What is Consciousness? Where is it?

Dualism:

It is customary (at least in my experience) to start with an explanation of dualism. One very influential version of this theory was put forward by René Descartes. In it he described consciousness (the mind) to be separate from the body. In such a way that the mind was not extended in space, and was in fact no part of the material world, or its laws; meanwhile the body was indeed extended in space and was most assuredly part of the material world and bound by its laws. Through this thesis he was describing two separate existences: a material existence and a mental one, which only the mind inhabited. Problems with this conception of the mind/body interaction were so inextricable that it became apparent a new approach to the issue was necessary.

Materialism:

Dualism has been all but expunged from philosophy of mind discourse (not to downplay its importance in illuminating all sides of the discussion). This has become the case for many reasons, but most significantly, it is due to science’s tremendous successes at penetrating the mysteries of the universe. Materialistic (physicalist) accounts of reality have become the basis for our understanding of all but theological questions, and events beyond the grasp of scientific understanding. Some would argue that consciousness has been one of the phenomenons that existed outside of scientific inquiry. It is my opinion that there has been scientific inquiry into consciousness since we acquired self-awareness in some form. But I digress. With the advent of modern imaging technologies we have gained experimental evidence that brain activity changes in a predictable manor when the appropriate behaviour is elicited.

These experiments are without a doubt scientific and add to our understanding of the brain, increasing our abilities to perform medical operations and control disorders. More importantly, they are part of a scientific framework that draws from multiple disciplines, allowing us to understand consciousness without requiring supernatural forces. In the past fifty years many physicalist theories have been proposed: the mind-body identity thesis, functionalism, eliminative materialism, and non-reductive physicalism.

Considering:

As many of the most modern theories concerning consciousness attempt to explain it in great detail, they all draw upon multiple disciplines. Even with the huge boom in interest surrounding the scientific community about consciousness, there is still a plethora of opinions as to where consciousness falls metaphysically (what role it plays in the natural order of physical laws), and epistemologically (whether or not we can even know certain things about consciousness, such as qualia). We have reached a point where our scientific paradigm is broad enough to encompass a concept as complex as consciousness (for another example of a problem as expansive: The Theory of Everything). There are those that would disagree and say consciousness can be broken into basic functions and with those build artificial entities. Of course this is possible, but it would not be human type consciousness. It would be but a close approximation. It would take a fraction of all the elements necessary to create our phenomenal experience. Consciousness seems to be a problem ripe with discoveries just waiting to be enjoyed and I plan on nibbling on it a bit myself.

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In the winter of 2001, my wife and I journeyed to Beijing to stand on The Great Wall; a barrier long ago conquered, broken into segments by the erosion of time and neglect. We wandered in awe through majestic ancient courtyards of a former royal extravagance, sipping tea at the Summer Palace and Forbidden City; excessive testaments to reasons why servitude revolts exponentially violent to such displays of indifference. We walked the length of Tiananmen Square several times; another tourist attraction promoting bronzed sculptured heroes of The State that inconspicuously doubles as a place where authority and brute force once melded like the perfect fit it is.

We had our expectations, our preconceived notions tweaked by our own culturally biased talking heads and the usual promoted fear and loathing of ill-informed idealist as to why ‘those’ people are the way they are, why we are better, and how careful we needed to be. It wasn’t until conversation took place outside the professional drivel of others’ most likely paid perceptions, that we found glimpses of truth and via a medium neither printed nor broadcasted. This truth was transmitted by the presentation of food; food harvested, procured, and prepared with the delight of a sharing host, and eaten with the delight of gratitude of a guest. Sustenance, the ultimate ancient pursuit to negotiate for, to war over, to leverage, and now it is something else; oil, market share, maybe the ego of influence. This enlightenment was our spontaneous moment of collective consciousness. This was our awareness. This was our stone soup.

