X-Message-Number: 7964
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 09:22:15 -0800 (PST)
From: Joseph Strout <>
Subject: clarification re. understanding consciousness

I see that my previous comment -- that perhaps biology and physics will
not be enough to explain consciousness -- was misconstrued.  I did not say
that *science* would be insufficient to explain it; I merely said this
about biology and physics.

I'm talking about the "hard problem" of consciousness, as it's put by
David Chalmers.  (I think yesterday I quoted Dennet, but I actually meant
Chalmers -- such is what you get for a human brain!)  The "easy problems"
of consciousness are things like, How does consciousness correlate with
brain activity?  What kind of processing can we do without consciousness?
What happens in our brain when we become aware of something?  And also
what seems to be Bob's emphasis: what kind of brain activity correlates
with emotion, pain, and other basic feelings?

The "hard problem" of consciousness is: how is it that ANY system of
physical stuff can have any awareness at all?  Whence comes
"consciousness"?  Can you imagine (as some believe they can) a great
superbrain more intelligent and adaptive than ourselves, which yet
experiences nothing?  If so, why do WE have conscious experience?  If not,
why is it that such a brain must be conscious?  This is a fundamental
question, and biology and physics alone will not provide an answer.  We
need some *new* types of theories.  Chalmers proposes -- and I suspect he
is right -- that consciousness is somehow an attribute of the universe
which must be dealt with as its own thing.  We'll need theories of
consciousness, in addition to theories of physics.

This is not to say that consciousness is anything mystical; just that it's
a kind of phenomenon we don't yet have a good framework for.  Perhaps
(Chalmers suggests, and Bob detests) consciousness arises wherever there
is information processing.  (Yes, in this case, a thermostat would have
a tiny little insignificant bit of consciousness.)  Perhaps it arises from
only certain kinds of information processing; some (in "A History of the
Mind", author forgotten at the moment) have proposed that it requires
reverberating feedback loops between sensory and motor areas.  Perhaps it
arises from reverberating magnetic fields.  In any of these cases, physics
and biology won't tell us WHY consciousness should arise from whatever it
arises from.  We'll need a new fundamental proposition, "consciousness
arises from X!" and have to accept it on a level with "photons propagate
through space!".

Of course, some scientists think that when the easy problems are solved,
the hard problem will disappear -- just as "life" seemed hard before it
was found to be merely a semantic category, definable as you please.
The two are probably quite analogous.  Only time will tell!  It's #2 on my
list of Great Mysteries I hope to see resolved one day (#1 is the Fermi
paradox).

Warm regards,
-- Joe

,------------------------------------------------------------------.
|    Joseph J. Strout           Department of Neuroscience, UCSD   |
|               http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/  |
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