How do we study consciousness?

Consciousness science is a very convoluted field. Partly this is due to the very nature of the conversation being considerably vague and ambitious, but it also falls victim to some unnecessary and in my opinion misguided obfuscation. Consciousness science in recent years (decades) has been in the tricky position of having to pry itself away from its “wooey” origin, but also rely on many aspects of non-materialist science and thought in order to distinguish itself as a necessary and novel field of research. In other words, if you removed all the aspects of consciousness science that make it hard to quantify scientifically, you wouldn’t be left much of anything unique or worth distinguishing as its own field. Consciousness science, lacking the investigation into subjective experience itself, is sensory behavioral neuroscience. Thus, consciousness science is in a consistent struggle to be seriously considered due to its inherent departure from traditional materialism in some way or another. More on this distinction later.

To understand the science of consciousness, it is important to recognize its origins in philosophy and religion. The science of consciousness is not born from nothing - the questions that are now under scientific scrutiny have been an integral part of all human societies since history has been recorded. Ancient greeks had theories regarding the origin of subjective experience, the hierarchy of consciousness as it concerns plants and animals, and ideas about where and how our metaphysical existence exists in nature. The Catholic church and religious philosophers had ideas about the bounds of our intelligence and how it relates to experience - even speculation of an afterlife is in some sense a precursor to the science of consciousness. Some of these same questions are investigated today, but often stripped away from their religious and spiritual connotations. Ancient philosophers of mind are certainly interesting and have signifiant impact on the history of the science of consciousness, but the most important philosopher to start would likely be Rene Descartes. Not only for what he contributed to the science of consciousness - but also how he led it astray (IMO).

I will first introduce you to Descartes’ dualism, and try to pair it with a prevailing idea/critique of our modern, materialist conception of consciousness that was brought forth by David Chalmers in the 90s. Both suggest something about consciousness that seems to intuitively construct a methodology that distinguishes experience from everything else. Rene Descartes, among other things, was a very intelligent anatomist. Scholars of the time debated about the origin of the soul in the body. Some theorized it was in the liver, or the heart. Descartes, when investigating the structures of the brain - found that the pineal gland was (one of) the only structures in the brain which is not reflected symmetrically across the inter-hemispheric fissure (line in the middle of your brain from between your two eyes). This led Descartes to theorize that this gland was the seat of the human soul. We now know this not to be true, but Descartes also posited a very interesting mechanic as to how this soul worked - and based on his historical context - he also had to make sure this mechanic meshed well with the beliefs of the church (not a necessary detail, but important to remember that there is a historical incentive or bias for any prevailing theory to sustain the belief of some “heavenly” governor. Descartes supposed that the pineal gland worked as a sort of “middle man” between the world of the soul and the physical world. Descartes believed the ontological place of the soul to be different than that of the body. This thinking is also present in religious views that posit that our soul “leaves” our body, or becomes “disconnected” from it, but inevitably lives on to go exist in some kind of an afterlife. This thinking already sets the groundwork for the seemingly intuitive construction that our mind is different from our body, or in Descartes sense - that our mind is different from our brain.

Descartes mechanism worked like this:

What is pictured is a mechanism that allows the mind (existing ethereally in some realm other than the physical) to interact with the physical world in the brain and thus produce actions, responses and behaviors. Descartes believed that a visual stimulus is presented to the body and the brain, processed through the eyes, transferred to the brain, but none of this resulted in subjective experience until it reached the pineal gland and was transferred out of the physical world and into the world of the soul. This conception laid the groundwork for the idea that there were two separate, but interacting types of “stuff”. There was mind stuff, and there was physical stuff - and to Descartes - the pineal gland was the way that this stuff interacted with each other.

Descartes’ duality has since been pretty unanimously disavowed, but the intuition that it purported long remains, and plagues much of our discourse about consciousness because of how intuitive it feels. One modern philosopher who relies on this intuition of “mind stuff” opposed to “physical stuff” is David Chalmers. Before I discuss Chalmers’ dualism and how it still influences our science of consciousness today, I want to first discuss the critiques of Descartes’ dualism that render it pretty unanimously abandoned today.

