An Expedient Mind: What is Consciousness?

AN EXPEDIENT MIND

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What is Consciousness?

A Hard problem?
For some, consciousness is the ultimate problem. Why am I ME? Why is it THIS particular person, the one I call ‘ME’, and not some other person, who is looking out through MY eyes? Why is it ‘ME’ who experiences, or feels, everything which happens to this physical object, which I call ‘MY BODY’? What happens to the ME-ness of ‘ME’, when my physical body dies?
I guess it is the prevalence and persistence of these questions, and the ubiquitous experience of this elusive, but persuasive thing called ‘ME’, which is the foundation for all religious belief, and gives credence to any chosen theology.
In his “Dictionary of Philosophy”, Simon Blackburn describes consciousness as ... “Possibly the most challenging and pervasive source of problems in the whole of philosophy" . The philosopher David Chalmers, editor of the Philosophy of Mind series, published by the Oxford University Press, calls it “The Hard Problem”. That terminology has been adopted by many who are writing on the topic. In a TV programme on the history of atheism, Jonathan Miller, himself a devout atheist, described consciousness as “religion’s trump card” .
Yet not everyone has accepted the prime importance of consciousness. According to William James, the American philosopher of the early 20th Century, consciousness ....

“... is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who cling to it,” he adds, “are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy.”

My View
In this essay, (or book, I really don’t know what to call it) I will argue that consciousness is not mysterious at all. It is just a procedure. When you have explained how that procedure operates, you have explained everything there is to know about consciousness.
That suggestion has often been advanced, and it has equally often been rejected as inadequate by those who hold, with Chalmers et all, that there is something else, a feeling of personal experience, which stands apart from mere mechanism.
At this point, I ask the reader to suspend judgement - to hold on to his or her objections until I have completed my explanation of how I think that consciousness procedure works. I have good reason to make that request. The procedure, which I will describe, contains within it, an explanation of why consciousness SEEMS to be a thing apart.

Procedures
A procedure is a sequence of re-arrangements which are applied to physical objects of some kind. The precise nature of these physical components, is irrelevant. A procedure could be expressed by brain cells and nerve fibres, by cogwheels, by electronic components or by any of a host of alternatives. It matters not what these components are made of. What matters, is the way they are manipulated to produce certain results. More than that - what really matters, is the significance or the interpretation placed upon these arrangements, where by ‘significance’ I mean the behavioural consequences which arise from each particular arrangement and from the ordered sequence of these arrangements.

The Supposed Non-Physical Status of Algorithms
Here is an interesting passage from The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose. Penrose is a prominent advocate for the view that there is something very strange about human intelligence and human consciousness, which must forever elude attempts to construct these characteristics using normal computer equipment. According to Penrose, it is something which, in a very mysterious way, has to do with quantum mechanics. In this passage he explains the algorithm idea and then raises an objection -

".... it is simply the logical structure of the algorithm that is significant for the 'mental state' it is supposed to represent, the particular physical embodiment of that algorithm being entirely irrelevant. As Searle points out, this actually entails a form of 'dualism'."

Dualism is the notion, originally suggested by Descartes, that there are two kinds of stuff in the brain - physical matter and some kind of non-physical 'Mind stuff'.
In my opinion, that suggestion by Searle is absurd - as is Penrose's guarded acceptance of it. And I don't think 'absurd' is too strong a word. There is no non-physical dualistic stuff associated with an algorithm. There is, moreover, nothing unique about the notion of an entity which is nothing more that an arrangement of physical matter which has a particular function.
Take, for example, a "roof". A roof is an arrangement of physical structures, such that one bit of the structure protects another by shedding rain water. It doesn't matter what the roof is made of. It is what it does, which is significant. The idea that a roof has some kind of non-physical existence of its own, separate from its physical substance, is absurd.
Other examples are legion. A balloon. What is that made of? Latex? Foil? Paper? Reinforced plastic? Does it matter? The physical material is irrelevant. All that matters, is that it serves its purpose. It is inadvisable, however, to try to dispense with the physical material if you are floating aloft in a balloon.
A roof (or a balloon) may start its existence in the mind of an architect. But it is only those who hold to a dualist view, who think that something which is mental, is non-physical. If my thesis is accepted, that idea of a roof, in the architect's head, is just another physical arrangement of the physical components of the architect's brain.
And that illustrates another aspect of this argument I have with the "non-physicalists". All too often those "non-physicalists" reject a physical explanation because it does not satisfy some criterion, which is relevant only to the non-physical theory. In a similar way, those who hold to the concept of a flat Earth, might reject the theory of a globular Earth, on the grounds that it does not provide a satisfactory explanation of what happens at the "sharp edges of the world".

