Can brain alone account
for consciousness - our inner awareness and felt experience? This is the classic "mind-body
problem" - and, all my life, I've been obsessed with it. Can the physical facts of
the brain explain the mental experiences of the mind? Yes? No? Both answers seemed
improbable if not impossible. Pursuing my passion, I did a
doctorate in brain research. But then worldly opportunities,
and the exigencies of life, intervened, taking me
in different directions. 30 years passed...
while, out of sight, my obsession grew. Finally, I had no choice but to
re-address the mind-body problem - what were recent
advances in brain science? What were latest ideas
in philosophy of mind? In the late 1990's,
Closer To Truth was born. What I didn't know then was that
Closer To Truth would become my journey, ongoing now
for almost 20 years. The fundamental question
continues to be: can brain alone explain consciousness? I'm Robert Lawrence Kuhn and
looking back, Closer To Truth has been my journey to find out. In 1999, producing Closer
To Truth's first season, I conducted roundtable
discussions on "What is Consciousness?"
and "Do Brains Make Minds?" Among the participants were two
leading philosophers of mind - John Searle and David Chalmers. John was then Professor of the
Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of
California Berkeley. Dave was then Professor of
Philosophy and Associate Director of the Center for
Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. I've now spoken at length with
John and Dave three times - in 1999, 2007, and 2014. In 1999, I had gone into our
on-camera discussions pretty much holding the two
traditional solutions to the mind-body problem - two
simple choices: pure materialism and robust dualism. Materialism meaning
that eventually neuroscience would explain consciousness. Dualism meaning that, in
addition to brain, some kind of non-physical substance
would be required. I was indeed naïve. And John and Dave showed me
how intricate the mind-body problem really was... John, you're one of the leading
philosophers of mind, one of your recent books is The
Mystery of Consciousness. Why is consciousness
such a mystery? Well, we don't know
how to explain it. We're doing pretty well in
physics, even though we do have puzzling areas like Quantum
mechanics, but we do not have an adequate theory of how the brain
causes conscious states, and we don't really have an adequate
theory of how consciousness fits into the universe. What are some of the
traditional explanations? Don't critique them now;
I'll let you do that later... It's hard to resist
critiquing them! But the standard view, the one
that the man or the woman on the street believes, I think,
is probably dualism. And that's the idea that, in
addition to the physical world, there's a separate
mental world. In opposition to that, I
think the prevailing view among the professional experts, among
psychologists and philosophers and neurobiologists,
is materialism. And that's the idea that
the material world is all that there is, and consciousness
either has to be reduced to brain states or computational
states or something like that, or else it doesn't
really exist at all. So, the big choices today are
between dualism, that says we live in two worlds, a mental and
a physical, and materialism that says, no, it's all material. Dave, you like to talk about
hard problems and easy problems, tell us what those are. There are different
problems of consciousness. Problem one is the problems of
behavior, how it is that we get around in the world
and we respond. I look at you and say,"that's
Robert," I'm talking about you, I can behave towards
you and point to you. That's what I call
the relatively easy problems of consciousness. How is it that I can behave in
this conscious way toward you? Now, the hard problems of
consciousness are the problems of first person
subjective experience. While I'm doing all this,
looking at you and talking to you, I'm having
subjective experiences of you. It feels like something. I have visual images of you;
I have thoughts about you running through
my mind and so on. Maybe even a little
bit of emotional affect. Why is all that going on? Why is there a first
person inner life at all? It's probably connected
in some way to my brain. But why do my brain
processes produce those subjective experiences. That's the hard problem. Dave argued - in 1999 -
that consciousness could not be explained by the brain alone. In a later episode in that same
year, I asked him whether there could be any evidence that
might make him change his mind? Dave, your book The Conscious
Mind makes the case for mind and consciousness being a
primary element of reality. What could brain research
discover to make you change your mind? Well, I started off
life as a materialist. And materialism is a
very attractive scientific and philosophical doctrine. But what brain research is
giving us is a set of really systematic correlations
between events in the brain and states of mind. But correlation isn't the same
as explanation or reduction. I think there's actually a
