In his 2003 Ted talk titled “The Illusion of Consciousness”, American philosopher Daniel Dennett talks about how most people are anchored to this idea that consciousness is something beyond the plane of the physical, biological world and that we have a privileged and unrestricted access to our conscious selves. He goes on to say that explaining consciousness unanimously is a challenge because everyone seems to be an expert on it — we all think that we best know who we are. However, through a couple of on-stage experiments during his talk, Dennett shows that no matter how hard we try, we are forced to perceive things in a certain way which is invariably determined by how our physical brain functions and optimizes its response to external stimuli. Therefore, he argues that consciousness is a powerful utilitarian illusion created by our nervous system that has improvised over several thousand years of human evolution.
As a neuroscientist (an aspiring one at least), I cannot agree more with his “naturalistic” explanation of consciousness, presented in much greater detail in his book “Consciousness Explained”. On a personal level, I have frequently dealt with this question of who this “I” is — the entity that we so fondly identify with. What is this stream of consciousness that seems to define us as unique individuals, somehow separate from our machine-like bodies that are so uniformly designed? Is there really something beyond the physical limits of our brains that provides us an edge over all other creatures that evolved in the history of life? These are not easy questions, they never will be; but thanks to the tremendous and rapid progress made in the past decade in the diverse fields of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and even philosophy, we now have a better grip on these complex ideas. In this essay, I will try to summarize what I have learned through these years of searching for answers to the puzzle of consciousness and how my own insights have evolved over this issue. However, I must admit that I am nowhere close to being satisfied by my seeking so far. Consciousness is always so elusive as a quest.
Let me begin by citing one of my most favorite ideas on consciousness by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers. In his remarkable thesis, Chalmers argued that the problem of consciousness can be categorized into two — the “easy” problem of consciousness, and the “hard” problem of consciousness. The easy problem of consciousness can be defined by the questions that neuroscience and other physical sciences can explain empirically, like how our visual system works, how we smell something, and even more complicated processes like learning and memory that can be comprehended by means of robust scientific principles and evidence. If you ask a neuroscientist, however, he/she would disagree with the word “easy” being used in this context as it takes years and generations of scientists (and their thankless graduate students) to conclusively prove that a certain neurological process or paradigm does exist and is true. Nonetheless, these problems do seem relatively bearable given the fact that we can study them experimentally and consistently. The hard problem of consciousness, on the other hand, is what agitates most neuroscientists and philosophers alike. In fact, there are some who outrightly deny that there is any such “hard” problem of consciousness and that everything in consciousness can be explained by neuroscience. So which side am I on? I am not sure myself, but perhaps it will get clearer as I progress through this essay.
So, what exactly is this “hard” problem? Consider the famous thought experiment about Mary, the colorblind neuroscientist who studies the process of vision. Mary stays in her small laboratory, experimenting and studying how the visual world is represented in our brains. Suppose she figures out everything there is to know about vision, about how our brains process color and the shape of objects, and even how we form memories that store these images for a lifetime. If, however, she is somehow exposed to a world of color that she had never experienced before, would she still be able to explain this feeling of being “conscious” of color by means of her scientific principles and theories? That is the challenge of the so-called “qualia” of consciousness — that inexplicable awareness of experiencing something that is unique to us. If David Chalmers is to be believed, the hard problem of consciousness is still beyond the reaches of modern neuroscience, but it is something that can be tackled by using new and radical ideas from both the scientists and the philosophers.
Well, I am not a philosopher, nor have I studied philosophy formally, so I don’t know much about any recent progress that has been made in the field of philosophy of consciousness. However, I would like to present a few ideas that stand at the confluence of neuroscience and philosophy, and that have influenced me in this quest to understand consciousness, which again are quite controversial on their own.
Remember Bishop Berkley, the famous Irish philosopher whose “idealism” sought to reject any objective reality and emphasized that only the mind and its contents are true? Well, there is a present-day cognitive scientist whose radical ideas sound pretty similar. Donald Hoffman is a professor at the University of California, Irvine and he uses evolutionary game theory to argue that the reality we perceive is nothing like the reality that exists, and that we merely experience a world full of illusions and theatricality. To him, evolution has traded accuracy of perception for greater fitness and competitive advantage. As a result, what we see in the world is analogous to the desktop interface in our computers which is filled with icons that give us access to the stuff we need. However, these icons are mere “illusions” which only make it easier for us to perform a certain task, say through softwares or word processors. What is actually happening behind the curtain of this user-friendly interface is the complex mathematics of computer programming and algorithms that make the computer work. Similarly, human perception is an illusion that is generated by the forces of evolution acting over several millennia for the purpose of increasing our fitness to the environment while hiding the incomprehensible reality of the physical world. But how would an inaccurate perception boost our chances of survival in nature? A simple example could be vision. We know that light waves consist of a spectrum of wavelengths out of which only a small portion is perceptible to the human eye. Now, imagine a situation where humans were able to visualize electromagnetic radiation or light in its entirety. Needless to say, we would be so overwhelmed with the sheer complexity of the world we may see that most of us would go crazy, like in a story by HP Lovecraft in which a mad scientist manages to create a device which could reveal the hidden contents of our immediate reality only to the distress and horror of the one who would be its witness. In a more practical sense, such an undistorted and accurate version of the visual world would have made humans incompetent to either hunt or to escape predators. In summary, evolution has designed consciousness in such a way as to create these potent illusions that help us, or in fact, help any other conscious species to function effectively in its environment. So maybe the hard problem of consciousness has an evolutionary solution to it.