Descartes posited that the ontological “stuff” of the soul/mind is able to interact with the stuff of the brain/the physical and that is how our soul controls our body. If a non-physical thing could influence objects in the physical world - it would necessarily have to be considered physical. If we disagree with this premise, we must also reject any notion of newtonian physics. For a soul not have an existence in the physical world - it begs the question how it can possibly influence physical objects. Fun fact: This argument was brought to Descartes in a series of letters by the Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Despite this, as neuroscientific knowledge has progressed, we also have far more articulate and detailed descriptions of the physical systems that control movement, behavior, emotion, etc. (aspects of Descartes “soul” world have now been reliably demonstrated to exist in the brain as mechanical systems)

To further clarify or articulate why these concepts are such a damning critique to dualism - try to imagine that I had told you that I possessed abilities like that of telekinesis. If I demonstrated to you my abilities by moving a cup on your table - except at the very time that I began my demonstration - a blast of wind knocked your cup over. Your immediate reaction, I predict, would be to call me a fake and inform me that my magic powers did not move the cup - the wind did. But what if I responded with “yes, my telekinesis moved the wind which moved your cup”. This statement is obviously a post-hoc explanation and seems to reduce my credibility as a telekinetic. This, in my view, is the same method by which dualism seems to persist in the current understanding of consciousness. Dualists first attributed things like emotion, personality, morality, and other personal behaviors as things which existed in the world of the mind - not the brain. But as we progress and move these things from the proposed world of the nonphysical to the physical - the need or an extra-physical explanation becomes less and less necessary. It is certainly possible to continue believing in my telekinesis after you learn that the wind knocked the cup over - but there is now less of a reason to. As more of our experiences and behaviors moved to the world of the physical (being accounted for in mechanical systems of neurons and electrical signals) exactly what the “immaterial” or “soul” world consisted of, became more vague and ambiguous. This, I believe is the basis for many’s insistence that there is something more than what is physically explainable. We began our investigation with the premise that the mind and the physical are separate - and despite the deterioration of this premise - we held on to it because it felt correct.

This is where David Chalmers comes in. Chalmers proposes that there is still a reason to believe in a non-physical agent or cause to our subjective experiences. To Chalmers, there is something about what it feels like to see red, to dream, to give a speech, to experience something that is not captured by physical or functional explanations. This position was put forth in Chalmers’ “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” where Chalmers distinguishes easy problems (accounting for physical explanations of behaviors) and the hard problem (even after every function is accounted for, there still exists no explanation for why subjective experience exists). The argument essentially proposes that if we can account for every function of a behavior, there is no reason for subjective experience to accompany this function. If we explained every neuronal mechanism that produced your experience of a morning cup of coffee - the movement that bring the cup to your lips, the taste receptors that trigger a memory in your hippocampus, the stimulant that makes your visual system more alert and awake because of the flow of certain neurotransmitters. All of this functionality can exists without subjective experience if you just built a robot that did all these things, but there would be no physical account of what it feels like.

This position is certainly attractive. And for the most part - I agree with it. Most functional “definitions” of experiences are severely lacking. If I could explain to you all the neural correlates of your experience of drinking a cup of coffee, I would be bad at it, and you would feel like I didn’t capture any important part of what it really feels like. You would be correct, because I am not explaining anything about your experience. I am explaining the functional mechanism of what I can see. In order to functionally or materialistically represent your phenomenal experience, I need to be able to deconstruct, and explain mechanically, phenomenology. This task (to describe the phenomenological in functional, material terms) has been deemed by many consciousness researchers as fundamentally impossible. But many have taken on the task - the difficulty is that there is no reliable method of investigating phenomenology in the same way that we investigate physical objects. Our access to physical objects is reliable and is discovered by things like sight, confirmed by touch, and categorized by other sensations. In other words, we have reliable and verifiable access to physical objects (including our body). Phenomenal experiences should be equally reliable and verifiable if they are in fact based on the material world. Our experiences of physical objects are in fact phenomenological - but the kind of phenomenology that is interesting when sorting and articulating subjective experience is the phenomenology that you cannot see.

Imagine the experience of you looking at an apple, while you are anxious. In order to examine this experience of you looking at an apple while you feel anxious - we need to utilize two different methods of phenomenological analysis - one for the apple, and one for your feeling of anxiousness. The tools we have for one does not apply to the tools we use for the other. If I wanted to study the apple, I would describe it, I would tell you to look at it as well, and we would do certain verifiable tests on the apple to learn consistent truths about it. Whether or not these things are truths are reliant on the ability for me to relate my experience of the apple to your experience of the apple. This is easy, because we both see the apple in the same way because our vision system works very very similarly. Now lets move on to study the feeling of anxiety. I would describe it to you, but I can’t tell you to look at it, and we can try to do some verifiable tests, but it wouldn’t have anything to do with what it feels like to be anxious, we would just be correlating other physical things with the anxiety’s existence (EEG, heart rate, etc). When we do physical correlations we are just trying to relate something to our visual systems - which are similar and thus we can talk about it and agree on it. But we are not talking about the anxiety - we are talking about the physical correlate that we translated our experience into. In order to truly study something like the feeling of anxiousness, we need to be able to separate it from other things around it. This is how we identify things - we outline it. This is easy with the apple - because our eyes sort colors into categories, define hard edges, and imply three dimensional form through stereoscopic vision. We easily investigate the phenomenology of objects because it is evolutionarily advantageous for us to do so. We need to agree with each other about what is in the outside world because we interact with it together. We don’t have these implicit tools for phenomenology of interior objects (feelings/thoughts). So now, in order to examine the feeling of anxiousness you have looking at the apple, not only do we need to do these things manually, but we also need to strip away the connotations and biases of these experiences that misguide us about their ontological reality.