systematic reason to think there's always going to be a
substantive bridge between these two different dimensions. So, you're saying that it's
logically impossible for any data in brain research to
make you change your mind? Brain research is
providing more and more data about the correlations. The question about how you
interpret the data is always a philosophical question. I think this whole debate so
far is totally misconceived, and I can't resist saying
at least a little bit why. Of course we're going to
find correlations, but then the next step is as with the
germ theory of disease: find out causal relations. Now, that's how we're going
to do it in brain research. And I think when we do that,
then all these old-fashioned categories about, is it
sufficiently materialistic? Or is it really dualistic? Those will just
fall by the wayside. Consciousness is not going to be
reducible to mental states for a kind of trivial reason,
namely, it's got a first-person ontology, it only exists
when people experience it, it's subjective in that sense,
and brain states are objective. So, you don't get a reduction
in the classical sense, but you still get a
scientific explanation. That's all I think that any
one of you guys really wants. To hear Dave describe "the hard
problem" - for which he became famous - and to hear John
critique traditional ways of envisioning consciousness -
opened a new world for me, simple answers would
now no longer suffice. In 2006, as Closer To Truth
Producer/Director Peter Getzels and I were preparing the
first season of our new format, I had to feature both
John Searle and Dave Chalmers. I contacted Dave, then at
Australian National University - and waited for Dave to
come to the United States - in late 2007. Our approach to consciousness
was now sharper - recognizing the importance of "the hard
problem" and what it might mean for the nature of reality. The question we posed to Dave: "can consciousness
defeat materialism?" Well, I was trained
as a scientist. My attitude was that
materialism had to be true, and there was just this
little problem reconciling materialism with consciousness. Only over time have I begun to
think this is more and more of a problem, and in fact, maybe
it's impossible to reconcile consciousness with materialism. You've articulated three
subdivisions that you can think about materialism in. What are they? Well, the basic problem for
materialism about consciousness is something like this:
you could know all about the physical processes
in the world, in the brain, and not know
about consciousness. Somebody could know about
every last neuron in the brain involved in psycholo-processing. They wouldn't know about
the experience of seeing red. So, what's a materialist
to do about that? The three different
attitudes that can take. First attitude, the one I
call the type A attitude, is just to take the hard
line, deny consciousness. There's just nothing here that
needs explaining, there's not really a phenomenon
of consciousness at all. You explain everything there
is to say about the brain, end of story. Type B materialism is
the one that says, okay, there is this phenomenon of
consciousness, and there is a gap between our knowledge of
the brain and our knowledge of consciousness, maybe
even a fundamental gap. But that's only really a
conceptual gap; it's a gap in knowledge of a level of thought. So, knowledge of the brain will
never produce knowledge of consciousness, but they say, in
nature, consciousness and the brain are one and
the same thing. From the outside, you look at
a brain, and you see a brain. From the inside, you think
about a brain, and it seems to you like consciousness. But it's just one
thing in nature. That's a very attractive
view in many ways. On this view, there's two
basic kinds of concepts. There's physical concepts, when
we look at physical processes from the outside. And there's mental concepts,
when we look at these processes from the inside. And these are two
difference ways of thinking. But on this view, there are two
different ways of thinking about one underlying reality. Okay. Third approach to materialism. So, another view is that
there is a gap between physical processes and consciousness
in our current theories. But right now, we're not
smart enough to figure out the connection between brain
processes and consciousness. But if we do enough more science
and enough more philosophy, perhaps in the ideal limit,
we'll be able to deduce the whole story about consciousness
from the physical story. It's just that
we're not there yet. Now, my own view is,
there's a principle gap here. Neuroscience gives us structure
of the brain and dynamics of what we do, and that's all
it's ever going to give us. More and more structure,
more and more dynamics, more and more behavior. And that's always going
to leave, in principle, a gap to consciousness. Dave's path paralleled my own -
at first, assuming materialism to "obviously" be true,
brain research just requiring more time... then, gradually
coming to realize that consciousness posed
a formidable problem. John Searle, I'm sure,
