John Searle -Consciousness and Causality

but in any case he has been an enormous enormous leap a positive influence on intellectual life in general on my life in particular because he is the original publisher of an article of mine which some of you may have heard of or read about it I think all the Chinese room I'll try not to mention it I'm bored to death with a Chinese room you know I feel like I got an A in that course I got that my term paper in on time and I don't have to take it over again but in any case Stephen has been an enormous see positive influence on me and I'm grateful to him immensely grateful both for organizing this conference and we're inviting me now I'm gonna talk about consciousness and first of all we asked a desk well why is it such a big deal I mean why don't we get busy and solve it as we do any other problem why is it some people even have called it the hard problem actually I think there are some interesting technical problems in neurobiology but info I know the philosophical and I don't think is a hard problem and I'm gonna give you a rather Swift solution to the philosophical problem of consciousness and then show how it opens up into some more difficult neurobiological problems okay what are the features of consciousness that make it seem puzzling or difficult well first of all every conscious state has this qualitative field to it this something it feels like that drink beer and it's different from listening to music or scratching your head or pick your favorite feeling the angst of post-industrial men under late capitalism one of my favorite conscious I don't suffer from it myself but many of my friends regard that as a limitation on my part all of these states have a certain qualitative feel to them now because of that they have a second feature namely they are subjective they're ontological II subjective in a sense that they only exist insofar as they're experienced by a human or animal subject now that subject object distinction subjective objective that's going to be a source of confusion and has been a source of confusion I'm going to sort that out in a few minutes and then a third feature of consciousness is it always unified so I don't just have I don't just hear the sound of my voice and feel the weight of my body against my shoes and feel a slight headache from the cabernet sauvignon last night but I have all of those as part of a single unified conscious field now I used to think these were three independent features a qualitative nough subjectivity and unity but now I think they're really different aspects of one common feature of consciousness and I'm by the way not the first person to have noticed this Immanuel Kant I noticed the unity of consciousness as very few philosophers have done and with it with his gift for catchy phrases he called it the transcendental unity of a perception okay I'm just calling it the unity of consciousness anyway that's what that's the target that's what we're trying to explain now of course there are lots of other features of consciousness and the most important from an evolutionary point of view is consciousness is typically directed or about something it has what philosophers call intentionality so I don't just think I think about this as opposed to thinking about that and if you we could add that as a fourth feature of consciousness qualitative 'no subjectivity unity and intentionality alright now why is that supposed to be a problem well in the end I think as I said I don't think the philosophy part is all that difficult but the neurobiology is tough and I'm gonna talk about some of the difficulties now the way I work is I when I'm working on a subject I list at the very beginning what I think I know for a fact about the subject maybe we have to give up on some of these features later but for a fact it seems to me at least initially we know the following about consciousness one it's real and as real phenomenon it's irreducible you can't get rid of it and pretend it's really something else now why is that why can't we've reduced a whole lot of things to other things we've shown that rainbows don't really exist and sunsets don't really exist both of those are illusions I optical illusion some people think color is also an illusion now why couldn't we show that consciousness is an illusion in a wave that we've shown that rainbows and sunsets and colors are illusions and the answer is very revealing the way that we showed that all of the others those others were illusions was by making a distinction between reality and appearance it appears that the Sun sets in the west by Mount Tamalpais but the reality is that their Earth rotates on its axis relative to the Sun and that gives us the illusion and so on with the other cases but now here's a striking feature about consciousness for the very existence of consciousness you cannot make the illusion reality distinction in a way that you can for sunsets colors and rainbows why because for the very existence of consciousness if you have the conscious illusion that you are conscious then you are conscious that is the illusion of consciousness is consciousness now that isn't to say you can't be mistaken we may call kinda car what's wrong about that we make all kinds of mistakes about consciousness we miss identify our own conscious States you thought you were deeply in love but it turned out you'd had a lot to drink and she looked pretty good in that light you know the whole scene was uh I gave you a mistaken conception so introspection is not a sure method but for the very existence of conscious States they are real and irreducible well why are they IRRI do scible well part of the answer is because they have this first-person or subjective ontology and for that reason they can't be reduced to anything that has a third-person or objective ontology I'm going to get back to that because that's an important point ok the second feature of consciousness along with its reality is as far as we know it is entirely