Note for web:
This was written for my PHI 108 class. It's all bullshit, but got an A+. If you're gonna steal it for class, ask me first. I won't tell on you, I just like to know these things. Don't steal it for anything else.
On the Subject of Human Consciousness
Scott
SMR6@buffalo.edu
Human have long embellished the importance of their own consciousness. Consciousness, which we can only see from a human perspective, is touted as being above and beyond both our physical body and our ready understanding. We assume that because we possess this self-awareness and inherent ‘feeling’ of our person we should be able to quantify it right away, or at least qualify it effectively. Since this has eluded us, we are forced to view consciousness as something separate, mysterious, and revered. We separate the body and mind in an act of arrogance, a defiant act, where we say that mere tissues, molecules, and atoms could not compose such noble creatures as ourselves. There must be something more.
I argue that this confluence of arrogance and self-aware ‘feeling’ tricks us into believing there is a consciousness distinct and disparate from our own body, and our own curiosity compels us to investigate it. The trick in this case is by no means intentional, but merely a side effect of our composition and a necessary part of being human.
Since their inception computers have been given the ideal of one day being able to at least approach human intelligence and perform mundane human tasks. Computer scientists still dogmatically pursue this goal, and have pursued it for over fifty years. In fifty years computer science has come far enough to reproduce neural networks to simulate the rudimentary behavior of insects, and they are able to learn and perform simple judgement-tasks. Fifty years is not a very long time. Another way of looking at it is that after a mere fifty years computers can already simulate the rudiments of biological behavior – something nature did in aeons.
The human brain, containing billions of neurons interacting at microsecond speeds, is currently too complex to be reproduced within even the most advanced supercomputers.1 Furthermore, no person’s brain (granting that all brains are different) has been completely mapped out to the point where it could be reproduced in a computer. To assume that this goal could never be accomplished, however, is short sighted in the utmost.
It is my contention that within perhaps the next fifty years technology will allow a computer simulation of the body to the point where it will respond in a ‘human’ way to all stimuli.
Assume we currently have a robot with the full appearance of a human. His computing powers are such that he can fully simulate a human brain, and that his virtual neurology was developed over time – he was raised from conception as any human would be. (Evolving neural nets are not only theoretically feasible, but have been implemeted.2) He has a job and human friends, and no one has ever suspected him to be anything but human. Is he conscious, self-aware, and does he share with humans a certain ‘feel’ of himself?
Yes. We know this because he has described all these things too us in full. This conclusion is dubious, because he may merely be giving the most human answer. The problem is that he was raised and not simply programmed. At no point has he been given the directive to ‘give the most human answer’. He has realized his own existence over time, and therefore knows what it is like to exist.
Our physiology is replete with feedback loops of every sort. Your brain activates motor neurons to move your arm, and in turn tactile neurons in your arm respond with the position. This is simply proprioception. You know where you are in space when you move even without looking. Feedback may also come in the form of a stress reaction when thinking about flying if you loathe to fly. The body may experience changes because of changes in the brain. Additionally, thought of flying may trigger thoughts of peanuts or life-jackets. In this case, your brain is feeding back on itself and causing new reactions. This feedback; proprioception of the brain (knowing what you are thinking about at any given time) seems like a separate ‘mind’ at work because the feedback has an indescribable nature to it. You can say that you certainly have proprioception of the body – your external actions cause reactions from the environment and from the brain. On the same note, your internal actions (thoughts, things of the ‘mind’) cause reactions in the brain (triggering other thoughts) and also external reactions of the body (shuddering when recalling having your last root canal). The word ‘mind’ describes one’s internal environment, but is not separate from the brain and therefore the body. Any distinction above between the body and the brain has been given only to illustrate the difference between external and internal actions; A stomach ache may be considered an aspect of the brain.
Consciousness and its felt qualities are only vestiges of our body’s ongoing processes. They are feedbacks from our myriad neural interactions, and are indescribable and complex because the body cannot be contained within itself. The ‘mind’ is henceforth defined not as separate from the brain, but rather as the nature of feedback within the body such that thought (inclusive of self-awareness and ‘feeling’) is possible.
Any person finds it impossible to fully describe what it is to be themselves. Their only avenue for knowing themselves is the feeling. Since every person’s brain is different, this feeling may be similar or completely disparate from person to person. A ‘feeling’ is a wordless, solipsistic interplay of neurons within the brain. It is indescribable and poorly understood by even the person feeling it because of its inherent complexity. One would have to describe the exact state of every neuron they possess over the time the feeling was present to describe themselves completely. Even the non-mathematically inclined would know that because of the billions of neurons and trillions of possible connections they could make, describing their complete state at any one moment in time would take more than a lifetime. To describe it for microsecond increments? Impossible for a human, but perhaps one day a computer will be able to tell us how we work.
Infinite systems require either infinite space or infinite time. The world in which we live in conjectured to have both.3 Quantum mechanics holds that matter is divisible given sufficient energy, ad infinitum. Astrophysicists theorize a closed universe in which time is unending. If the very composition of our universe is infinitely complex then it follows that our own composition is infinitely complex as well. Perhaps this is true at the most rudimentary of levels, but to assume that most things in the universe are infinitely complex at mesoscopic levels is unreasonable. Categorization would be impossible were prevailing patterns and order not to exist. Fortunately, the distillation from the infinite (or very complex, incomprehensible) to the finite (somewhat complex, comprehensible) has been provided by science as chaos theory.
So, even assuming our universe is infinite in space and/or time, our brain is not necessarily infinite, and may not assume infinite states.
