Taking Consciousness Seriously

When you look at grassy lawn and see a green expanse or when you place sugar on your tongue and have an experience of sweet, have you ever wondered what, exactly, this green or sweet sensation actually is?

If all that's going on when you see the grass or taste the sugar (or hear music or smell a flower or feel a pain) is that electrochemical reactions are occurring in the material brain, where and what are the actual sensations they produce? If you could observe the interior of a brain you wouldn't observe "green" or "sweet" anywhere so how do movements of molecules across synapses translate into sensations?

The problem of explaining exactly what a sensation of color, taste, sound or pain is is just one aspect of what's called the "Hard Problem" of consciousness. There are a half dozen or so others.

The problem wasn't attracting much attention among philosophers until the mid-nineties when a young Australian philosopher named David Chalmers read a paper at a conference in Tucson, Arizona. His talk focused attention on what is one of the deepest mysteries in all of science and philosophy: the nature of consciousness.

A piece at Mind Matters describes the meeting, its effect on the attendees and quotes from an article in The Guardian in 2015 which calls that meeting the day philosophers began taking consciousness seriously:

The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party?

But these were all “easy problems”, in the scheme of things: given enough time and money, experts would figure them out.

There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers said.

It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters – the Hard Problem of Consciousness – and it’s this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life?

And how does the brain manage it? How could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as the experience of being that pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

What jolted Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. “At the coffee break, I went around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping,” Hameroff said. “And everyone was like: ‘Oh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!’”

Philosophers had pondered the so-called “mind-body problem” for centuries. But Chalmers’s particular manner of reviving it “reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone. It defined the field. It made us ask: what is this that we’re dealing with here?”

The significance of this, or at least part of the significance, is that for a century or more the regnant view among philosophers was materialism, the belief that everything, including human beings, was comprised of a single substance - matter - and that everything about us and the world could be explained in terms of material (physical and chemical) processes and laws.

The conviction that everything was matter or reducible to matter (or energy) left no room for belief in a soul, mind or anything fundamentally immaterial, and if there are no immaterial entities in the universe there was no need to think there were immaterial entities outside the universe either. The idea of immaterial supernatural beings like angels, demons or God became dispensable and untenable.

The Hard Problem has upset all that. As the article at Mind Matters points out we're no closer to solving the difficulty today than we were a quarter century ago, although we have made some interesting discoveries. According to the article we've learned that:

• people in a persistent vegetative state can have active conscious lives
• people can control artificial limbs by thoughts alone
• in, perhaps, the strangest development, the mind can sometimes discover information when detached from a clinically dead brain.

The last is what happens in what are called Near-Death or Post-Death experiences, in which people declared medically dead are nevertheless resuscitated and report knowledge of what had happened during the time their brain was dead.

None of these phenomena are easily explained, or explicable at all, by materialism. Here's a fascinating example of one such experience that defies any materialistic explanation:

Materialism is teetering. There's too much it can't explain (see here and here for more examples).

If and when it finally passes into the archives of discredited philosophical ideas what will take it's place? And if there is something immaterial about us, a mental substance of some sort, how does it work and what are the implications of that for our belief about life after death?