caused by neurobiological processes in the brain the only a consciousness that we know to exist is human and consciousness and that exists in certain sorts of neurobiological systems now I think the most fascinating question in the biological sciences today is how exactly does the brain do it that is an amazing fact and I have to tell you when I first got interested in this subject about 30 or so years ago I thought well why don't these guys get busy and solve the problem so I went over to UCSF and there was a guy named Ben Libet who was working on this kind of stuff and I started nagging him why don't you get busy and solve the problem of consciousness and he said look in my field in neurobiology it's okay to be interested in consciousness but get tenure first get tenure first then you can work on consciousness now one sign of progress over the past thirty years is now you can get tenure by working on consciousness and I hope many of you are doing exactly that but in any case it was not regarded as a subject as a as a legitimate subject I mean figuring out the number of carbon rings in serotonin that's honest ajahn science at the end of the day people feel like they put in a day's work but consciousness it as one guy said to me we can't be interested in consciousness that's for philosophers and theologians well thanks a lot but in any case that that has changed there has been a major change okay so proposition one consciousness is real and irreducible proposition two it's entirely caused by neurobiological processes it's entirely caused we persist in thinking that the neuron is the functional unit and that may be wrong I mean maybe Jerry Edelman's right that it's whole maps of neurons or clouds of neurons I and I have colleagues in Berkeley who think you have to take big clouds of neurons and they have to have certain kinds of mathematical treatment but in any case it's going on in the brain and not in a toenail and we've got to figure out exactly how it works okay now the third proposition is that consciousness is realized in the brain it exists it's right there in the rain got all human and animal consciousness actually occurs its realized in a human brain at a higher level than that of the neuron and the synapse and probably at a higher level than that of whole groups of neurons we don't know exactly what the right anatomy and physiology is and I'll talk about some of those problems later but consciousness is real it's caused by neurobiological processes it exists itself as a neurobiological phenomenon realized in the brain and now proposition number four it functions causally its causally real in our behavior if you have I mean it's always some philosopher who will say well you know consciousness can't function causally because it's not part of the physical world and the physical world is causally closed so you get this absurd view epiphenomenalism of the view that consciousness doesn't really make any difference you think it doesn't make any difference just watch I decide to raise my arm and the damn thing goes up and here's an amazing fact I don't say well that's the thing about the old arm some day she goes up and some day she doesn't go up it's like a weather in Montreal no it's up to me and you want to see consciousness in action just watch it this is much more fun than the unk's of post-industrial men under late capitalism is changing reality just by deciding to change it okay now why isn't all that stuff I told I think all that stuff is obviously true why is there supposed to be a problem well it seems like there's a problem because we've got this horrible tradition that says consciousness is not a real part of the real world let me give you a simple proof that it is I said my conscious intention in action cause my arm to go up but we know independently that anything that caused my arm to go up must cause the secretion of acetylcholine at the axon endplates the motor neurons no acetylcholine no arm movement and in so if top down causation somebody puts a gun to my head and says secrete acetylcholine at the axon endplates of your motor neurons watch I'll just do it no problem all right but now you and you have an interesting result you got the result that my conscious intention and action caused my arm to go up but anything that caused my arm to go up must cause the secretion of acetylcholine so my consciousness intention and action caused the secretion of acetylcholine but that can only be done by something that was itself neurobiological so my conscious intention in action is a neurobiological phenomenon now this is the one this is I that philosophically most important point I've made so far and that is we will only understand consciousness as I believe it should be understood as a natural biological phenomenon if you see that that the existence of consciousness is part of complex phenomena going on in the brain and the same event can be described at different levels it can be described as raising your arm or causing the secretion of acetylcholine at the axon on in place and that's together with all the other stuff the ion channels and the myosin and the actin filaments and all this things that that are in the standard undergraduate textbooks you have one on the same phenomenon that admits of different levels of description that's not a mystery that's true of any natural phenomenon my car won't start what do I say do I go to the mechanic and say well the passage of electrons is insufficient to sustain the oxidization of the hydrocarbon molecules no I say the damn thing won't start I think there's some wrong with the plugs but of course that's exactly what I was saying when I said the passage of electrons is insufficient to I've sustained the the oxidization of the hydrocarbon molecules by the way in Berkeley you could probably do that bit about the hydrocarbons because there are a lot of unemployed physicists working in garages but for most of us human beings we think in terms of the higher level the plugs