As we ate, we found a lust for conversational English at each pause, our suspicions heightened as our personal space was constantly bombarded. That was our problem. We found a transformation of minimal survivalist mercantilism towards a burgeoning middleclass and streets full of the art of the dicker where we bartered as ugly Americans do, looking for that trophy buy and bragging rights to our prowess for getting something for nothing. That was our arrogance. We found a six-foot genetically suspect Mongolian guard complete with an automatic weapon standing stoically emotionless in a packed MacDonald’s. We found jazz. We found a young idealist who thought North Korea is the epitome of a pure socialist state. We blinked. He argued that Tiananmen was nothing but a protest against bureaucratic corruption and now all is well. We smiled. We found a dancing midget in eighteenth century garb promoting geisha-looking escorts in front of a suspect looking bath house. We found Starbucks.

We discovered an old woman living in a soon to be dismantled ghetto called a Houton, a place where capitalistic momentums were needing space for concrete and steel expansion and we asked her questions, knowing she had survived the communist and cultural revolutions, periods of mass starvation, the social cleansings and re-education. She replied that the reason her skin was so smooth at the age of seventy-three was because she only washed her face with cold water. She said she liked Americans, but feared our country because we have no one but our nuclear powerful selves to hold us accountable.

Our stay was all too short. We left Beijing with understanding, many of the dots connected, and yet quite fearful of environmental, economic, and thus politically charged reactions to a massive populace awakening with explosive consumption. Governments lie and manipulate. Institutions sell an agenda whether product or ideal twisting verbiage and history, elevating themselves at others’ expense. We folk, our global brothers and sisters, can choose to be shepherds or sheep at any given emotionally vulnerable moment. We can choose to be collectively manipulated by fear and loathing or irrational exuberance. Or we can transcend all of this by something as simple as the creative expression of sharing versus summits of positioning. We can break bread and teach our leaders to do the same. We just need to get out more often.

Â
Peace.

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It has taken a brief and bitter struggle with myself but, now at one a.m. of a new day I am going to write. I could have left myself in the comfort zone and tomorrow, rested, record today’s events as a coherent and pretty whole. But that would hardly be an accurate picture. No, this must be presented as the shattered, multi-faceted image it is. I’m playing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the background, partially in the hopes that the literary spirit of the great HST will give me some semblance of inspiration, partially to heighten the sense of lost sanity I find a day begun at the other side of the country, with an extra hour squeezed in where no one wants and no one expects it to be.

I awoke in Salthill, in Galway city, the Atlantic Ocean barking at me a stones throw from my window…actually that’s just poetic licence, I didn’t really have a window, just the living room floor of a friend’s apartment. Its window wasn’t mine, and it faced in the opposite direction to the sea, onto the back yard of a rather unappealing bar. But the sea was audible and I knew it was there.

The friend I had visited had changed since I last saw him, in that most meaningful of ways, where your tolerance for him has been decimated. One incident is all that’s required to illustrate this.

[Setting: Nighttime, ext. Brendan and Paul sit on a wet rock beside the Corrib river and a canal. Brendan drinks Belgian beer, Paul a bottle of mixed berry cider]
Brendan: Do you know what’s nice? Having someone to love.
Paul: Yeah…Not to sound like a prick, but how often do you think about how you feel about her?
Brendan: Well, not constantly, but every now and then it intrudes into my thoughts like…
Paul:[sharp intake of breath] That’s not a good sign.

I reckon he’d have came up with that, even if I’d said something along the lines of “I ponder my feelings for my girlfriend constantly, and refine my concept of how I feel about her on an hourly basis.” Paul moved from his home and university to be with his girlfriend, but that wasn’t the beginning of his marking out a monopoly on romantic understanding. In all the years I knew him in Dublin he was always locked in some long term relationship or other, which took up most of his time and, all the more irritating, parts of his conversation. And now after two months without seeing him, these comments stung fresh. Their subject was closer to my heart than before, and my recollection of them blunted. He was rarely correct in his statements, but there was always the chance I could be wrong in mine. I haven’t laboured the point. But I think I love my girlfriend, and every now and then something she’s done or said intrudes into my thoughts and I know.

