What is Consciousness?

"It is not any experience, thought, emotion, or perception, but it is the empty space in which all experiences, thoughts, emotions, and perceptions take place."

To which you very properly reply:

"Huh! So, ah, what's for lunch?"

As Steven Pinker points out, consciousness is not a complicated concept, painstakingly built up from more basic concepts. It is itself completely basic: you either "get it" all at once, or you don't "get it" at all. So I have collected below a few indirect ways of talking around the subject, in the hopes that one of them will cause you to have the sudden flash of: "Aha! Not a thought or perception, but the empty space in which thoughts and perceptions take place!" I had that flash in 1990, reading Hofstadter and Dennett's brilliant book The Mind's I, and nothing has quite been the same since.

Voluntary vs. Involuntary Reflexes

• I get a cut on my arm. In response, blood cells rush to fill the hole, form a clot, and—in the long term—regenerate the damaged skin. These are all involuntary reflexes.
• I'm thirsty. In response, my hand lifts up a glass of water and my mouth drinks it. Voluntary reflexes.

But now go past the specific examples and describe, in clear terms, the difference between a voluntary and an involuntary reflex. In either case, the body responds to some physical stimulus by sending a message to the brain, which processes, determines a response, and sends an instruction back down to the body. "OK, blood cells, clot over here!" "Hand, lift that glass of water up to the mouth!" When I try to describe what is going on in the nervous system, voluntary and involuntary look identical.

So I want to put this question to you, and I really want you to try to answer it: What is the difference? I don't want this to be a rhetorical question, so I'm leaving a lot of blank space below. Answer this question in the clearest way you can, in words, before you scroll down and read more.

Most people come up with something along the following lines.

"I choose to lift the water to my mouth, but I don't choose to make the blood clot."

or perhaps the following, which I would contend is a bit closer:

"I am aware of the decision to lift the water, but I'm not aware of the decision to clot the blood."

If you're with me so far—if you did your best to answer the question, and came up with something like one of those two sentences—then the "Aha!" experience I'm looking for may be just around the corner. You're not talking about "the brain" and "the nervous system" any more: you're talking about an "I" that is quite different.

Not convinced? Try substituting "the brain" for "I" in either of those two sentences. "The brain doesn't choose to make the blood clot." Well, of course it does. But "I" am not aware of "the brain" choosing.

You may want to stop here, before you read any further, and convince yourself that this is more than a word game. Does it make sense to say "I am not aware of the decision to clot blood?" And if so, what do those words "I" and "aware" actually describe?

That's a thinking process you need to go through on your own. When you've taken it as far as you can, let's move on to another, very similar, thought experiment.

The Human Google

It turns out your brain can do the same trick.

I'm going to give you five words, and I want you to find a song that contains these five words in this order. The words are not the title of the song, nor are they necessarily the first line, so there aren't any shortcuts: you have to search through every word of every song you know until you find this particular string.

Roll the mouse over the following picture and you'll see the words. Time yourself to see how long it takes to find the song.

Took you less than a second, didn't it? Of course, Google does the same thing in a comparable time. But since you can do it too, let me ask you this: how did you do it? What algorithm did you use? Did you cue on rhyme and rhythm? Did the meaning somehow narrow the search space? Once again, I don't want this question to be rhetorical. Think about it until you have your best answer, and then scroll down to keep reading.

For most of us, the best answer is simply: I don't know. "I don't know how I did it." I read the words, and then suddenly the song popped into my head.

Once again, we have a sentence that is manifestly obvious, but which is nonsense if you substitute a few words: "My brain doesn't know how my brain did it." Well, of course it does. But we can agree that "I don't know how my brain did it."

In both examples, it seems that the "I" gets to peek at some, but not all, of what "the brain" does. But remember that the point is not to carefully analyze the relationship of "I" and "brain," but to try to get the "Aha!" experience of suddenly realizing what the "I" is. I can't get you there. Think about it.

