Perhaps the hardest thing in the search for knowledge is to keep an open mind. Whether philosopher or physicist, Sherlock Holmes or Stephen Hawking, the important thing is not to prejudge where the answer to a problem might lie. And this is difficult. We are creatures of habit, and an approach which has proven successful at numerous times in the past will always be favoured over a less tried-and-tested method. Which is of course where the problem lies: it’s difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, especially when the old tricks still continue to pay off.

Science is not perhaps an old dog – not as old as philosophy or religion – but its method has certainly reaped benefits. As I suggested in my previous Phlog, this is perhaps one reason why it has developed certain blind spots – intractable problems which do not seem to respond so readily to scientific method. Chief among these – and of keen interest to philosophers – is the so-called problem of consciousness. In a nutshell, it is this: in a world which science tells us is made up of purely physical objects and interactions, how does it come about that certain beings are conscious?

On the face of it, this looks like a problem that science is well-equipped to solve. It has been long established that the organ of consciousness is the brain, and that mental states would seem to correspond to electrical activity between neurons in various parts of it. Furthermore, close study of the brain would seem to argue against the old assumption that there exists a mind or soul which may potentially exist separately from its physical host. Specific damage to areas of the brain will affect consciousness in various ways – not only whether someone is conscious or not, but also how they are aware, their ability to function in certain ways, perform certain tasks, and so on. In short, the case for the physical brain’s central role in thought and awareness seems beyonddoubt.

So why is there still a problem? Firstly, whilst neuroscience and psychology seem to be doggedly on the trail of how this or that function is performed, what area of the brain is involved in certain mental states, and so on, it is – I am sure they will admit – still a pretty fuzzy picture. As to the precise correlation between the organisation and activity of neurons and specific mental contents, there is still a huge gap. And there are some perplexing findings: for instance, a recent study concluded that a single neuron may be responsible for holding your memory of a person or event (e.g. the actress Halle Berry – see here), which is not something scientists predicted. But such perplexities aside, it seems fairly undeniable that such an approach will at some stage provide us with a good working model of how the brain produces consciousness – a complex model, with some mind-bending findings and a splash of quantum weirdness, perhaps, but a model nonetheless. However, when this day comes, the real problem of consciousness – what philosophers and neuroscientists call the ‘hard problem’ – will remain largely untouched. But why?

It sounds belittling to imply that the sort of scientific endeavour described above is in some way ‘easy’, but this is not what’s meant. When philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists distinguish between the ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems of consciousness, they are merely pointing out that, as regards what consciousness really is, and how it comes to be there, we simply don’t have a clue.

Not all philosophers would agree with the above characterisation. Some, in fact, want to argue that there is no genuinely ‘hard’ problem, just a series of confusions and a large amount of wilful mystification. As should be by now obvious, I don’t agree with them, but rather side with other philosophers who consider that – for various reasons – the sort of approach which seems dominant in contemporary science will never fully account for consciousness (in the hardest sense). I’ll try to explain why.

Imagine that someone were to make an exact replica of you using Meccano, or some other handy material. For argument’s sake, let’s say this is nano Mecanno, which is so small that we can build lifelike organisms out of it so that people can’t tell the difference between organic and inorganic humans – this will be ringing bells for Battlestar Galactica fans! Now, the question is: Is the Mecanno ‘you’ conscious? It is a machine, driven by fiendishly advanced nano-Mecanno technology, but at the end of the day it is still an inorganic machine. So, you may be tempted to say “No, it’s not conscious, because machines aren’t alive, and only living things can be conscious”. Fair enough. Your toaster is quite complex and functional, but no one would dream of saying that your toaster is alive. But what if someone were to point out that living bodies are really no more than organic machines? At some level, we are all just cogs and levers, aren’t we? We can make this picture less Victorian if we spice it up with quantum thingies zinging all over the shop, appearing in two places at once, etc, and ask ourselves the question again: Aren’t we just biological machines? It seems more tempting now, doesn’t it? If life is just an arrangement of very small parts in a certain formation and interaction, then what is there to stop us one day building life from scratch using other basic materials – silicon-based life-forms as opposed to carbon-based, perhaps? (Obviously, I’m out of my depth here, and relying almost wholly on Star Trek: The Next Generation). Even if the dream of Mecanno or Silicon Man is ultimately unfeasible, it is nonetheless an interesting thought experiment, for it tests our notions of what life and consciousness ultimately are. For the sort of philosophers who reject the hard problem, Mecanno man is not only possible, it is more or less a true picture of the world. There is no special ‘stuff’ which makes us conscious, but only the specific arrangement of physical parts. But for myself, and other philosophers, a fully conscious Mecanno man is impossible. We would simply create a very lifelike robot, but which ultimately is not conscious in the way that humans are. It is a simulacrum or life-like copy of consciousness, not consciousness itself.