the spark plugs I and and the firing in the cylinder we don't think about the oxidization of the hydrocarbons and the passage of the electrons yeah it was pretty funny and when I was working on this I thought oh hell does it work and I asked physicist friend of Mines how does the spark plug actually work and they would mumble something about ionization or something like that I finally found it on something called Nordstrom's encyclopedia this was before the days of Google and it yes it is the passage of electrons ok so I have given you what I think are four propositions which I think are obviously true and there are the propositions that we should start with in our explanation of consciousness now one way or another they are routinely denied and I'm going to tell you about some of those denials they are routinely denied the basic idea I'm getting trying to get across is consciousness is a biological phenomenon like mitosis or photosynthesis or digestion or the secretion of bile it's a higher level biological phenomenon and like all higher level biological phenomena and it is grounded in lower level cellular behavior and we need to an explanation of how exactly it works why is it so difficult to get that message across well I've reluctantly come to a conclusion that there are two invisible features well they're not so invisible either two features of our intellectual tradition that are seldom mentioned it's sort of almost impolite to mention them but I think they hang like a shadow over this whole discussion the first feature is the tradition of God the soul and immortality and the idea is that if consciousness exists at all and it has to exist in the soul and the soul is not a part of the physical world whatever it is it's not part of physics so one tradition that we're militating against is God the soul and immortality and I have to tell you there's an irony here in that I finally realized this when I was debating people and what I call strong artificial intelligence realize that they were in effect part of that tradition they couldn't see that consciousness is a biological phenomena like digestion as Dan Dennett said somewhere I know consciousness is formal and abstract what's formal and abstract about wanting to throw up or having a hangover headache I mean it's I philosophers always like to take these arcane examples but think of more gutsy I won't go through all the sorted list of things I can think of but if you think of an actual conscious States hi there's nothing formal and abstract about them I so we that we have to get out of this idea that consciousness has this special mysterious mode of existence now the second tradition is just as bad or nearly as bad and that is a misconception of something called science with a capital S and the picture that this tradition gives us is that science is supposed to be the name of a set of propositions and those propositions are materialist and reductionist science by its very essence on this conception is materialist and reductionist there's no place in science for anything that has the characteristics that I mentioned qualitative nough subjectivity unity I and the sort of causation that I describe as intentional causation so that the science is mistakenly taken to be the name of a set of established truths it's not it's the name of an institute set of institutional structures that have evolved certain techniques certain methods over the past several centuries for improving our knowledge I and it is I think it is a most stunning intellectual achievement of the human race the most amazing fact about our species is that we've reached a point where knowledge grows that's the central intellectual effect but if you think that science is supposed to be the name of a set of established truths you're in for disappointment I have been telling my students literally now for decades that we know that the universe consists of physical particles that these and and I go through the usual list of of atomic and subatomic particles well it turns out that that now composes 4 percent of the universe what's the other 96% dark matter and dark energy what's dark about it darkness here is epistemic it means these guys don't know what the hell they're talking about no ok I'm paying them to figure this out but whenever I think no science is the name of a set of established results one result that I was brought up on was a certain atomic conception of the atomic nature of ultimate reality and it turns out that we now I have pretty good evidence that that's about four percent anyway the point I'm trying to get across is don't think that science is the name of a set of established truths and materialism and reductionism are the basic established truths no think of it as the name of a set of methods that we've evolved for finding out how things work about how nature is and the reason it's universal is that anything you can study systematically I can be science you can it can now be can be thought of as a science if you can study it systematically by using methods that are designed to get it how things actually work oh so I think part of our difficulty then in getting an account of consciousness has been that we're militating against these two these twin a false views that we've inherited over several centuries we've inherited them Oh at least since the 17th century and some of them even Anna dating that now with all of that said I want to now go through a list of some very common mistakes or at least I take them to be mistakes and there'll be plenty of time in the discussion for you to challenge me if you think they're not mistakes the first is there's supposed to be a tremendous problem about the evolutionary function of consciousness we could imagine robots AI that were zombies and behave exactly like you or me but have no consciousness at all but then if we can imagine that then it seems well maybe consciousness doesn't have any function maybe it's just epi phenomenal after all now I think that's