would reject the notion that materialism cannot
explain consciousness. John has been one of my
intellectual heroes - first, for making consciousness respectable
for intellectual discourse. Second, for his
rigorous critique of traditional theories. In late 2007, I had
to speak with John. We met in his Berkeley home. John, the prevailing view among
philosophers, and certainly most scientists, is materialism -
that only the physical is real, people who don't like that,
point to consciousness as their single arrow that
can kill materialism. You don't agree with that. Well, it depends of course as;
we like to say, on how you define these terms. And materialism is driven -
the intelligent materialism is driven by the conviction that
the account that we're getting of reality in subjects like
physics and chemistry and molecular biology and
evolutionary biology, that that ultimately gives us an account
of how the world works. And I think that's right. If that's materialism,
then I'm a materialist. But I also think consciousness
exists and it has an irreducible subjective ontology. It only exists when it's
experienced by a human or an animal subject,
by a conscious agent. But now, if you put those two
together, then my task is to make the existence of
consciousness in my sense - the real thing, not some ersatz
or simulation - the real thing, consistent with what we know
about how the world works. I claim that can be done. So, consciousness
does not refute my version of materialism. But it does refute
certain tradition versions. What does that tell me? Let's get rid of this
terminology of materialism and mentalism and so on, and
just describe the facts. I think in terms of the
mind/body problem, that's right. But, there's something
much deeper at stake in these arguments because most
religion is founded on the existence of two
different kinds of worlds. No, I think that's right. And what I am trying to do is
describe a version of what we know about the world from
physics, chemistry, and all the other hard sciences - and even
imagine these carried to the limit where we had a perfect
knowledge, how that is consistent with the
existence of an irreducible qualitative subjective
consciousness. I think I can do that. But that wouldn't satisfy people
who'd believe this for some religious reasons - who want
us to get an immortal soul. And I want to say you
don't get an immortal soul out of physics. [laughs] Okay, there are some other kinds
of dualistic views, some that, take quantum mechanics and
show that consciousness is important to make
quantum mechanics work. Others would point to some kind
of panpsychism that there is some protoconsciousness
in almost everything. That's the only
way to explain it. So, the concept of consciousness
destroying the foundations of materialism has a lot
of different tentacles. Well, when we get on to this
subject, people tend to lose their normal caution. I think intellectually we ought
to proceed one step at a time. There's nothing in what we
know about the universe that would lead me to believe to
think we have a good reason for believing in panpsychism, that
consciousness is everywhere. And there's a real
problem with panpsychism. And that is it doesn't give
a coherent account of how consciousness comes to us
in the units that it does come to us in. If you're going to say,
"The thermos, that is conscious -
then what about a screw? And each molecule in the screw?" Consciousness cannot be
described as a kind of jam spread thinly over the whole
universe because we know it comes in discrete units. So, that's not a serious option. But now, another option that
some people have adopted is the idea that in order to account
for quantum mechanics, you've got to suppose that
consciousness is a basic feature of the universe because
it's what brings the collapse of the wave function. And I want to say, just my
experience has been whenever philosophers and indeed even
some physicists, when they talk about, quantum mechanics, that
the density of hot air tends to increase exponentially. But nothing, it seems to me,
that I know about quantum mechanics, would
suggest that you can't make sense of the experimental
results unless you suppose that consciousness
is sort of a basic building block of the universe. You see, on my view,
consciousness is a higher-level feature of the brain caused
by lower level brain processes. You can no more have
it existing prior to the existence of its
neurobiological bayside. Then you could have any
other higher-level feature, such as digestion. What would seem to follow
from what you're saying is that in some ultimate science
we should be able to create consciousness. In principle, I see no obstacle. If we knew exactly how, in
detail, I mean, really down to the finest detail, how to
brain caused consciousness, then I don't see any obstacle
in principle to building a conscious machine. You see, the thing you
always want to remember is, the brain is a machine. It's a machine made out of
organic, a substance made out of big carbon-based molecules. There's nothing
special about carbon. It could made out of