Perhaps what we call consciousness is a summation of perception, which primarily occurs in the brain, and our interaction with the physical world, whether it be through technology, language, culture, or even the internet.
There is another radical hypothesis that doesn’t aim at explaining consciousness, but rather endeavors to expand it. It is being referred to as the “extended mind” theory, proposed by David Chalmers and Andy Clark. Take your smartphone, for example, to understand this concept. Although it has become a virtually indispensable part of our lives today, we wouldn’t consider our phones to be so intimate to us as to become a part of our consciousness, would we? These two will argue otherwise. To them, the content of your smartphone is as intrinsic to your consciousness as your deepest memories stored in the neocortex. This “extended mind” hypothesis seems to challenge the traditional approach to the understanding of consciousness to suggest that consciousness is a flexible, dynamic system that is evolving as human technology progresses. It is like saying that a part of our consciousness can now be uploaded in a ‘cloud’ and accessed whenever needed. So then, how do we define consciousness now? Perhaps what we call consciousness is a summation of perception, which primarily occurs in the brain, and our interaction with the physical world, whether it be through technology, language, culture, or even the internet.
Now let’s come to some of the major breakthroughs in neuroscience that have wrestled with the question of consciousness. We now have a much greater and in-depth understanding of the mechanistic correlates of sensation, perception, and higher-order cognition in the brain. We have gone as far as to be able to narrow down to specific populations of neurons that regulate, say the sensation of smell in the olfactory bulb, glomerulus, piriform cortex, and at other levels. We even have a pretty good idea about the genetic and molecular mechanisms that underline these cellular systems. Moreover, problems related to more intricate processes like learning and memory have now become integral to modern neurobiological research and more holistic paradigms are being described that aim to explain these concepts better. However, these explanations also work almost unanimously for many other vertebrates that we have studied who otherwise don’t seem to be as supremely “conscious” or “self-aware” as humans. So, the question still remains — what is so special about the human brain that has dramatically altered the way we relate to our experience of the world? A recent paper in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience by Dr. Jaan Aru and colleagues described a special class of neurons called the “L5P” neurons that are being deemed essential to any conscious experience. In fact, these neurons were discovered in mice, so these cells are not special to us. However, the interesting thing these neurons appear to be doing is coupling the two distinct levels of a conscious experience — the “state” and the “content” of consciousness. The state of consciousness is that sense of awareness we feel when awake or dreaming, while the content of consciousness includes our perception, thoughts, memories, and dreams when we are either wakeful or asleep. It was previously a mystery as to what links these two levels together that creates a full-blown conscious experience in humans or any other advanced species. Nonetheless, the fact that these groundbreaking cells are active in a species like the mice challenges this notion of privilege that we had been associating with apes and humans in terms of their ability to enjoy a complex form of consciousness. So, the bottom line here seems to be that biologically our brains function in a very similar way as most other vertebrates, with a few levels of greater complexity that makes us retain much more information than any other creature. The only real distinction perhaps is in terms of our social, cultural, and technological expertise that has made humans so successful as a species. Keeping in line with the “extended mind theory”, one could say that our internal consciousness (or what we may call “intelligence”) has helped humans to expand the boundaries of our mind through culture and technology which may have acted as a feedback to further embellish the contents of our consciousness as new generations of humans continue to emerge in a technologically gifted world. As Jacob Bronowski very coherently said in The Ascent of Man, “Man has a set of gifts that make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape.” An extended consciousness is perhaps one of those gifts.
To understand the story of consciousness, we need brave and novel ideas from disciplines as diverse as evolutionary biology, computer science, neurobiology, and of course, philosophy.
Whether consciousness is an illusion or not, it is definitely something that has inspired the best of our scientific, philosophical, and spiritual thinking. To me, as someone equally interested in philosophical discourses as in empirical scientific research, the problem of consciousness offers the ideal playing ground for synergizing the two fields. I think the “hard” problem of consciousness is a real one but I also believe that humanity is quite well placed in trying to address this problem. To understand the story of consciousness, we need brave and novel ideas from disciplines as diverse as evolutionary biology, computer science, neurobiology, and of course, philosophy. Perhaps, we already have the answers, what we need is a paradigm shift in the way we define consciousness. Perhaps, we need to look beyond ourselves and acknowledge the fact that consciousness is not a human privilege. This extended understanding will not only help us come closer to solving the problem of consciousness but will also have wide-ranging ethical implications. Hopefully, it will make our world more connected and empathetic towards species that are different from ours. Therefore, this is a pursuit we cannot let go of.
I would end with quoting the neuroscience wizard Dr. VS Ramachandran as he so brilliantly put forth this perennial question –
“How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos?”
That exactly is the glorious quest we have embarked on right here. Bon voyage!