such a bad argument I'm amazed that anybody can state it but let me say tell you what's wrong with it as an argument when we look for the evolutionary function of a phenotype you have to respect how nature actually works if you look at bird's wings originally I'm told they functioned as devices for keeping the bird warm and then they evolved in the devices in many species of birds that enable the bird to fly now it's no answer if I say well what's the function of the Robins wings to say it enables the Robin to fly to say well you could imagine Robins were born equipped with rocket engines well you could imagine that as science fiction now you can imagine I that we could do all the things we do without consciousness but that's not how nature works think of just about everything you do and you will find consciousness is pretty much coextensive with your life my favorites are the the four FS of the biology textbooks they're fighting fleeing feeding and sexual intercourse I and in my experience at least I can't do any of them without being conscious i you've got to have consciousness in order to conduct a normal life I and I think the problem with with consciousness is not that we I can't think what its function is it's got too many I mean it is stunning the sheer amount of information that we're able to incorporate in a single moment of consciousness all the stuff that comes in through vision all of the organization of our memory all of our antecedent knowledge that we bring to bear on a present situation I in in the latter decades of the 20th century it used to be common in commencement speeches for scientists the Chancellor Berkeley was one who made this speech who said by the end of the century we will all have household robots that will do all the housework take care of the children entertain us with light conversation help us with our income tax and do all the things that we like household robot to do now by about 1990 they stopped saying that because the end of the century was becoming clear we're nowhere near having robots that can do that kind of stuff when General Motors switched their production lines to robotics they found they had to redo the production line because you have to have it to the right millimeter how the robot can't sort of make adjustments the way that a normal human welder can but why is it why is it that robotics has been so disappointing I think at least one possible answer is the obvious one namely we don't know how to make a conscious robot what you have are in you can do various kinds of information processing and the information processing will enable you to implement algorithms of a useful kind I'm saying I think robots are immensely useful and no doubt will become more so but until we have a conscious robot it looks like it's going to be very hard to attain the kind of flexibility and a global comprehensive ways of coping with the environment that conscious agents have okay so that's the first mistake a mistake about well what are the special functions of consciousness now a second mistake and I think probably not common among this group but it's worth pointing it out in our intellectual culture there's a big deal about the distinction between what's subjective and what's objective but unfortunately that distinction between the objective and the subjective is systematically ambiguous between an epistemic sense and an autologous sense work I'm sorry to use this fancy jargon epistemic G's means having to do with knowledge and ontology means having to do with the existence emilie the objective subjective distinction is a distinction between types of claims so if I say Rembrandt was born in 1606 that is epistemic Lee objective because you can settle it as a matter of fact if I say Rembrandt was the greatest Dutch painter that ever lived well that's as they say a subjective matter of opinion that's epistemic Lee subjective but the basis of the epistemic subjective on epistemic distinction is an ontological distinction in modes of existence some entities most of the entities dealt with by physics for example have an existence which is independent of being experienced mountains molecules and tectonic plates all are ontologically objective they exist independently of experience but pains and tickles and itches are ontologically subjective they exist only insofar as they are experienced now why is it so important to keep this distinction in mind well a standard argument I mentioned this earlier that I used to get from physicists from a neurobiologist was look science is objective on your own account consciousness is subjective so there can be no science of consciousness now you all recognize that's a bad argument that's a fallacy of ambiguity because objective and subjective are being used in two different senses in the epistemic sense science is indeed objective in the sense that science see I to find out how things work in a way that's independent of the feelings and attitudes of the investigators but and this is the bottom line of this part of the discussion the epistemic objectivity of science does not prevent us from having an epistemic objective science of a domain that's ontological II subjective no I a fact about the subjective ontology of con justice makes it impossible to have an epistemic ly objective science and I've often heard people say but you couldn't have a science of consciousness well really I go to a medical section of your University Bookstore and look at the section on Neurology see these support doctors have to deal with patients that are actually in pain and they have to try to figure out how does pain work and what sorts of analgesics will be best at alleviating pain so the important point that I want to emphasize here is that the ontological subjectivity is no bar to epistemic objectivity you can have a completely objective science of a domain that is ontologically subjective now that distinction between these two senses of the objective subjective distinction leads to an