Paul’s brother Kevin had come to Galway with me, and returned with me today. Kev and I are also good friends, and play in a band together. Unlike me however, Kev has taken the jump and immersed himself in music, studying performance and music technology, while I’ve taken the surer path and chosen law. It’s about now that the band is building momentum, and unless something drastic happens our paths will undergo a jagged schism - my band will no longer be mine, and I’ll just be a barrister who plays drums and classical percussion - which I can live with, but all the same, it’s sad. Today was the first time we talked about it, the unhappy details about the point at which I’ll have to take my final leap from the whole flaming vehicle and how we’ll get a replacement to clamber on. Taking a bus across a country is different to taking it across a city - you step out the other side a different person.
When on the first day of college I looked for words of wisdom from my tutor through a beer tinted haze, he said something I thought unlikely.

“You’ll probably find you’ll make new friends at college” he said “And the people you hitherto thought to be your friends were really just people you were hanging around with.” He was right in the first sentence, and about the implied fading away of my old friends, but unfortunately, he was about the ‘just’ part. They were and are the people I love and slowly, slowly they are going away. Our paths our set to split and I shall miss them.

On that note, dear readers, I shall sleep.

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Consciousness is a favorite subject of mine. It tickles my brain and I can’t help but be aware of how important it is to understand what consciousness is. The more we know how it is involved in our phenomenal experience, the more we are able to control our environment (including the environment we are encased in, eg. bodies). Most people are, to some degree, both intent on their survival and aware that their continued survival requires an assortment of things: other individuals, a reliable food supply, reliable water, a safe environment, and many other basics that too many go without. Our list gets updated as new information is added to our awareness and not everyone shares the same things on their lists. For instance, global warming is beginning to become a concern for a large number of people. It’s an agreement of disparate positions, but the general consensus seems to be that it is indeed happening and whomever is to blame, it needs our global attention. Carl Jung started to talk of a Collective Consciousness near the end of his life, many years after writing about the Collective Unconscious. As information starts to move globally we are beginning to witness a pattern that could be considered a collective consciousness. Not only will understanding our private phenomenal conscious experiences help us control ourselves, it will also give us explanatory tools to probe complex information systems such as social networks. This is reciprocal, as theories on information systems and related fields help us understand consciousness.

Besides the common sense understanding of consciousness as self-awareness, there are many other theories that diverge drastically from one another and more that differ only slightly. Since I want to start talking about how to define consciousness I will refer to other theories and draw from various sources to piece together a coherent, and theoretically useful description of consciousness. In my readings I have come across many who have helped refine my description of consciousness, whether my concept of consciousness was congruent or not. I’ll begin by describing some of the contemporary theories while introducing some consciousness jargon here and there in this series.

The view of consciousness that I wish to propose cannot be summed up in a single sentence, but there is, what I consider, a totipotent form of consciousness. I’ll try and explain how information is a fundamental property for any form of consciousness to be able to exist. This idea of consciousness I’m describing is strongly panpsychist with elements of neutral monism. Most don’t lay out their basic metaphysics right off the bat, as both these terms have a wide range of views within and overlap in various ways, while often leading to confusion in the long run. Also, by so defining my metaphysics there are expectations and assumptions that can be made with regards to how consciousness should be described. But it’s my experience that a great many views have something important to say about how to describe consciousness. Some idea’s I will cover are:

• Functionalism
• Identity Theory
• Quantum Theories concerning consciousness
• Panpsychism
• Property Dualism
• and Neutral Monism to list a few.

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While on a bike ride at the canal, i started looking around. Dodge a person here, dodge one there. It was like an old Nintendo game. There was nothing better! Inside this game, i had my thoughts about the various interesting people in my life. How the wind whistles through your golden hair on a beautiful, warm day. Those two over there look interesting. I “quacked” in their general direction as they pondered the extent of what wholeness means. Where mist blew across the wet path a small rainbow formed at 42 degree to the sun. Not only that but it moved as i tried to pass it.

There is nothing more pleasant than being near water. It is the infinity that humans can understand. My Affinity. Any infinite is one thing: everything together. All inseparable.