Our mind cannot describe itself because of the inherent paradox in asking it to do so. Any description of its neural makeup would change with that description, and the changed state could only be described after it occurred. The person would die without ever revealing their last state, assuming they could describe things that fast, even to themselves.
Our mind has grand-scale patterns which become evident from our comprehensible external actions and ordered internal thoughts. It through these grand patterns that we understand each other and ourselves. Happiness is universally known as a general feeling, but its nature can only be understood by the individual feeling it. Even the person feeling it never understands its exact nature and is incapable of complete understanding of it.
Any given system cannot completely understand itself because that understanding becomes part of it, and that understanding must be understood, and the understanding of the understanding must be understood, etc.
An infinite system would be capable of such understanding, and the fact that we are not capable of it indicates that we are a finite system and therefore incapable of fully understanding ourselves.
Phenomenology is a valid description of how a conscious person believes they function, and is a good internal functional view of consciousness. Phenomenology makes claims such as: ‘We as conscious beings are not merely affected by things around us, but are also conscious of things’.4 This draws too much of a mind/body distinction and contradicts the idea that we are shaped by the life-world; it says that we have, from conception, the ability to be conscious of things that do not affect us. On the contrary, we must be affected by something before we can be conscious of it. We may imagine and be conscious of Pegasus, but before that we must have been affected in some way by horse and wings and by something causing us to intend that thought. The mechanism behind this is not some pure, detached mind, but rather a feedback from memory manipulated to form something else. To us it seems that our intention is an original and spontaneous thing, but it is in fact the result of our neural state at that time. We are often unpredictable to other humans, and sometimes even unto ourselves, but this spontaneity is false; the brain is too complex to always predict itself because it is a finite self-contained system.
Formulating a Pegasus is not beyond the grasp of even ‘unconscious’ (or non-conscious) computers, and is a function of feedback from memory. The will may be a simple or complex feedback (a timer that intends a Pegasus every minute, or a human instructing it at will). Either way the intention only occurs because it was triggered by something else; something internal or external.
Regardless, the brain originated from external factors (conception through post-adolescence), and anything internal was caused in one way or another by and external event. Even the evolution of DNA generating the brain’s original structure is to be considered an external element.
Phenomenological time is a concept familiar to computer programmers; A fast computer experiences more phenomenological time per second than does a slow one. Additionally, two computers of equal speed may be performing a different amount of tasks. One computer may be devoting more of its power to Task A and less to the act of monitoring time. It’s clock (phenomenological clock) will run slower than a clock on the wall. The other computer may only be monitoring time and its clock will run at the same rate as the wall clock. Who is to say the human brain is any different? Being engrossed in a task surely lets time slip by while boredom (the mind wandering) allows the perception of time to be more accurate (slower). Of course, there are complexities and nuances contradicting this general rule, but is the brain not complex and full of nuance?
A dangerous problem when discussing consciousness is one of context. Whether or not we grant that the mind is a function of the brain, or that it is special unto itself, it cannot be fully understood until the entirety of the universe is understood. To provide a full description of anything, or even to fully understand anything, we require it to have a context. Our life-world, our universe, has shaped our brains and minds (whether or not you separate them). We came into being and think the way we do only because we have origins and have always had this world, this context, to exist within.
The ultimate barrier to human understanding and knowledge is the edge of our context. For a long time we, the animals, and the plants were the only existence on a flat world surrounded by a celestial sphere with bodies painted on it. Soon we, the animals, plants, and bacterium were on a round world with a sun and planets orbiting us. Lately we find we are a tiny speck in a tiny galaxy composed of even tinier particles composed of energy. Now we ask about what is beyond our universe and smaller than energy.
We were only able to describe the celestial bodies in terms of our planet, and the bacterium in terms of animals. They all needed contexts. To put forth a thought experiment in which only your mind and an atom exists is absurd because your consciousness would develop differently – in terms of that particular life-world. You could not now take an atom out of context and understand it, and if it is not now, you are not you. For you to be who you are now requires the context, and the context includes time and space.
As our knowledge of our universe increases it changes our consciousness, even if by small margins. To the same token that we would be different if all we knew was our mind and one atom, we would be different if we knew what the shape of the universe is. Only when the universe is fully understood will we fully understand ourselves. The problem is that our universe is whatever we decree to be the extent of our knowledge. When we know more things, the universe expands. So it must not be the universe that we seek out, but the final context – something that may or may not be outside of the universe we now know.
The human brain is a finite thing, capable of finite states. To say this implies that it could be easily understood. On the contrary, even though it is finite, it is also extraordinarily complex with too many possible states for a person to ever describe or experience all of them. Because the brain is finite it has no ability to describe itself with any accuracy. It has general grand-scale patterns – patterns which include feed back on themselves to provide us with thought, emotion, and even our own sense of identity. This feedback, being only a general pattern, is discernable to us as something unique and separate from the brain, for how can the brain reflect on itself? In fact the brain does reflect on itself, and this concept is not unique – computers currently respond to their own data in, by human standards, a rudimentary way.
Furthermore, the complexity of Human brains relates not to our recent environment and conditioning, but also to the details of our evolution over aeons. To understand the human brain, mind, and consciousness is to understand everything in the universe – for all these things contributed to our formation and our continued change.
Humanity has long been known to think of itself as something clever and irreproducible. It has therefore elevated discourse on the brain to the cleaner and less common talk of ‘mind’ and ‘consciousness’. Mind and consciousness do exist, but are only side effects of a complex and busy mass of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, sodium, iron, etc...