anything if you could. If you knew the principles. We don't know the principles. Hearts do not have to be made
out of muscle tissues in order to pump blood. We don't know what
you have to have to do it with consciousness. But, there's one mistake we
got to avoid, and that is the mistake of supposing
that if you simulate it, you've duplicated it. A perfect simulation of the
brain, say on a computer, would no longer thereby be
conscious than a perfect simulation of a rainstorm on
a weather predicting computer will leave us all wet. If you adopt what I think is
what we know about how the world works, we know
that consciousness is caused by brain processes. If we knew in detail
exactly how the brain does it, then we ought to be able
to do it artificially. John's approach was so
richly textured - it changed my way of thinking. Rejecting old categories. A nuanced materialism,
enabling a "first person" irreducible subjective
consciousness. John had a profound
impact on me. More than ever, I determined
to follow the field. Almost seven years later, in
2014, at the 20th anniversary of the Tucson Conference, Toward
a Science of Consciousness, a milestone event in the study
of consciousness, I was eager to again meet John Searle
and Dave Chalmers. Had they refined their thinking? What were the latest trends,
the hot ideas? Are you seeing any
kinds of convergence? Are you seeing more divergence? You know, it is a field
which by its nature is letting a thousand flowers bloom
and they're blooming in different directions. So, yeah, on the materialist
side of the story we have the computationalists who say it's
all about computation basically. You've got the, let's call them
the biologicalists, who say it's all about the neural wetware. And then you've got the quantum
mechanics theorists who think it's all some fundamentally
quantum phenomenon. All of these views are getting
uptake in different ways. And do you see them as
ever working together? I mean, I think there's
certainly prospects for convergence there. You might believe it's
really the computation that fundamentally does the work
in giving you consciousness. It's structures of information
for example, to take one leading current idea. It's the information
structures that get integrated; that gives you consciousness. But, at the same time, we might
think all that's got to be grounded in certain specific
biological wetware in a human brain, and that biological
wetware is going to be a key part of the story, and maybe
there's some way to work quantum mechanics in there,
but I haven't quite figured that out yet. And in that model, you do not
need a panpsychist's approach. Well, it's interesting. There are people - Giulio
Tononi, for example, has put forward the integrated
information theory of consciousness which is really
a leading contender right now. And his view is that
consciousness is the integration of information. In the human brain there's
a huge amount of information being integrated all the
time and therefore a very high degree of consciousness. But, in simpler systems - a dog,
a mouse, a fly, a computer - there's still some
integration of information. So, on his theory, there's some
little bit of consciousness even at the fundamental
level of nature. A photon, an electron
integrates a few little bits of information. On his view there'll be a little
bit of consciousness there. So, interestingly, even this
computationalist theory ends up going in the
direction of panpsychism. When you look at panpsychism,
there does seem to be a growing number of people who either
fully endorse it themselves, or respect it enough to say that
we must consider it because everything else is not working. Is this a trend or is this just
a few people who are making a lot of noise? I'd say it's a trend. The jury is still out. It's interesting we're getting
convergence from people coming from very different directions. Some people very much on the
pure philosophy side have grown to take it very seriously. But then we've got
neuroscientists who are taking it seriously and
people coming from physics, who are taking it seriously. Now, that said, I think there
are still some pretty serious problems for the
panpsychist view. How is it that these little bits
of consciousness at the bottom level - photons or electrons in
my brain - every one of them a little conscious subject
on the panpsychist view. How do they all add up to
my conscious experience? How do you put together the
billions of little conscious agents in my brain, and get the
kind of familiar consciousness that we know and love? That's what people
call the combination problem for panpsychism. It's an awfully hard problem. It's an aspect of the original
hard problem of consciousness. Astounding was the proliferation
and diversity of opposing ideas. If I'd expected "progress" as
convergence, what I found was divergence - an explosion
of wild and radical ways - all trying to
explain consciousness. But that, to me, was more
revealing than confusing. A clue? Perhaps consciousness
is not a normal scientific "problem to solve". I finally got what Dave was
