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What David Chalmers calls the “Hard Problem” of consciousness has been among the main reasons I started this blog. If you view it honestly, it is the last remaining fundamental mystery and, were I to be as extreme as Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, I would go so far as to label it the only problem worth studying (Camus said that about suicide though). I meant to segue into this topic slowly, by first posting reviews of a bunch of relevant books as anchor points for my views, but blog readers have an unsettling habit of jumping the gun, and derailing the best-laid roll-out plan with untidy comments. So here we go. I’ll frame and circumscribe my approach, state my axiomatic commitments, bluntly partition the landscape into the relevant and irrelevant, and we’ll get set for exploring the Last Great Mystery.

Why Framing is Hard



When you deal with something as fundamental as consciousness, you have to first formulate the problem of formulating the problem. In fact, it can take several chapters of a carefully-written book like Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind to even make a case that there is an actual problem. That we are not merely talking about confused self-referential processing by a neuro-computer. That labeling it an ’emergent’ property of a complex set of algorithms is misguided at a very basic level.

When it comes to consciousness, there is so much complexity and so many irrelevant (or at best, marginal) sideshows that one party or another holds dear (sneak preview: AI, religion, neuroscience and ‘humanism’) that a full-blown open debate is impossible. You will either be reduced to Consciousness 101 level irrelevancies like whether computers can be “creative” or have huge dissonances, like that between (say) Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers, or between those who view the experiential-report evidence from mystic traditions as legitimate and those who do not.

The 101 level debates are boring, and the advanced debates between polar extremes are irrevocably stalled. The only hope for interesting progress is to commit to the camp that you resonate with the most, and look for movement there. Ignore the beginners who are yet to get beyond a few nights of stoned introspection, and ignore your intellectually solid but too-distant peers. We’ll bridge that gap in 2025. Until then, I’ll listen, but not engage, certain viewpoints like Strong AI.

So where am I on this spectrum of development of sophistication of views? Not 101 certainly. My bookshelf on consciousness and mysticism groans under a collection of some 30 volumes (more than half of which I’ve actually read). I’ve done a couple of informal talks about the subject. And I have one data point from a personal “mystical” experience (they are not as rare as you think, you can stop feeling special if you’ve had one too — I estimate that 1 in 4 or 5 people have had experiences comparable to mine, and they’re not particularly hard to get to). But more on that later. So I am not at the 101 level, and 101 level debates bore me to tears. I am also not a professional though, and haven’t worked years writing volumes on the subject. So one of the things I will be doing with this theme is exploring ideas at say, a 501 level. I’ll eventually post a bibliography if you want to catch up and keep up.

Keep in mind though, that almost everything that has been written is about clearing away clutter that is not relevant. Surprisingly little has been said on the subject that is relevant in a non-negative-definition sense. But you have to clear the clutter, and there the literature helps.

I’ll studiously ignore 101 level questions or at best say “read Chalmers” or something along those lines. This is not because I am snotty about my extensive reading in this area. It is because even for the talented thinkers in this field, who I frequently cite, providing a careful account of even the most trivial-sounding question, like whether we all experience ‘blue’ the same way, can take entire chapters. And still achieve no progress besides eliminating the sillier wrong answers.

The Framing Problem

So here is the framing problem, which might itself be critiqued, but let’s not backstep our way to exhaustion. If you answer this for yourself unambiguously, you will at least know where to begin looking for the real question. The framing problem is to force yourself to make clear assertions about the following things questions:

Do you or do you not believe that subjective consciousness is a real , as yet-unexplained, mystery? (Chalmers estimates that about two thirds of academics engaged in the question believe it is. Daniel Dennett wrote a book titled “Consciousness Explained” that represents the other third who think it has been explained. That’s the schism. Live with it.) If you answered ‘yes’ to Question 1, which sub-category of stances do you adopt (the main current candidates being a) that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe like mass/time, b) that it is a an epiphenomenon of brains only, or c) it has something to do with quantum mechanics that manifests itself due to the peculiar structure of the brain). There are about half a dozen other views which I don’t view as even being contenders. What elements of the consciousness debates do you consider relevant, marginally relevant and irrelevant respectively? There is a laundry list of things you need to make up your mind about, which I’ll provide in a minute.