So, what makes consciousness special? It is easy here to fall into a trap. It’s like the old schoolboy trick question: “Which hand do you wipe your arse with?” Either you’re a materialist, or you’re a dualist; either consciousness is just an arrangement of physical parts, or else you’re a woolly headed loon – there is no third option. In arguing that consciousness is not just an arrangement of physical parts, it seems that we must be admitting that it is non-physical or immaterial. This trap is a direct consequence of what philosopher Gilbert Ryle famously called, “the dogma of the ghost in the machine”, a view springing from the dualism of French philosopher René Descartes, which saw mind and body as two separate substances; the body is just a machine, whilst the true mind or essential self is an immaterial ‘ghost’. The problems of dualism are well known: If mind and body are different types of substance, how do they interact? If mind is ‘immaterial’, where is it? How can it exist ‘inside’ a body? But rejecting dualism need not lead us to accept materialism. Rejecting the possibility of Mecanno man is not the same as supposing that we are, in truth, ghostly soul-like entities that can all crowd onto a pinhead. Ideally, we would like a third option – one which involves toilet paper, as it were; which rejects the idea that we are ‘only matter’ without also creating ghosts and other ‘immaterial entities’. And we can do this – it’s just tricky. To do it, we must first say that the standard scientific method does not capture all that consciousness is. It is a method, and not a court of appeal as regards the right to existence. Scientific method might explain how brain states produce or are equivalent to certain mental states, or explain the role of neurons in certain types of brain activity, but such a picture is always from the outside not the inside; the objective, not the subjective (and ‘subjective’ here needn’t mean ‘unsubstantiated’ or ‘deluded’). In short, a certain type of scientific understanding does not explain ‘what it is like’ to be you.

This last phrase goes back to Thomas Nagel, who first introduced it in his famous paper, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Nagel argued that a successful theory of consciousness must explain not only the physical role of the brain, but how this gives rise to subjective experience, or what has come to be termed qualia. Examples of qualia include the specific taste of something, the way something looks or feels, the quality that specific sensations of pain or pleasure have. Mecanno man might taste some soup and say, “That’s too salty”, but whilst he might be right – his nano-Mecanno taste sensor technology could identify the presence of too much salt in the soup – there would be no taste of ‘saltiness’ that he was experiencing. When we talk of the inability of words to capture an experience, it is often this qualitative aspect that we are referring to. The only way we can really know what another’s experience is like is to try to replicate their experience – to taste the soup ourselves – and even then we can’t completely be sure (it might taste different to you). But it is not so much that these experiences are private or ineffable that makes them special, but rather the very fact that we have them – that we are conscious at all. If there were a world of Mecanno men, without consciousness – for whom there would be nothing it is like to have any experience – then that world would be lacking something. The very qualities that it would be lacking – the self-conscious, subjective experience of being aware and sentient – are the very things that even a successful solution to the ‘easy’ problem would leave unexplained. How does matter give rise to mind? Somehow – we assume – it switches the light on, but we don’t know how, or how such a thing fits into our understanding of the physical universe. It’s a real stumper!

But if consciousness is not a special ‘something’, and we are not ghosts in the machine, but we also do not want to be simply machines, where does that leave us? Personally, I think the problem lies with scientism, or the idea that the scientific method, and its accompanying materialist assumptions, is the only one necessary for a full understanding of the world. The problem is, however, that consciousness is not a ‘thing’ – not in the sense that we can put our finger on it or isolate it for study in the same way that we can with most physical phenomena. As such, it is slippery. We can, of course, gain a partial understanding of it through traditional scientific methods, but, unless scientism can be dethroned or adapted, or we can in some way revise our fundamental concepts so as to accommodate qualia, we will always be left with an aspect of consciousness that is mysterious and beyond reach – even though it is the most obvious thing in the world, and the closest thing to you at this very moment. Infuriating, isn’t it?