So many little dogs waddling their owners along. The runners, joggers, walkers, and vagabonds not quite comfortable with the status quo. We always look, and we always find. But we question whether now is that better tomorrow. And we look. What must be done has already been decided just not revealed. The known becoming infinite, the easier to find. You will know and we will always find.

A man wanted to join me in his run and with a supernova we were side by side. 1..2..3..4…..42..43. He’s done this before. The exhilaration of speeding to get that glimpse of what matters and that is all. The freedom of connecting the lowercase whole experience. There is always more to find and explore just around that corner. The expressed fact that we are even capable of such a thing is utterly astounding. This knowledge of what we do can bring together all things.

The umbra canal path was more in the air. It did not keep its distance. I am one with the wind. Then the water, the sun, and lastly the earth. I have never felt more complete.

As the mutual energy of my last relationship drained to their respective decanters my eyes opened once again. Found in Indianapolis, on a canal, dodging the fledgelings, a man found happiness in wholeness. You will understand when you know nothing to pi.

Basking on the grass next to the sculpture, a couple rubbed each others arms. They lazily watched the acrobat in the sky. The man pulled right and it twirled counter clockwise four times. The man pulled left to narrowly avoid a death as the Red Baron had had.

They sat, pondered, walked, watched, jogged, focused, biked, felt, roller bladed, read, flew kites, relaxed, and threw the baseball… into the canal. All on the edge of danger. The ball, a super hero, was impervious to wind. It received the sun and we shall go to the moon. Post eclipse a reality is revealed and it is to grow, seek, and find the wisdom. The process may come to you but when you come to it then does it click.

I have found the me that I am now.

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(The Dublin Bus: Bus of the Ford of Hurdles)

Of all the popular myths you know about Ireland, it is unfortunate that the most irritating and banal of them all, is also the most true. It rains. It rains in a way that robs your sight of colour and mind of mirth. It’s raining right now, and so, instead of an enjoyable cycle through the crisp october air, I’m sitting in a bus, blinded by condensation, and wholeheartedly enjoying the anonymity and indifference of my fellow passengers.

Back when Ireland was a gloriously impoverished nation, ie. the 80s (yeah that’s right, while you were discovering gyms and the Walkman, we were emigrating… and then discovering the gym and Walkmans in other countries-perhaps the reasons weren’t purely economic…), before we were wealthy, the bus, like every other place where more than two people congregated, was a social amenity. People -strangers that is- talked on the bus. Being a child of the 90s, and young adult of (may the FSM forgive me for using this word),noughties (seriously WTF is the noughties?-what’s the acronym-00s? can’t we go even a decade without abbreviations?), this seems as distant a concept as hara-kiri. How does it come about? What do strangers have to talk about? Perhaps there were only a few set topics of conversation in less materialistic times- perhaps we’re all just that bit more sophisticated. I mean we have divorce in this country now, and high paid, high commitment, high technology jobs . Surely, this not talking with hitherto unknown people can’t be a retrograde step?

And then immediately to my right, a man starts talking to his friend about law; which is my subject/major in university. He’s a student, which means that he probably goes to the same college as me. We have the same lecturers, the same classes, and both of us think what we’re doing is pretty interesting. But naturally(or unnaturally as the case may be) I’m too scared of making an ass of myself to strike up a conversation, I just keep typing, writing for people I may never see, to make a connection half a world away, a connection that could be just a metre to my right… And now they get off the bus.

I do talk to strangers, but only in situations where it’s acceptable, where it happens all the time, like in college, in societies, at gigs. How in this space of ten or twenty years did the bus become unacceptable ? It’s not like the physical space between us has been increased, quite the opposite, modern buses provide about as much leg room as the glove box of a Mini Cooper, and considerably less air. So why do I not have the wherewithal to turn to whatever individual has been jammed into me in a vaguely intimate and entirely embarrassing way and say “Buses kind of suck, don’t they?” But i have come to my stop, just in time to miss half my first lecture, and my musings end here.

My impromptu verdict: I blame society, because otherwise I would have to blame myself.

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