Human consciousness? Never has there been a subject on which so many can claim first-hand experience and yet about which so few satisfying explanations exist.

What is so difficult about this seemingly familiar experience that words so often fail us when we try to explain it? It seems simultaneously the most obvious and the most obscure of phenomenon. To paraphrase St Augustine “If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not”.

It can seem there is an unbridgeable gulf between the experience of consciousness and the mundane processes in the brain. And if we dwell on the idea of consciousness itself for any length of time a sense of giddiness or vertigo can quickly envelop us, our thoughts seeming to naturally recoil .

In this article I focus on a few of the issues of this so-called “hard problem” of consciousness as defined by cognitive scientist David Chalmers, the implications these might have for the way we live our lives and why it might not be such a problem after all.

“Consciousness — the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience — is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness,” ~Sam Harris

What we talk about when we talk about consciousness

One of the first things that becomes apparent when exploring literature about consciousness is the plethora of definitions and meanings the word has.

The OED defines it as — The state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings — but this then only begs the question, what does it mean to be “aware”?

Depending on the context, consciousness can range from a sort of ineffectual evolutionary curiosity that exists in a few biological systems to a universe encompassing power.

It can represent an esoteric property of neural networks that lies just beyond our current understanding or act as a by-word for far-out hippy philosophies and drugged-up experiences.

The sense of unrealness we get when trying to square our sense of consiousness with our knowledge of the brain is often refered to as the “hard problem and , Chalmers, in his 1995 book Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, defines it thus:

How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does. ~ David Chalmers.

The crux of the issue here is how to bridge the gap between quantitative descriptions of the physical processes that take place in the brain and the actual qualitative experience of being alive.

How to relate physical events — such as neurons firing or the release of neurotransmitters — with the actual experience a person feels, the qualia.

Neuroscience can tell us in detail how brain processes work but that doesn't seem to get us any closer to what subjective experience feels like. Data scientists can create detailed simulations of neural networks but again they don’t seem to get us any closer to what “it is like” to be the possessor of a brain.

A deflating experience

One approach to this problem is the deflationary or reductionist approach advocated by Daniel Dennet amongst others. In this view, the problem is merely an illusion — we may feel like we are conscious, or that our thoughts are more than a collection neurochemical processes but we are mistaken.

The reductionist argues that the sense that consciousness is primary to our experience is an illusion and that fundamentally the only reality is that described by the processes of neuroscience.

The way in which this epiphenomenon arises is still up for debate but generally it is either shoe-horned in as a last minute after-thought, talked around or simply dismissed as unworthy of explanation.

True, people may talk about being conscious, they may even seem convinced about it or bang on about this or that experience but talk is cheap. The reductionist would say that people talk about a lot of things — such as God or Religion or Horoscopes— that are not verified from a scientific point of view.

Although every scientist may themselves be conscious not one experiment has ever measured consciousness. No apparatus has detected a quanta of consciousness, no meter has gauged it.

“It becomes increasingly clear that not only does ‘consciousness’ fail to be a useful scientific term, but it is also a harmful one to scientific practice. The use of the concept ‘consciousness’ prevents standard scientific methods from being adequately applied, inhibits standard research heuristics, does not allow generalisations and predictions to be made, prevents clear communication across research groups, and thus forces research into unproductive and confused directions,” ~Dr Elizabeth Irvine

Where then is this substance we talk about? What is it made of? For many in the scientific community the answer is that it has no substance, that it is not made of anything. If we can’t detect it after all why would we hypothesis its existence?

The stuff of the world is mind-stuff

While this approach certainly simplifies things from an empirical point of view it nonetheless leaves most people somewhat uncomfortable. The idea that our sensation of being alive and conscious is an illusion is a hard sell outside of a philosophy lecture.

And this instinctive resistance, that most people have if told that their sense of self, the conscious “I”, or free will are illusions, is more than a mere blip. If you scroll through Medium you will see that far from being a minor philosophical curiosity the ‘self’ is of major importance to many, many people.