Frank Jackson's "Mary"

Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red," "blue," and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence "The sky is blue."

1. "Oh, so that's what red looks like."
   (or)
   
2. "I always knew that was just what red would look like."

But if you answered (1), you have a philosophical dilemma. Because Mary, by hypothesis, has "all the physical information there is to obtain" about the visual cortex. If red-ness doesn't lie there, where could it possibly come from?

You can probably guess now that I'm voting with the "1" crowd. I don't think that all the knowledge in the world about light, and about brains, could possibly add up to what red looks like. No experiment can ever determine if my experience of red is actually your experience of blue.

It's tempting at this point to completely dismiss "my experience of red." There is such a thing as electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength of 625-740 nm. There is such a thing as cones in the eye, neural pathways in the brain...all of these can be measured and agreed upon. This whole "red-ness" thing is unmeasurable, unscientific, and unnecessary for explaining human behavior. Skinner wouldn't need it.

But to me, that kind of logic is completely backward. As I look up from my desk, I see a red doll that one of my children made in school. Now, what part of this experience am I certain of? Well, if I'm dreaming, then there isn't actually a doll. Or a wall behind it. There is no light emanating from the doll to my eye, and in fact no eye to see the doll with. All of these are illusory in a dream, so I can't be certain they are real right now. But the experience of red is absolutely certain. All of science, in fact, is built up on our sensory impressions—that is, experiences in consciousness.

Stop now. Look at something red, or any other color you like. What is that color? Can you describe it in terms of anything more primitive? Who or what is it that sees the color?

Where does all that leave me?

Of course, it's possible that only the realm of consciousness is real. The physical world is an illusion in consciousness. This is the case in a dream, for instance, or in The Matrix. Occam's Razor points that way, I think, as the simplest solution.

But the opposite idea—that consciousness is an illusion, or is an emergent property of physical laws—seems patently absurd to me.

If you find me unconvincing on that point, you're in good company. Philosophers refer to my position as "Cartesian dualism" with the same sort of disdain that Southern Baptists and Unitarians reserve for each other. Hofstadter and Dennett, from whom I originally had my own "Aha!" experience, don't actually believe in it. John Searle, who has made a name for himself by arguing that consciousness cannot possibly be an algorithm, still takes it as axiomatic that consciousness results from (or is identical to) the chemistry of the brain. If any of them ever heard me talk (not that this is likely), they would dismiss me as a rank amateur and a fuzzy mystic.

And the last criticism would not be entirely unfair. I don't feel fuzzy at all about this topic, but it is inherently mystical, and I mean that in two ways. The first is what I have already stated: it suggests a realm beyond the physical. Some people would say that defines mysticism.

But beyond that are the writings of the mystics themselves, from the ancient Buddhists and the Taoists to Gurdjieff/Ouspensky to Richard Rose to Eckhart Tolle. They talk about consciousness in language that is, to me, far more intellectually clear than the philosophers. They understand that consciousness is the seat of certainty. They understand that "I" am not a thought, or a creator of thoughts, or even able to control my thoughts, but that I do get to witness some of my thoughts. And they stress the need to identify "self" with that "I" instead of with the thoughts themselves, as a doorway to finding something infinitely more real.

So let's end with an experiment that is patently mystical. Of all the body's reflexes, there are two that Biologists say can be either voluntary or involuntary: blinking, and breathing. So take a few minutes to make breathing a voluntary activity. Be as conscious as you can of the breath flowing in and out of your body. Watch the change that comes over your consciousness when you do this even for a few seconds. And then ask yourself: what changed? And who was aware of the change?

