Number 91 : March 1998 |
If you switch on an electric fire a number of kilowatts of thermal energy will be produced per hour. If you sit by the fire you will be warmed. That is dualism. Physicalism insists that the world consists of physical processes that take place outside and within our bodies. Dualism insists that in addition there is consciousness of sensation and that between subjective experience and the objective world there is an unbridgeable chasm. I will try to narrow the gap. This is in order to make a bridge more conceivable though I offer no such bridging concept.
As nearly all the signals received by the conscious mind are visual I shall confine my remarks to that form of perception mentioning the other senses only in passing.
I hope to show that:
We can find out how minimal the phenomena are by dumbing down consciousness to its simplest form. In a thought experiment suppose the whole screen of consciousness to be featureless darkness of unknown duration. If we subtract memory and emotion, such as fear of the dark, from the situation we will be unable to make a positive descriptive statement. In this respect it is similar to not having experience.
If the screen of consciousness is then filled with darkness that is the same in every respect except that it is minimally lighter and if comparison with the prior experience is not allowed then there is still no statement that can be made about it. The same applies to any subsequent undifferentiated illumination of consciousness to the brightest perceivable. Likewise, it would not be possible to describe the experience of undifferentiated red light without recourse to memory. If a pinhole of light appeared in a dark screen the brain would compute the relative sizes of areas, co-ordinates of position and degrees of brightness but the retinal image would still consist of two areas which previously in this thought experiment were found to be devoid of describable content. Yet all visual knowledge lies in the ubiquity of colour coded light composed of elements which are themselves almost as void of information as is the absence of experience.
It is only by means of a brain mechanism external to consciousness that the hardware of the brain computes the differences between the contents of consciousness and uses that knowledge to construct a virtual reality. Semantically speaking consciousness remains as dumb as the world with which it liaises. It is only through being processed by the greatest complexity in the universe that the "real" world emerges from the raw data of consciousness. That we can see this virtual reality is our illusion. It never enters consciousness. We merely function as though the virtual reality was there present before us. We interact with its computed dimensions; its amenities and dangers. This virtual reality is a tool for making use of the unseen world that originally emitted signals some of which were translated into the markers such as red and green that the senses use.
The more minimal the markers of consciousness are, the more they have the plasticity of potters’ clay. Specific brain locations have been found for the analysis of these markers in terms of edge, tone, colour and movement. Through the use of these analytical tools objects are constructed and appear in "real space" in perspective.
Consider a black and white film of a day’s outing. Shifting white light conveys the totality of all data. Predetermined patterns of interpretation operate away from the screen but the raw data itself has been entirely controlled by the physical world. The distribution of light on the film varied directly in accordance with the light waves on the day of filming. The contents of consciousness are determined by the outside world in the same manner as the surface of the film.
The markers of consciousness are, however, novel. In the literal darkness inside the brain chemical and electrical messages convey the presence of light and are monitored on our screen by markers coloured in an entirely arbitrary way. It has been conjectured that a bat could hear by echo location its mate as red or brown, thus using the same limited store of markers as visual perception uses.
So all the semantic complexities that constitute our understanding of the world are derived from sight. (But see my prior reservation about the other senses). As the markers of light in consciousness take the same ever changing forms as light in the physical world then the dualistic divide is narrowed, though not, of course, bridged.
The markers of consciousness are less important in the brain’s decision making process than is generally believed. Through brain function, the stomach releases or withholds gastric juices in the absence of consciousness of the food being digested. In a recent experiment described in Guy Claxton's book 'The Dark Room', a man had to raise a flag when an event was observed. Muscular tensions that initiate flag raising began momentarily prior to the conscious decision to act. When a person is scared, he may react to an element in his situation without being conscious of it, hence he feels confused. Later, this reaction may be described as involuntary, instinctive, intuitive or even acting upon the sixth sense. It is conceivable that lower forms of life such as ants are reacting appropriately to their environment without consciousness. Car drivers may drive on automatic pilot using visual information without being aware of it.
So why does the brain need consciousness or is it just a by-product of brain activity? One reason may be that it enables one sense to alert another so that having looked we then listen or having seen the rose we then smell it. For the senses of touch and hearing friction and vibration would enable and generate highlighting as chemical detection would do for taste and smell.
Perhaps the most important function of consciousness arises from the conjecture that the brain is composed of separate unconnected computing systems. Consciousness may act as a beacon to alert all systems to information they may find useful. Other system would not of course see the beacon as this would involve infinite regression. Rather there would be a gate that is either open or shut to such information entering, a binary system controlling the consequences of consciousness. Information would initially only generate an image to be highlighted if it passed through a lattice of previously determined significance such as food or danger. Consciousness would then be a cog in a mechanistic process it neither began nor concluded.
Now that consciousness has been separated out from the determinist mechanisms that extract information from it and is seen to be an entirely simple set of markers provided by the brain, is there a case for saying that it is part of the furniture of the world albeit reproduction furniture ? We know that the markers are not "seen" because the evidence of this sighting would itself have to be seen and an infinite regression would ensue. Are we aware of them in any other way? Consider the difference between smelling a rose and being aware of the smell of a rose. Sometimes we are distracted from fully appreciating the smell of a rose and thus not fully aware. If however we give the smell our undivided attention it is clear that there is no difference between the smell and awareness of the smell, otherwise we could specify the difference. We can conclude that the phenomena of consciousness are neither seen nor are we aware of them. They simply exist, provided by the world, controlled by the world and used by the world and thereby sharing the same realm of discourse.
Roger Farnworth
Roger : Thanks for the above paper. There’s much food for thought, which, in my case at least, must be left until another time.
Theo