You will find countless self-help and thought leadership articles offering life hacks and methods to improve your “self” but where is the elusive ego or id or super-ego?

As with consciousness, science has an answer that is increasingly clear-cut — free will and the self are not there. The evidence seems to show that there is no homunculus or seat of consciousness.

Our description of the brain operates quite fine without the need of free will or a seat of consciousness or a location where the self resides. This is the crux of the issue for science and where the hard problem rests.

“The stuff of the world is mind-stuff… It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness…. no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.” ~Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World

Specifically how to explain within a scientific framework the fact that so many people report that they are consciousness or have a sense of self . How to fit the lived experience into a description of the world which already has a perfectly good explanation in terms of mechanistic actions?

When viewed through this lens the “problem” of consciousness is not how to understand it but how to fit it into the existing framework of scientific thought and the reductionist answer to this is that it doesn’t fit — it is something extraneous that cannot meaningfully be considered within the limits of scientific explanation.

The idea that we cannot meaningfully ask certain questions within a scientific framework is not unfamiliar. We already know there are hard limits to what science can describe. The most widely accepted model of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, refutes the idea that we can ask a whole range of questions — such as the position of a particle prior to measurement — meaningfully.

The “hard problem” is then only a problem if you wish to maintain both that consciousness exists and that there is nothing which is not described by a quantitative scientific description of nature. After all, for most people, consciousness continues quite fine without any explanation.

The hard problem is not a problem for consciousness but a problem for rationalism

The role of natural language

So you are reading this and you might think so what. Science isn’t able to explain consciousness. Maybe nobody is able to explain it. Who cares. I know what it is. I don’t need an explanation to know the way things are, I am living it right now.

The issue for most people — and the reason that Medium is clogged with self-help articles — is that is impossible to simply let go of the idea of consciousness or that there might be rules to experience, life hacks, right and wrong paths.

The question “what should I do with my time on earth?” is not one that ever goes away. Our current cultural understanding of the universe is heavily dominated by science but it is only through natural language and speech that we can develop our sense of being.

Mathematics, the language on which most of science is built, is one lens to view the world but at base it is only a language. A language par excellence for certain forms of rational enquiry but as with all languages, one that has its limits.

“All of our so-called knowledge or convictions, from questions of geography and history to the most profound laws of atomic physics or even mathematics and logic, are an edifice made by man that touches experience only at the margins,” ~Willard Van Orman Quine

The ability to translate and transmit experiences happens differently in every language but in each there are limits to applicability and often the process of translation from one perspective to another gives us more insight than the description itself.

The comparison might be made to our visual system — if we imagine the left and right eye both trained on the same scene. The image from each eye may be slightly different but each eye on its own can be thought of as giving a “complete” description of the scene however it is only in combination that a new aspect appears and we perceive depth.

Depth perception does not exist in either eye on its own but only through the combination of the two images. Sometimes it is only through the comparison or combination of different perspectives that a deeper understanding of the reality is possible.

Self as fiction

It is through natural language that we construct models of the self and through translation of our intuitions into words and ideas that we learn the limits of this language and the limits of our own particular perspective.

Through language we learn to differentiate between ourselves and others from a young age even if consciousness is not a concept that we ever learn explicitly or ever truly “know” our self.

“The evolution of the higher animals and of man, and the awakening of consciousness at a particular level. The picture is something like this: ‘Though the ether is filled with vibrations the world is dark. But one day man opens his seeing eye, and there is light.’ What this language primarily describes is a picture. What is to be done with the picture, how it is to be used, is still obscure.” ~Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is in natural language — the spoken word, novels, poetry, vague metaphorical speech, descriptions of made-up things like love and self and consciousness — that we have our greatest tool to share our subjective experiences. A powerful tool to build a common roadmap to create better selves.

The self may be a fiction but in that case it is all the more vital that we embrace fiction, and by extension natural language, to communicate with each other at an ever deeper level.

The modern world is filled with soundbites and instructions on how to live but to have truly deeper conversations we must have both eyes open to explore and construct new ways of understanding the lived experience rather than commodifying it.

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