I read and enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I can say that I really understood it at the level I think you were hoping to induce. I'm right with you through the parts about how some things our brains do are more accessible to our consciousness (whatever we normally think of as "I") and others are totally inaccessible to it. I agree that something there is doing the watching of whatever is there to be watched, and that something—whatever it is—is real. But that's all I can say. Just as the concepts of God and no-God are equally incomprehensible to me, it makes no sense to me that a collection of purely chemical and electronic processes can be self-aware, and it also makes no sense that there's some other entity somewhere that's doing the observing (what kind of entity? where is it?) or that everything I think of as real is just a dream (whose? what is that being's reality?). I haven't had the kind of epiphany or mystical experience that makes true believers of people, although I would love to. I've tried to meditate and to be conscious of my breathing, and although on at least a few occasions I became much calmer and felt better afterwards than I felt when I started, I'm not conscious of a more profound change that occurred in me—and I don't have a clue about who was observing. I'm not saying this as a criticism of your essay, which is excellent, or your belief system. It's really more of a self-criticism, because I truly believe that there's something to experience that I just don't seem to be able to get to.

From: Kenny Felder
October 25, 2008

I've not had profound mystical experiences either. My goal in this essay is to convince people, based on absolutely everyday experience, that there is something there.

I have one more argument, which I left out of the original essay because it's a bit more esoteric, but I'll put it here because it's the last weapon in my arsenal.

Here is a picture of a black circle on a white background.

That circle exists in a file called "circle.gif" which exists on a hard drive on a Web server. That is, there are a bunch of magnetic domains, some of which point this way, and some of which point that way. "1"s and "0"s. Those magnetic domains are not arranged in a circle...which may sound obvious, but it is crucial to the point I want to make. Nothing in that file is, in any real sense, round.

When you downloaded this Web page, the server sent a sequence of electronic signals, sometimes on, sometimes off, representing "1"s and "0"s again, to your computer. There was still no circle—nothing round—anywhere in the process.

Now, your browser knows the structure of a .gif file. So it interpreted those "1"s and "0"s and rendered a series of black and white pixels. At this point, for the first time, there was really a circle—there was really something round. There were some black pixels on your computer screen, and they were more or less arranged in a circular shape.

Let me be clear about this distinction. The original file on the Web server contained all the information, or instructions, to draw a circle. But the file did not actually contain a circle itself. This distinction would become important, for instance, if we all lost the software that knows how to interpret the "1"s and "0"s in a .gif file. In that case, the file would still exist, but there would not be a circle any more.

It's very analogous to the word "circle" written in letters, or spoken as two auditory syllables. That word is not round in any sense, but it refers to roundness, if you know how to interpret it. It is roundness in potentia.

But once the black-and-white pixels are on the screen, you don't need to interpret them into a circle: they are a circle, round, in reality.

Hopefully, you're thinking "this makes perfect sense, as far as it goes, but I have no idea what point you're making or what it has to do with anything." Just bear with me a moment longer. When does a potential circle become a real circle? When something in the physical universe is actually arranged in a circular pattern. That something might be as insubstantial as pixels on a screen, or it might be much more substantial like ink on a printer page, but it exists in a real position in space. An alien from Mars could see the circle on the screen or on the page, but not in the file or in the word.

Now, close your eyes and imagine a circle. See it as vividly as you can. See exactly where it is in space, how far from you, how big, what thickness, what color. Focus on the image for a while.

Then ask yourself this question. That circle that you see: is it really round, or is it only instructions for round-ness? Does it physically exist, or does it only refer to something physical?

As you stare at it, I think it's impossible to deny that it is really a circle, right now. It is round. No interpretation is needed. It exists in a certain place in your visual universe, and it traces out a circular pattern there.

But of course, unlike the computer screen or printed page, your imagination contains nothing at all in the physical universe that is arranged in that circular pattern. Your neurons aren't. You can answer the question "where is the circle?" but never the question "what is the circle made of?" And yet, you can't deny how gosh-darned circular that circle is.

Does that prove anything? Does it prove that consciousness is a separate entity, distinct from all physical reality? To me it does. But it is not a logical Geometric proof that you can't argue your way around, and it isn't meant to be. Remember that my whole goal here is to induce an "Aha!" experience. I know at least one student for whom none of my other thought experiements worked, but this one did.

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