The greeks could not see blue. There was no blue to them. Based on the unavailability of other blue things besides the ocean, to the greeks the ocean was “wine-colored”. They sorted what they saw in the ocean as a sort of violet. Whereas in our modern society - we see numerous blue things, and thus we categorize our color experiences differently. The interesting part though, is that if we showed an ancient greek and a modern human from the West the same color tests, the greek would not be able to distinguish certain blues and we would - and likewise, certain amazonian tribes can tell better green differences than us. To them there are about 4-5 different colors in what we just call green. This is all to say that our language and cultural context shape our perception of reality. This is the kind of ontological biases that exists even in our visual sense. The misinfluence of how we expect the world to be vs how it is in reality is likely significantly more potent in the analysis of interior objects.

When we describe something as an apple, we are making a useful, but incorrect assertion that there is such thing as an apple. More correctly, there are atoms which are arranged “apple-like”. VSauce makes the assertion that whenever there is a tree and a dog within 10 meters of each other, it is a “trog”. This mereological assertion is no more false or true than the assertion that when we see a small red ball with a stem and seeds inside and a hard consistency that tastes sweet, etc we call it an apple. There are no physical laws of separation between what is and what isn’t. There is no proof of the existence of the apple - there is a premise of an apple that we agree to. This arduous point about mereology is all to say that we make assumptions about how correct we are about what exists. When we look at the apple on the table - we say an “apple” exists because we will consistently and reliably be able to continue calling objects that look like that, an apple. But if we wanted to find novel, true things - we need to be more humble and skeptical about what exists, and allow ontology to speak for itself. This inherent trust that we have in ourselves for distinguishing things from non-things is one of the biggest errors which holds us back in the science of consciousness. We try to apply this labeling system and object-oriented ontology to our phenomenological analysis, and that is just simply too hard. It is like using a flashlight in a dark room to better tell the temperature.

I don’t want this to be misconstrued however. I am not saying that the exterior objects are ontologically different than the interior objects. That would simply be dualism. The point I am trying to make is closer, metaphysically, to the idea that we do not have access to anything that is ontologically “true”. We can never “see” anything “as it is” because in order to reliably gather information about something, we utilize certain tools that necessarily entail their own biases in information as far as what they include or exclude. People often equate our visual system with seeing things “as they are”. If we “saw things as they are” then why can we not determine the spin of the electrons that we are looking at, why can’t we tell the temperature of an object by looking at it? Why can’t we approximate the volume of our feeling of sadness? Our visual system is useful for guiding a particular aspect of our phenomenal experience, but it is in no way an equivalent for everything that exists phenomenologically in that moment. At any moment of our existence we experience not only what we see, but also what we feel. These two aspects of the same phenomenal experience are necessarily intertwined, the only reason we separate these systems is because we have explained the functional mechanism that guides the visual system, and thus removed it from the realm of phenomenology without reason. What would be more beneficial in explaining what consciousness is, would be to account for the visual system in phenomenological terms. This way, we can more precisely describe what it is to see and not just describe what we see.

If we are able to more precisely do this, and begin to build our assertions of what phenomenology is, and what is consists of from the ground up, I believe the Hard Problem that Chalmers supposes begins to deteriorate in the same way Descartes’ pineal gland lost power as we ascribed more and more of its uniqueness to mechanical explanations. This objective is exactly that of the “neurophenomenologists”. This endeavor requires the development of a methodology that is completely unique and separate from the methodology of physical investigation. It requires the collaboration of philosophers of science, neuroscientists, philosophers of mind, clinical researchers, and more. It is, in my opinion, the next frontier. Once we find a widespread methodology, become comfortable, and distill the method so it is approachable by layman, I believe that we will enter a new era of understanding consciousness. We will finally be able to dispel improper intuitions about life and existence, and perhaps fundamentally change how we interact with life around the world.