That’s it. That’s the framing problem. My own commitments have been made: yes to 1, choice a) for 2, and the rest of this post for 3. If you believe ‘no’ for the first question (a stance usually, but not exclusively, identified with what is known as Strong AI), then I probably have nothing to say to you that hasn’t been said already. It isn’t that your viewpoint is provably unsound — it is just that debate is fruitless at this stage of evolution of both options, and primarily consists of noisy public showboating. A prime example of this is Daniel Dennett dismissing certain points of view as ‘you are a mysterian’ (a category he made up) on venues like Slate’s Meaning of Life TV. Entertaining, but not particularly helpful in moving the debates forward. Neither side can completely undermine the other at this stage, but neither does direct engagement help. Each side has significant internal work to get done first.

Scoping the Specifics

Once you decide you want to roll up your sleeves and do some non-trivial thinking about consciousness, you have some prep-work to do. In the framing problem, answering question 1 is easy if you have read a couple of books (or even if you are navigating only by introspection up to this point). Question 2 is tougher if you don’t know about some of the frames in play, but I’ll help you along for that in a future post, but Question 3, fortunately, is a much simpler matter of logical grunt work and figuring out the implications of your foundational commitment from Question 1.

The grunt work consists in making up your mind about several themes that have been proposed as candidate elements (or even centerpieces) of the debate. Here is the list of the usual suspects, probably incomplete, but covering 90% of the words you’ll see and hear in the debates. You may want to print out this page and pencil in your opinions if you want to follow along this thread of blog posts. I’ll elaborate on my own commitments in a minute.

None of this, unfortunately, is a moment’s work, but you can do an instantaneous self-assessment and evolve that. I’ll be addressing at least a few of these themes. To form a substantial opinion and avoid getting trapped into unnecessary trails of thought that others have mapped and dismissed credibly, you need to do some reading.

Themes List

Neuroscience of the fMRI localization variety (“decision making is located in the anteriorus crapulus”) Neuroscience of the brain damage/counterintuitive phenomena variety (as in Oliver Sacks’ books) Artificial Intelligence Complexity and ’emergence’ (of the Douglas Hofstadter and Santa Fe varieties) Foundations of mathematics (stuff like Godel’s theorem, Brouwer’s view of the continuum, and so forth) (Human) Psychology Humanism and ethics Mysticism and mystic experiences (East or West; cultural silos are irrelevant. If you are a Westerner, think about the Christian mystic Hildegrad von Bingen if Vedanta and Zen make you uncomfortable and New Ageism leaves you cold) Religion of the organized variety with an associated theology and historicism Unsolved fundamental physics problems (primarily, but not only, quantum indeterminacy) Western philosophy of mind (Descartes, Ryle, all the way up to Chalmers) Language and its phenomenology Other Western metaphysics subfields besides PoM, such as ontology and epistemology Eastern metaphysics, separated from the related theology (primarily the varieties of Buddhist and Vedantic and non-Vedantic Indian metaphysics — recall that in the West, there was a philosophy-religion split, or more correctly, a theology-metaphysics split, perhaps dating back to about Aquinas, that has no parallel in the East. So you have to do the separation artificially, since I do think that the split is a useful and necessary operation)

My Commitments

Here are my commitments. I parse the themes into irrelevant, distraction, useful and fundamental. A word on the middle two categories is in order. There are many things that lead to revealing arguments that illuminate some aspects of the mystery of consciousness (more so for some stances than for others), but for some, the illumination comes at the expense of a whole lot of distraction. Language is an example. To me, the argument that dogs fall into my definition of ‘conscious’, dogs don’t have language, ergo, language is irrelevant is sufficient to ignore language as a fundamental feature. Whatever insight thinking about language provides then, comes at the expense of enormously distracting debates of the sort Steven Pinker likes to get into (he of “How the Mind Works” and acolyte-of-Chomsky fame). Not worth it. Language, however interesting a subject qua language, is too expensive an indulgence for a spartan attack on consciousness.

So here is my parsed list. I’ll justify some commitments, defer some, and simply assert an opinion on others without defending them (usually because it takes too long and others have done a better job already).

Remember, my classification follows from my commitment to answer a) to Question 2. If you answered differently, you will parse differently.