even more important distinction and that's a distinction between those features of the world that exist independent of our feelings and attitudes I'll call those observer independent from those features of the world that are observer-relative so mountains molecules and tectonic plates are all observer independent but money private property government and marriage all of those exist only relative to people's attitudes they are observer-relative not observer independent now one of the important features of this distinction is that the observer relative features of reality like money property government and marriage all contain an element of ontological subjectivity it's only money because we people we think it's money now the fact that there is an element of ontological subjectivity in economic phenomena does not prevent us from having an epistemic aliy objective science of economics you can have an objective science of a domain that contains ontologically subjective components it's a unfortunate feature that economists tend to forget that economics is not like physics when I studied economics they taught us that marginal cost equals marginal revenue other way in physics we learned that force equals mass times acceleration they're really quite different one is based on human attitudes and human ontological subjectivity but you can have an objective science of such a domain now there's a deeper reason well I want to get this across and that is several attempts to explain the consciousness appeal to observer-relative phenomena in the explanation that can't be right consciousness has an observer independent ontology even though it's a subjective ontology and that's just a fancy way of saying my consciousness exists regardless of what anybody says if all of Neurobiology get together and say we've done a study of you Searle and we've concluded that you're totally unconscious that you really are just a zombie I don't think gosh maybe I'm just a zombie no I know they aren't mistaken because my consciousness has an observer independent existence okay now it gets a little bit tricky here because all observer-relative phenomena are created by consciousness I mean some unconscious forms of intentionality as well but roughly speaking all observer-relative phenomena are created by consciousness so the consciousness itself can't be observer-relative without an infinite regress I mean you wouldn't be able to explain the existence of observer-relative phenomena if the consciousness that created them was itself observer-relative but it follows from this the fact that consciousness though ontologically subjective has an observer relative as an observer independent existence it follows that you cannot explain consciousness in observer relative terms now there are two attempts to do that that are worth calling your attention to one is the computational theory of consciousness the problem is what's the definition of computer and the accounts that I have seen going back to touring are all observer-relative watch I'll show you a simple computer this thing just computed the function s equals one half GT square I did it whether certain amount of interference from the floor but that's his typical bus lab a scientists we have to face these experimental problems on a daily basis I the point is anything can be described as a computer see this computes that function and indeed we you could if you had accurate enough measuring devices you could I actually use it to calculate they had the value of s to calculate the distance that it fell but if this is a computer than anything as a computer anything can be described computationally in the old Chinese room days when I used to argue this stuff with with people there would come a moment in the debate when I would take an object like this slam it down on the table and say this is a digital computer just as a boring program program says stay there and of course that's right anything can be described as zeros and ones but what does that tell you that tells you computation does not name a natural force like gravity computation is a exist relative to the interpreter and the user now people think if something is observer-relative then it must be arbitrary not so most observer-relative phenomena a pretty functional phenomena are only able to function in virtue of their physical structure but the fact that this is a comb and that this I have my pocket full of observer-relative phenomena that all of them have functions I the observer relativity does not imply that it's arbitrary but it does imply that there's an element of ontological subjectivity if we decided to use this as an object of religious worship or as a paperweight it ceases to function as a comb and would cease to be at home even though it was designed and is used as a comb so observer relativity does not imply arbitrariness but it does imply an element of ontological subjectivity you could not give a computational explanation of consciousness because consciousness is observe a relative and computation except for these rare cases where a guy actually consciously does a computation where he actually computes a function here this is an observer independent computation but when my pocket calculator does that it's observer-relative intrinsically the pocket calculator is just an electronic circuit okay another more recent effort to do this is to find information theoretic explanations of consciousness and I'm in the middle of trying to review a book by Christophe Mar he is influenced a lot by Tononi and I have great admiration for these guys I think they're very smart but the account of information that they give us his straight observer-relative I know maybe they can have an observer independent explanation but I haven't been able to find it yet it's like computation it's worth pointing out the relation of this argument that I'm giving here to the Chinese room the Chinese room argument rested on the fact that the syntax of the computer program was not by itself