Been there. Done that.
I will describe a mechanism, which, I claim, would exhibit the behavioural characteristics, of an intelligence sentient being. There are those, like David Chalmers (quoted above), who say that in doing that, I will be avoiding the real issue. He does not dispute that there is a mechanism involved, or that it may be possible to describe it, or even to construct that mechanism. He says, however, that is just ‘the easy bit’. What he claims is that consciousness is something else - the ‘hard bit (hence ‘The Hard Problem’). This extra thing, whatever it is, may ‘correlate’ with the mechanism, It may arise from it, it may be generated by it, (these are all alternative phrases that are used), but consciousness (he says) is not the same thing as the mechanism. It is claimed that, even if we were to build a robot, with a complete and functioning mechanism corresponding to conscious, that machine would not really be conscious. It would have 'behavioural consciousness'. It would not have ‘phenomenal consciousness’. It would then be what some philosophers call ‘a zombie’. That is, it would be a mechanism which behaves outwardly exactly like a human being, but which internally, was unaware of what it was doing. It would act, but it would not experience. It would be in ‘auto-pilot’. It would, in colloquial parlance, be a ‘dumb machine’. I will, in the discussion and again in the "arguments" section of this book, demolish that zombie argument. The zombie idea was dreamed up as a powerful argument against the idea of consciousness being a simple physical phenomenon. What the zombist have done, however, is, like Dr Guillotine, to prepare the instrument of their own destruction.
Anyway, a common criticism of those like myself who speak of consciousness in terms of physical mechanisms, is that we have 'missed the point', that we do not understand the mysterious experiential nature of consciousness. My response to that, is this ....
Many years ago, I shared the view that consciousness had to be something different, something beyond the physical world. That was in my youth - a really long time ago. But the point is this, I have been there, I did that. So now, having passed through that adolescent phase, I reject the notion that I do not understand the phenominalist point of view. I think that I understand it rather better than they do.

The Problem of Self-representation
I changed my mind when I started to think out how one would actually build a thinking machine - one which had all the behavioural characteristics of a conscious human. I realised then, that to behave in such a way, the system had not only to become extraordinarily complex, it had to contain an internal representation of itself.
Think about that - a system which can represent itself. How could such a self-representation be constructed? Would it contain a representation of itself containing a representation of itself? And would that self-representation then have a representation of itself containing a self-representation containing a representation of itself. And so on.
You can see the problem. You can see that this is an endless treadmill. Something has to give, otherwise this business of self-representation can never be completed. The thing which has to give, is the notion that this self-representation, which is part of the system, is part of the system. Do I confuse you? That was my intention. What I am getting at, is that to get out of this imbroglio, the system must pretend to itself, that the representation of "itself" is something which is not part of the mechanism. It has to represent the representation as something which is separate and which is never fully explained in terms of internal mechanism. If it included everything in detail it would be forced into that endless spiral which would result in mental paralysis. Like your desktop computer, it would go into 'blue-screen' mode as it ran out of memory store. It would then tell us that it had performed an illegal operation.
I think that Chalmers and others, who take a phenomenalist view of consciousness, are profoundly wrong. But I also think their mistake is understandable. If I am right, the mechanism itself, pushes that phenomenalist concept on to us. It has to do so, in order to do its job properly.

Predictions and Self-prediction
And what, you may ask, is its job? Well, its job is to promote the survival of the species. Its job is to give the species - in our case, the human species, a survival edge over other species, and over natural events which threaten extinction. More primitive species, are able to react to events, but only after those events have happened. They react using pre-programmed responses. It is what biologists and psychologists call 'a stimulous-response mechanism'. Evolution will ensure that these reactions are appropriate and are likely to promote survival. If it were not so, a given species would not survive. It would die out and exit, leaving the stage for other species, and other individuals, which had reactions better suited to the prevailing conditions.
But higher animals have developed a different kind of survival edge and one which is well suited to their environmental circumstances. They are able to anticipate events before they happen. Clearly, there are degrees of anticipation, but even the ability to anticipate by just a few seconds, would be useful. It is difficult, for example, to see how a bat could catch an insect on the wing, if it was not able to anticipate where the trajectory of that insect's flight, would take it in the next fraction of a second. The more that anticipation can be projected into the future, and the more accurate the prediction can become, the greater is the survival edge.
There are two general strategies for survival. One is to reproduce in such large numbers, that there will always be some lucky survivers to keep the species going. The second is to reproduce in small numbers, but to give each new member of the species a special survival capability. The circumstances, which favour one of these strategies over another, vary. But the circumstances in which our own ancestors found themselves, must have favoured the second stratagem. They did not choose that course. It was natural selection which enforced that evolutionary path.
Intelligence can be described as the ability to foresee the future. That is what it's for. That is why natural selection picked out the more intelligent members of a humanoid species for survival and reproduction. The ability to predict, however, is not much use unless you also have the ability to remember. That's how it works. Recognise current circumstances as an example of something encountered before, consult memory about what happened on that previous occasion, and then choose a course of action which will either avoid a repeat of unfortunate results, or promote the repetitiion of favourable cicumstances. That is what we do. We do it unconsciously, all the time, across a broad range of circumstances. And we do it consciously in a small number of selected circumstances. Note that that kind of behaviour does not work very well, if we encounter something which we have never previously experienced. And such a mechanism, because of the complex processing required could never operate so quickly as a more primitive stimulous-response mechanism. So both are needed. We need the stimulous-response mechanism to deal with a host of ordinary events and we need prediction-based responses to deal with special events. The brain is mechanism which does both these tasks. It is the process of selection and prediction, particularly the bit of it which is concerned with predicting our own behaviour in response to anticipated events, which is our consciousness.