The Irrelevant

Humanism and ethics Religion of the organized variety with with an associated theology and historicism

The Distracting

Almost all of AI, except for occasionally useful thought experiments. The slug is 0.01 on the consciousness scale, ergo, most talk of AI capabilities is completely distracting. The 0.01 level scale consciousness of a slug with 127 neurons is just as mysterious as the fact that you can critique Van Gogh and HAL (as yet) can’t. Let’s stick with the simpler cases and not go to the more complex cases unless they reveal some subtlety. Haven’t seen any such revealing subtlety in the reams I’ve read from AI so far. Even the famous Searle-Dennett Chinese Room debates are a distraction once you plow through the details. Neuroscience of the fMRI localization variety. See Mind Wide Open. Learning the physical address of something in the brain is not particularly helpful. All you need from the neuro-morphological research literature is a rough-and-ready understanding of gross structure (like neocortex versus brain stem). The rest is detail. Noisy detail. If something in that world is curious enough and helpful enough to this debate, you’ll hear about it in a more digestible context from a hard-working philosopher who will filter out the noise for you. Language and its phenomenology. This is a hard area for me to dismiss as a distraction, because I hugely enjoy all my reading and thinking in this area, and it is deeply revealing in other ways. Complexity and ’emergence’ (of the Douglas Hofstadter and Santa Fe varieties). Again, it pains me to have to put this class of literature in the ‘distracting’ class, but I can only view my immersion in that for the better part of a decade as a waste of time, at least for the purposes of exploring the consciousness problem. It is useful for thinking about other things, but not for consciousness.

The Useful

Neuroscience of the brain damage/counterintuitive phenomena variety: This is useful because it can lead you away from certain pointless lines of thought. For instance, does the brain construct reality or perceive it? The data is in. It constructs reality. You do not need to agonize over this. Read Dennett to understand how (in particular the Stalinist vs. Orwellian models of how the brain parses sensory data). Understand, internalize, move on. The mystery isn’t hiding there. (Human) Psychology: Not useful in the way you might think, in terms of what it says about the subject itself (hint: “almost nothing”), but in terms of what it tells you about the pitfalls of your own thinking about a topic that is so intimately and trickily entwined with your sense of (objective psychological) self. Mysticism and mystic experiences: most people either ignore (out of unreasoned suspicion or reasoned skepticism), underrate or overrate the importance of evidence from mysticism, so since this is a theme where I take a possibly very unusual stance, I’ll elaborate in a separate post. Other Western metaphysics subfields besides PoM, such as ontology and epistemology: these help skewer certain viewpoints like the ‘Cartesian Theater’ but are not in themselves directly relevant.

Fundamental

Western Philosophy of Mind (Descartes, Ryle all the way up to Chalmers): You need this, and you’ll understand why when you read Chalmers and realize that it takes a hundred pages even to create a secure sandbox for thinking that is insulated from the distracting attacks of, say, Daniel Dennett. There is a vast, sophisticated and nuanced vocabulary that WPoM brings to the party (example, “qualia”) and a neat array of powerful thought experiments (like the Zombie problem and the inverted spectrum) that clarify a whole bunch of muddy issues. Eastern metaphysics, stripped of mythological trappings: studiously (though not conspiratorially as some imagine) ignored by the Western academy, mainly because it has no clue how to methodologically integrate what Eastern metaphysics has to say. It is mainly the second rung amateurs from outside philosophy (primarily neuroscientists who are stuck in synaptic weeds, and some AI folks infatuated with Zen koans) who introduce these ideas into the Western academy. To be fair, the few remaining intellectually rigorous Eastern philosophers roundly ignore Western ideas too, besides occasionally whining about credit attribution issues (I have a friend — sorry to call you out Rashmun! — who frequently brings up the point that the Mimasaka philosopher Kumarila Bhatta developed the dreaming argument before Descartes. Yeah, yeah, let’s move on!). Unsolved fundamental physics problems (primarily, but not only, quantum indeterminacy). Chalmers dismisses this as not relevant, and that’s an area where I break from his views. I don’t agree or disagre; I just think the jury is still out, and that fundamental physics is at least as mysterious as consciousness itself. Think about it. Mass, space and time are fundamentally just as confusing as the fact that there happens to be an ‘I’ sitting inside your head (just behind your eyes, apparently). Foundations of mathematics (stuff like Godel’s theorem, Brouwer’s view of the continuum, and so forth)

Whew! That was quite a trek. And that was just to get to the starting line. Hopefully we’ll make some progress in the next post.