sufficient for the semantics of mental states of human cognition syntax is not semantics but this is actually a deeper argument this argument says syntax is observer-relative you can't get semantics out of syntax but you can't get syntax out of physics the syntax is not intrinsic to the physics the syntax exists relative to an interpretation so I really made well three points so far that I want to just summarize them because they might be useful if they come up in the discussion one eye is that I there that there is no problem about does consciousness have an evolutionary function it's got too many we don't know where to start or even where the end if we're trying to list all the second is that you need a clear between the epistemic sense of the subjective object of distinction and the ontological sense and the third is you need a clear distinction between observer-relative phenomena which may be subject to all of the epistemic objectivity you could desire I mean it really is Canadian money this stuff that I have it's epistemic the objective but of course it's money in a fashion that is observer-relative and you need a clear distinction between those features of reality that are observer-relative and those features that are observer-independent okay well now I don't know how am I'm doing for time what I'm doing fine okay I mean I guess it means I get to keep talking but I want to say plenty of time for discussion okay now let me then discuss some current efforts to solve the problem of consciousness I in the early days of this research there was a great search for the neuronal correlative consciousness the NCC as it was called and with imaging techniques we did get quite a lot of interesting and CC's I indeed you could I'm always suspicious incidentally when these guys display their wonderful results on the blackboard of fMRI I've been in those damn machines how do they get this subject to hold still that long and one wonderful lecturer earlier today said well they had a problem half of the subjects wiggled around too much and they didn't get any data out of them I would have been one of those subjects because I get very impatient in these things but in any case we do have imaging techniques that enable us to find various NCC's and many of you will be familiar with this research so I'll go over it very briefly one spectacular eye a mode where you could look for this is the case of blindsight if you can find exactly the distinction neurobiologically anatomically physiologically between the pathway that produces normal conscious visual experience and the pathway that produces blind sight then it looks like you would have found the NCC you if you've got exactly that distinction another set of interesting cases are the gestalt switching cases and my favorite is the Astro Vidkun Stein duck rabbit which I will now do an incompetent job of drawing and that's either a rabbit looking up that way or a duck looking that way now there's several things to notice about this one is it doesn't look the least bit actually like a duck or a rabbit if you said somebody go in the store and buy a rabbit and they brought you some something that looked like that you think something is really radically wrong here but the other thing and this is what's interesting to us philosophically you get a totally different experience where the stimulus held absolutely constant there's no question what what the phenomenology of seeing the duck is different from the phenomenology of seeing the rabbit but the stimulus is constant now if you could find the point in the brain where the brain and here I talk in this homunculus vocabulary it's a metaphor where the brain makes up its mind I'm gonna see the duck and now I'm gonna see the rabbit if you could find that point you'd have the NCC for those experiences you see this the beauty of the gestalt switching experiments is that the stimulus is constant but the phenomenology is different they the experience is quite different now another a beautiful bunch of experiments was done by Logothetis and his people in germany i and what they did was do it's a variation on the same idea a binocular rivalry so if you show a vertical lines to one eye and horizontal lines to the other eye the the visual experience is typically not of a grid one side or the other wins either they're the the horizontal lines win or the vertical lines win and if you could find the point at which the brain decides that it's going to see the vertical lines or the horizontal lines it looks like you'd have the NCC now why does that excite people why does that seem like it's a big deal well presumably the mechanisms by which the brain produces these experiences will be common to all conscious visual experiences and maybe to all consciousness see Crick and Watson didn't have to figure out how the DNA produces every phenotype all they had to do was get a mechanism by which the replication was done and that will apply generally so the idea was that if you could find the NCC if you could get the I the mechanism by which a single eye experience is produced that might give you the key to understanding everything and then in addition to all of these a natural way to do it a natural way to look for the NCC the key to consciousness might be just a track a stimulus track the visual experience as it goes through all of the over the optic chiasma and through the various stages of the of the the visual cortex and then until finally it produces a visual experience track it down until you've actually located the visual experience now a lot of very important and interesting work was done but I have to say I think most of the people who did it were disappointed and that they did not get what they had hoped for they didn't get a key to understanding consciousness why not well I'm not enough of an expert on this to judge but I'll point out one thing that's interesting to me and that is all of these cases all of these experiments were done on subjects that are already