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WillowOne's Positions

Consciousness

My Positions

  1. I hold that consciousness is an emergent property of, and wholly reducible to, the physical processes of the brain.
  2. There is no "hard problem" of consciousness in the sense of a problem that is in principle unsolvable. There is a very hard problem in the sense of one we have not yet solved.
  3. Consciousness is not an all-or-nothing property. It admits of degrees and kinds, and is probably present in some form in many animals.

Notes

  1. Conscious experience arises from the complex, organised activity of the biological brain. There is no credible evidence for consciousness existing independently of the brain, and when brain function ceases, so does awareness. The state of my consciousness is wholly and directly explained by the physical state of my brain. I therefore reject dualist models and accept a materialist account of mind. See Mind-body dualism for the arguments against dualism.
  2. Emergent materialism emphasises that consciousness is an emergent property of physical complexity, not reducible to any single component, but still entirely physical in origin. In the same way, "wetness" is not a property of any single water molecule but is entirely explained by the behaviour of many of them together. Emergence is not magic; it is what complex systems do (see Emergence).
  3. Identity theory (in philosophy of mind) claims that mental states are identical to physical brain states: the pain is the firing of the C-fibres, not something caused by it. I find this and functionalism (mental states are defined by what they do, and could in principle be realised in a different substrate) both compatible with my position, and the dispute between them is not one I need to settle.
  4. On the "hard problem". David Chalmers' formulation (1995) asks why physical processing should be accompanied by experience at all. I regard this as a question that will dissolve as the "easy" problems are solved, in the way that the question "what is the vital force that distinguishes living from non-living matter?" dissolved once biochemistry was understood. Nobody now asks what élan vital is; they ask how metabolism works. See Daniel C. Dennett, who argued this position for forty years.
  5. On qualia. The thought experiments usually deployed against materialism, Mary’s Room and Philosophical zombies, establish only limits on what we can currently imagine, not limits on what is the case. See my notes on Mary’s Room: Mary learns what it is like for her brain to process red, which is new information about her brain, not about redness.
  6. On function. My working assumption (see Mind-body dualism) is that consciousness is what it is like, from the inside, for a system to model its own states in order to regulate them. Early organisms reacted to stimuli; later ones modelled the stimuli; later still, some modelled themselves modelling. Consciousness is that last step. This is close to the higher-order and global workspace theories, and is consistent with Karl Friston’s free energy principle.
  7. On machines. If consciousness is a matter of organisation rather than substrate, there is no principled reason a non-biological system could not be conscious. John Searle's Chinese Room does not show otherwise; it shows that the man in the room does not understand Chinese, which nobody claimed. Whether any current artificial system is conscious is a separate question, and my answer is "almost certainly not, and we would struggle to tell". I make the full case for the in-principle claim under Substrate Independence.

Also see