saying - consciousness is so strange that it may demand a
whole new aspect of reality, like a new force in physics,
or even panpsychism, where everything has a
kind of "proto-consciousness." I couldn't wait to hear
John Searle's reaction to the explanatory mayhem -
especially to panpsychism. Panpsychism is the idea
that everything is conscious. At least at some... My watch has a little
bit of consciousness. It's busy ticking away
and my belt is conscious. It's thinking, why does this guy
fasten me so tight and so on. I don't think that's
a serious view. I think if you've got
panpsychism, you know you made a mistake. Now, some of these other views,
the idea that maybe we should look at consciousness at a lower
level than that of the neuron, well, let's be open. We know that the neuron is
the defining feature of known systems of consciousness. But maybe features of neurons
at the subcellular level will be important. That seems to me
open for investigation. The subcellular aspects of
neurons are no different, as far as we know, than all sorts
of other cells in the body; in your liver and your bladder
and your heart, and there's no consciousness there. So... So, what's going on, right? Well, that's an obvious
objection to these guys, and I assume they
have an answer to it. Since I don't believe
what they're doing anyway, I'm the wrong guy to
invent an answer for them. If you look at all of them;
if you look at biological naturalism, integrated
information, quantum theories; they all are kind
of an identity theory. They're all saying that
consciousness is this thing. Yeah. And, in that sense, they all
have this ontological problem for me because how can
this subjective feeling be that thing? Be something else, okay. Whatever the thing. It'd be something else. No, that's a beautiful question. I'm sorry you're not a
professional philosopher. You'd have been
great in that field. (laughs) But I now think, which I did not
think 20 years ago, that we suffer more from our
tradition than we're aware of. There are two traditions,
and we're very much prisoners of these traditions. First is the tradition of God,
the soul and immortality that says consciousness is not
part of the physical world. It couldn't be part
of the physical world. It's part of the soul,
and the soul is not part of the physical world. Now, there's a rival tradition
that thinks it's opposed to that, but accepts
the worst mistake. This tradition is a tradition of
scientific materialism that says consciousness is not part
of the physical world. So, it's not suitable
subject for scientific investigation at all. Those look opposed to each
other but they both make exactly the same mistake; they refuse to
recognize that consciousness is as much a part of our biology
as growth, digestion, mitosis, meiosis, you name it;
any biological process. It's just that consciousness is
a peculiar biological process and it seems to go on only in
neuronal structures of the kind we have in our brains, and then
it's got this amazing property. It only exists insofar
as it's experienced. The qualitative experiential
subjective character of consciousness is the defining
feature of consciousness, and our problem is to figure
out how the hell does the brain do that? I could listen to John
and Dave for hours. I love their commitment
to consciousness and their passion for truth. I'm entranced by the
flow of their arguments. Oddly to me, it doesn't make
much difference that they espouse opposite views of the
deep nature of consciousness. Notwithstanding all the
discoveries of brain research - there seems little
progress on consciousness. Frankly, no progress. But, wait, isn't "no progress"
a kind of progress? After all, traditional
materialism claims that progress in understanding the
brain will lead to progress in understanding consciousness. But that hasn't really happened. Why? There are two
contesting reasons. The first assumes that
consciousness is a problem, when it is not. The second is that there's
something about consciousness not related to current brain
research, perhaps some exotic physical thing, perhaps
something not physical at all. John Searle asserts that
consciousness is produced by the brain and
nothing more is needed - a philosophical position he
labels, "biological naturalism". Dave Chalmers contends
that the inner experience of consciousness is so radically
different from anything found in the brain - or for that matter,
in the entire physical world - that something beyond our
current physics is needed. Dave offers panpsychism - where
everything, every particle, is "proto-conscious". It is not for me to adjudicate
between John and Dave - between a sophisticated
biological naturalism and a contemporary panpsychism. I agree with both in rejecting
traditional materialism - and I sort of side with Dave in
requiring more than biology. But, I'd bet we need new
ways of thinking to get... closer to truth. For complete interviews
and for further information, please visit
www.closertotruth.com
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Non-Material? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-6hosFAObI