conscious see the picture that they have is that the perception is creating consciousness and I want to suggest a different picture think of perception not as creating consciousness but as perception as modifying a pre-existing conscious field imagine you wake up in a completely dark room so that you have minimal stimulus input I maybe you feel the way to the covers weight off your body against the bed but you're there an absolutely dark room with minimal stimulus input and no perceptual input now you can still be fully conscious you can be 100% consciousness now imagine you turn on the lights and you get up and brush your teeth and get dressed and all the rest of it are you creating consciousness well in a sense you are of course but I want to say we should think of that as modifying the pre-existing conscious field what we want to know is how does the brain create the conscious field in the first place and that's a much tougher task then figuring out the NCC of particular stimuli and I'm not up to the minute on this and they're probably people here who can bring me up to date but last time I looked at this there were some labs that did this sort of research where you try to figure out how the brain creates the entire conscious field wolf singer in Germany and Rodolfo Lena said and why you medical school both did research along this line which i think is more promising though it's much harder to do because if your methods are imaging techniques and single cell recordings it's very hard to figure out how the whole brain creates consciousness but I think that was the source of a lot of the disappointment Francis Crick once said to me that he was very frustrated and annoyed I that it was so much harder to figure out consciousness than it had been to figure out DNA DNA seemed relatively easy compared to consciousness and I had to laugh I pointed out we've been working on this for about 2,000 years now so we can't expect to solve it immediately but the message that I want to get across on this part of the talk and indeed I think it's really in a way the message of the of the whole conference at least the talks that I have been able to hear and the abstracts I've read is that if we think of as a natural biological phenomenon it's just part of our biological life history I then it is a difficult but not a metaphysically impossible problem to solve and indeed the steps by which you solve it are familiar from the history of the sciences step one is you try to find the correlates you try to find what the states of rain are correlated with consciousness and what I'm suggesting is that the more important question is not about particular experiences such as the experience of the color red but the creation of the conscious field the creation of the total conscious field is what our target ought to be and that's much harder to do but but the first is you look for correlations the second stage is you test to see if the correlations are causal and there again the tests are quite familiar to us I can you if you found what you thought was the NCC for the creation of the conscious field can you create consciousness in an otherwise unconscious subject by turning on that NCC and can you turn off consciousness by turning off the NCC can you do you have causally I necessary and sufficient conditions other things equal do you have causally necessary and sufficient conditions for the Gration of consciousness and then third we would like a theory we'd like a theory that says why does it work this way and not some other way I myself think that this is a very challenging scientific project trying to figure out exactly how the brain creates the conscious field but if I there's one important philosophical message it is this I don't think there's any philosophical obstacle here at all I think that the philosophical tradition has this mistaken conception that there's something tremendously mysterious and mystical and metaphysical about consciousness which would prevent us ever from having a science of consciousness we've lived through that before a hundred years ago perhaps on this very spot there was a huge debate about between vitalism and mechanism and a lot of very good biologists and philosophers thought well you can never have a mechanistic explanation of life life is too mysterious to explain life you have to have an L all viitala some nonsense sounds much better in French I discovered this when I was debating a bunch of French a deconstructionist and it's very hard to talk English about a lot texturally to text but it can sound almost halfway intelligent maybe if you talk in in French but in any case there was a huge debate now we can't recover that none of us can feel a passion that surrounded the debate between mechanism and vitalism and what I want to suggest is we want to get to the same situation where consciousness is concerned where we see it as what it really is a natural biological phenomenon now another item in the history of the of the sciences which i think is like this is electromagnetism if you're brought up to believe the world is essentially Newtonian then electromagnetism looks pretty spooky really mysterious magnet the magnetic field how does it abate Newton's laws it looks very mysterious once we had Clark Maxwell's equations then it ceased to be a mystery and what I'm suggesting is we are now in a situation I with consciousness where people were in I in the days of the debate between mechanism and vitalism more before they had Clark Maxwell's equations and what I hope is that some of you may be some group or team of you will be the group that actually finally solves this problem I think it will be the greatest in the like achievement so far in this century thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 87,216

Keywords: consciousness, philosophy, biological naturalism, searle, subjectivity, physicalism, objectivity

Id: yCii726A4Jc

Length: 49min 9sec (2949 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2012