The Mystery of Consciousness
Out of all of the clumps of atoms in the universe, you are one of the lucky ones. Because you are one of the clumps that woke up. You are one of the clumps that is conscious, that is aware; that exists, not just as matter, but also as mind.
Why are some atom clumps like humans conscious, but other atom clumps like rocks aren’t? This is one of the central mysteries of our existence.
At first, you might think that the answer to this mystery is obvious. “We’re conscious because we have brains,” you might say. And this explanation certainly has merit. We can directly connect certain conscious experiences to certain parts of the brain lighting up, for example. Thus strongly suggesting that mind is nothing but an offshoot of matter. While this explanation is tempting, however, I think that there are serious reasons to doubt it.
Personally, I am simply unable to comprehend how mind can come out of matter. Matter is just unconscious atoms, so it makes no sense to me for a clump of unconscious atoms to suddenly wake up and turn into a conscious creature. Admittedly, there are lots of things that make no sense to me, so this isn’t saying a lot. However, I am inclined to agree with the philosopher Colin McGinn, who says of consciousness emerging from matter that “You might as well assert that numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb.” To me, it makes no sense that certain atom clumps just spit out consciousness the way a printer spits out paper.
This suggests that consciousness is more than just a clump of atoms; that it is a kind of extra ingredient that is added onto these atoms. Even if consciousness was just atoms obeying the laws of physics, however, this wouldn’t solve the problem. In the words of physicist Adam Frank:
Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself. Some consciousness researchers might think that they are being hardnosed and concrete when they appeal to the authority of physics. When pressed on this issue, though, we physicists are often left looking at our feet, smiling sheepishly and mumbling something about “it’s complicated.” We know that matter remains mysterious just as mind remains mysterious, and we don’t know what the connections between those mysteries should be. Classifying consciousness as a material problem is tantamount to saying that consciousness, too, remains fundamentally unexplained.
“Rather than trying to sweep away the mystery of mind by attributing it to the mechanisms of matter,” Adam concludes, “we must grapple with the intertwined nature of the two.”
To further explore the idea that mind is more than just matter, consider the idea of a philosophical zombie. Normally, we think about a zombie as a guy who has risen from the dead and eats people’s brains. But a philosophical zombie is something slightly different. A philosophical zombie is a person who is exactly like a normal person in every way, except that they have no experiences. They are, as the modern schizoposting community would say, an “NPC.” Physically, they do the exact same things, say the exact same things, and act the exact same way as a normal person. And even their brain chemistry is identical to that of a normal person. And yet there is no one home, so to speak. They feel nothing. A philosophical zombie exists only as matter, not as mind.
I’ve always thought that this thought experiment has some flaws, but I won’t get into them here. The point of the thought experiment is to get you to see that consciousness is more than just physical atom clumps, because it is possible for the exact same atom clump to act in the exact same way, but to be missing the extra ingredient of consciousness.
(A note to the non-layperson: Just to be clear, I don’t actually think that consciousness is a “extra ingredient” added on to physical systems, and I don’t think that these physical systems are just “atom clumps.” I am writing about things this way to highlight to the layperson how mysterious consciousness is. I think that consciousness is probably an aspect of a unitive reality that transcends the mind/matter dichotomy [i.e. neutral monism]).
To think more about the “extra ingredient” of consciousness, consider what philosophers call “qualia.” Consider the “redness” of red, for example. Red is physical wavelengths, and physical neurons fire to process it. But the “redness” of red it not just a wavelength, and it is not just neurons firing. When we look at something red, it has a certain “redness” to it that is indescribable, and that cannot be reduced to mere brain chemistry. It is a direct experience, not just a whir of information processing going on between our ears.
This indescribable “redness” is what philosophers call a “quale,” the plural of which is “qualia.” Other examples of qualia are the “saltiness” of a taste of salt, for example, or the “clarinetness” of a sound from a clarinet. In short, qualia are the ineffable impressions that make up our experiences.
Notice how qualia are not made of matter. The definition of matter is that which has mass and takes up space. And you cannot say how much mass the “redness” of red has, for example, or how much physical space the “saltiness” of a taste of salt takes up. The brain weights about 3 pounds, but it makes no sense to say that the present moment of experience also weights about 3 pounds. Why? Because the brain and the mind are different things.
This creates a problem. The brain is a physical thing, so how can the experiences that come from it not be physical?
Various theories have been proposed to solve this problem. Some of them say that the mind is actually just the brain, but I’ve already explained why I don’t find this view satisfactory. Some of them say that only the mind exists, and that the material world is an illusion. Some of them involve quantum physics, but I’m too dumb to understand quantum physics, and the people who study it probably are too. As the quantum physicist Richard Feynman said: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.”
I have my own theory of consciousness, and at some point I will probably write a post explaining it. In short, I think that the same way that water has a solid state and a liquid state, the universe has a consciousness state and a matter state. I think that matter and consciousness are continuous, but I think that our psychology biases us toward seeing them as separate because it is useful from an evolutionary perspective for us to see matter as a lifeless substance to manipulate. I won’t get into that here though.
Like all true mysteries, consciousness will likely never be explained. And I see nothing wrong with that. “The existence of consciousness,” the philosopher Thomas Nagel writes, “is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness.” I agree. But I would go further. I would say that no conception of the natural order period can aspire even to the outline of completeness, whether or not it explains consciousness. The proper tool to get right down to the essence of the universe, after all, is probably not the neural net of a selfish, tribal, evolutionarily infantile primate.