Two Pleas
My thesis is based on these ideas. But before I present my argument - a plea, or more correctly, two pleas.
The first is a request that the reader should not jump to premature conclusions. Do not, for example, assume that if I say that consciousness is a procedure, that you can then interpret that as meaning that consciousness is a ‘mere’ procedure. That simple word ‘mere’ carries within it, an erroneous assumption. There will be nothing ‘mere’ about the mechanism which I will describe. It is a very complicated system indeed. It will be driven to do what it does, by the data which it has recorded and stored internally. You and I, even if we were the creators of an operational version of this system, would never know exactly what data was stored internally, and so we could never be able to predict, with accuracy, how the system would behave in response to unfolding events. We could guess, we might even be right on some occasions, but we would be no more able to predict with precision, what the system was going to do, than we are when we are dealing with the future behaviour of real people, or even with ourselves. Can you predict exactly how you would react tomorrow if you received sudden shocking news? That would depend, would it not, on where you were at the time, how the news was broken to you and what you were actually doing at the time? If you have never been in battlefield conditions can you predict how you would react it you were suddenly exposed to such dangers? Would you be brave? Cowardly? Many of us watch news footage of others in these situations and marvel and wonder if we would be able to cope. My point is that such self-knowledge cannot be taken for granted. There has to be a part of our brain mechanism which tries to make predictions of that kind based on past experience of our own behaviour.
My second plea is we avoid the use of inappropriate terminology. It is unfortunate that, by habit and tradition, we describe a person as “being conscious” or as “being in a state of consciousness”. What those words suggest, is that consciousness is a static condition. Somehow you land in this special state, and from then on, in some way which is never explained, you are aware of everything which is happening. And that "YOU" of course, is not the YOU of the mechanism. It's another YOU (the real YOU) who is standing on one side watching what is going on.
I don't think that's the way it works. Being conscious is a dynamic condition. I think that what happens, is that in some circumstances, an additional part of the mechanism clicks into action, and from then on, the other bits of the mechanism are being monitored, recorded and are guided by this special bit of the mechanism which predicts what is going to happen next.
It would have been better, for the sake of our understanding of these things, if we usually said that a person “is currently doing consciousness”. But that, I guess, is a forlorn hope. I will, like everyone else, adopt the traditional phraseology with just an occasional reminder that that phraseology gives a subtle “bum steer” to our understanding.

Common Objections
And finally - when I discuss these issues with friends, they often raise two objections.

(1) "A machine can never do anything which its programmer has not told it to do."
Not true. Computer programmes already exist which play chess and draughts (or chequers) rather well. Many of these are programmed to learn from experience. After a period of eductation during which they play human experts and learn from their own mistakes, they are then often able to outplay their inventors. Does that fit the notion of a computer which can do only what it has been programmed to do?

(2) "A machine made of inert physical objects like, electronic components, cannot possibly be conscious or have feelings."
I call this 'the magic juice theory'. It can be re-phrased this way -

A machine or system is not capable of doing anything unless at least one of its components has some special quality (i.e. the components have the right kind of magic juice).

From that (erroneous) statement of principle, we can reach the following illogical conclusions -

(i) You cannot make a flying machine unless you use component parts which themselves have the power of flight. Which of course, means that aeroplanes cannot fly, because none of an aeroplane's component parts have that vital ability to fly. All of them - wings, fuselage, kerosine, engines and pilot, when separated, will fall out of the sky with depressing finality.

(ii) You cannot make a calculating machine unless you use components which have an ability to count. Which means, of course, that it is impossible to build a calculating machine using inanimate cog-wheels.

(iii) You cannot make a machine which has the power to understand language unless you use components (some of) which have the power to understand language. Do any of the individual cells in your brain understand English by themselves?

(iv) You cannot make a machine which has the power to be conscious or to have feelings unless you use components which have that wonderful and mysterious power to be consciousness or to have feelings. Refuting that statement is what this book is about.

When the magic juice theory is stated in those terms, we can see how absurd it is. Of course, there are indeed some systems which owe their ability to function in a particular way, to the fact that some of their components have a special property. A hot air balloon flies because one of its components is lighter than the surrounding air which is not hot. The hot-air component is a large proportion of the whole thing, and that makes the average density of the whole thing, less than that of normal atmospheric air. So it flies. But that is not true of all systems. It is not true of an aeroplane. The point is this - the functional capabilities of certain mechanisms, is due not to the properties of its components, but to the way all the various component parts of the system contribute to that ability. We could describe an ability like that, as a 'constructed' ability. And that is what I am claiming here. Consciousness is a constructed ability. A constructed ability is what the various components of a brain (or of some other mechanisms) can do, when they operate together, in a particular way. Consciousness, in humans, is the co-operative achievement of brain cells and nerve fibres, working together in a particular way. None of these components are actually conscious in their own right.
That is my thesis. I will, in the text which follows, describe a mechanism which, I claim, would be able to do these things. I will follow that with a argument which I hope will persuade the reader that my thesis is sound.

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