to improved technologies for observing the brain.

However, neither of the wagers requires solving the hard problem. Nailing down the neural correlates of consciousness, even if it can be done, won’t necessarily show how consciousness emerges from matter. That question has philosophical implications that may or may not be amenable to science.

A New Generation of Consciousness

In 25 years, Chalmers will be 82 and Koch 92. Krasich, who is far younger than both men, is part of a new generation of scientists working on this problem. She describes herself as having a “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed approach,” perhaps not confident that the problem will be solved but hopeful. She expects that continued development of technology and more scientific discovery will lead to progress. “But,” she adds, “it’s really unclear if we’ll be able to answer with certainty how consciousness emerges.”

She is confident of one thing, though. Any progress will be the result of an interdisciplinary approach. “I don’t think that my field of study will have the answer. I don’t think that computer science will have the answer. I think that it will be an interdisciplinary answer.” There may well be more wagers to come as teams of scholars continue to tackle the perplexing problems of consciousness, both “hard” and “easy.”

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