Consciousness and the search for scientific humility

I like the humility of one cognitive scientist and philosopher about the state of knowledge as to how consciousness arises. His admission that despite all the attention the subject is getting there is much still to understand is at stark contrast with the declarations made by the likes of Steven Pinker or Sam Harris.

Professor David Chalmers

I’m referring to David Chalmers, University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is also Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He has had a long interest in the philosophy of mind (especially consciousness) and the foundations of cognitive science, as well the philosophy of language, metaphysics and epistemology.

In a 2017 broadcast Chalmers said: “I see consciousness as one of the fundamental data of our existence, it's just a manifest fact where consciousness is possibly the most familiar thing in the world to most of us. At the same time, it's one of the things that is really the hardest to explain…" He went on:

This is for me what makes it such a fascinating problem I think for any scientist, for any philosopher, for anyone who is contemplating the human mind or the world, and I think we're at a very interesting point right now in 2017 where the field is becoming mature and there is a developed science and philosophy of consciousness, but still that moment you just step back and say, wow, this is really puzzling and something we are just beginning to come to grips with.

This willingness to be tentative in response to the complexity of that field of study can be compared to the pontificating seen in much that comes from the likes of Steven Pinker, Sam Harris or John R Searle, who in 1990 published The Mystery of Consciousness, but in 1997 berated Chalmers for his view that there was not enough evidence to decide that consciousness was completely a product of the brain. However, on this point Searle did offer a bifocal view of the issue. First he states, “Consciousness is above all a biological phenomenon, like digestion or photosynthesis. This is just a fact of nature that has to be respected by any philosophical account.” Then he takes a step back and qualifies the degree of certainty by concluding that work still needed to be done “in the project of understanding how the brain causes consciousness.”

Chalmers in 2017 was still looking for ways to bridge the gap between the brain’s processes and consciousness. He put the issue this way:

For me, there's any number of questions you can raise about consciousness but for me the big one has always been how can you explain it? Why does it exist and how can we give some kind of scientific theory of it. Absolutely it's got something to do with the brain. At least in humans you need a brain to be conscious, and activity in the brain is going to lead to consciousness. Change the activity in the brain and you will typically change the state of consciousness.

There's any number of correlations between the brain and consciousness, but nothing about that yet yields an explanation. So for me the hard problem of consciousness is how is it that all this physical processing in the brain should somehow give rise to conscious experience. Why doesn't it all go on in the dark without any consciousness? Why aren't we just giant robots or what philosophers sometimes call zombies, doing all this processing, behaving, walking, talking, but with the lights off inside, with nothing going on.

For me there is actually conscious experience here and I suspect very strongly that for all of you, you are undergoing something like the same thing. But how can we explain that fact, how can we give an account of that in terms of the physical processes of the brain?

Associate Professor Olivia Carter

In that broadcast Chalmers’ view of the uncertainty in the field was corroborated a fellow researcher into consciousness. Olivia Carter is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and was executive director of the International Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness. In explaining the state of play of the neuroscience of consciousness she said:

"So within the biology, if we say it's something about a brain, what is it about the human brain that allows consciousness? It's not inherent in the biological structure, it's something about the way this brain is working."

She described how certain types of neurons might be a factor. However, “… It's still unclear, absolutely unclear.” She goes on in a likewise tentative manner: “One big theory of consciousness is that basically… magically consciousness happens when…” Another telling aspect of where the science of consciousness is at comes with this statement:

It seems to be that the sorts of things, like visual perception and emotional processing, that these types of loops do exist and they seem to be important in working memory, whether or not you need working memory as a component of consciousness and such is not clear either.

Having discussed three areas of study, mainly to do with neurons and their behaviour, Carter says: “There's a lot of complex stuff happening in the brain. It seems to be coordinated, [and] one component of those things may or may not be the critical step to consciousness, or maybe it's the three things all together.”

Whether one is talking about consciousness, or the mind or the spiritual beliefs of most of humanity – Pinker had this to say in 2004: “the universal propensity toward religious belief is a genuine scientific puzzle” – what is needed is a little more accuracy on what the state of the scientific knowledge is and a little less of a readiness to marginalize those who see the facts about brain processes pointing to a compelling conclusion of a countercultural kind - that humans have capabilities that transcend the nature and nurture elements of their existence.