Episode #181 - Transcript

So throughout the last couple episodes we’ve been doing on the philosophy of mind…there’s been an IDEA that we’ve referenced MULTIPLE TIMES… and really just glossed over it as something, that’s PRACTICALLY self evident. 

The idea… is that when we THINK about consciousness… we can SPLIT it into two different types…there’s ACCESS consciousness on the one hand… and PHENOMENAL consciousness on the other. This is what we’ve been saying. 

When it comes to ACCESS consciousness…that’s stuff we CAN explain with neuroscience things like memories, information processing, our field of visual awareness…we can CLEARLY EXPLAIN a bit about how all THAT stuff works.

But in this conversation so far, what KEEPS on being said… is that what we CAN’T SEEM to explain…is PHENOMENAL consciousness…you know, the subjective experience, that UNDERLIES conscious thought. That it FEELS like something to be me. There’s this idea…that this phenomenal consciousness is something separate…something fundamental, something in a category ALL IT’S OWN… that needs to be explained. You can explain a lot of stuff about access consciousness…but you can’t explain PHENOMENAL consciousness. 

But if you were a good materialist listening to the discussions on this series so far…and you’re sitting in the back of the room, being SUPER PATIENT, NOT SAYING ANYTHING trying to be respectful to all the other ideas being presented…maybe there’s a part of you so far that’s just been BOILING inside, because you’re waiting for the part of the show where we’re ACTUALLY going to call that GIANT assumption that’s being made into question. 

Because a materialist might say, SURE…phenomenal consciousness is PRETTY mysterious and all. But DOES that necessarily mean that it’s something that NEEDS a further explanation? 

This is a good question. What is the difference… between EXPLAINING ALL of the component PARTS of our subjective experience again the thoughts, memories, information processing…what’s the difference between explaining all that and explaining phenomenal consciousness… in itself? Like what does that even mean?

That’s kinda like you saying…well… you can EXPLAIN the delicious waffle cone. You can EXPLAIN the creamy chocolatey goodness inside, you can EXPLAIN the RAINBOW colored SPRINKLES. But you CAN’T explain the ICE CREAM CONE…in ITSELF, now can you? 

I mean at a CERTAIN point what are we even talking about anymore? IS phenomenal consciousness REALLY something that’s ENTIRELY SEPARATE that needs to be explained? 

Maybe, it DOESN’T need to be explained. Maybe phenomenal consciousness is less a thing in itself…and MORE a sort of ATTRIBUTION we make… about a particular INTERSECTION of those component parts that we CAN study and explain. 

Now obviously there’s a bit to clarify there… and going over some popular arguments as to why that might be the case will take a good portion of the episode here today. But maybe a good place to start is to ask the question…if the hard problem of consciousness is to be able to explain why it FEELS like something to be me…and your SOLUTION to that is that maybe we don’t even need to explain that. One thing you’re gonna HAVE to explain no matter what… is why it SEEMS to MOST people living in today’s world…that phenomenal consciousness IS something that needs to be explained. 

Right before we began this series we did an episode on Susan Sontag and the power of the metaphors we casually use in conversations. And we talked about how these metaphors ACTUALLY go on to have a pretty huge impact on the way we contextualize the things in our lives. 

Well the philosopher Susan Blackmore, and apparently… I ONLY cover female philosophers by the name of Susan or Simone on this show…but anyway SUSAN BLACKMORE, huge player in these modern conversations about the mysteries of consciousness…and she thinks that if it’s DIFFICULT for someone to wrap their brain around the idea that phenomenal consciousness is NOT something that is conceptually distinct…it MAY BE because of the METAPHORS about consciousness that we use in everyday conversation that are directing the way you THINK about consciousness… into a particular lane that’s incorrect.  

For example, there’s a way people think about consciousness… that’s TRAGICALLY common in today’s world…it’s become known as the Cartesian theater. So Cartesian obviously referring to Descartes. And when Descartes arrives at his substance dualism where the MIND is something ENTIRELY SEPARATE from the BODY…this EVENT in the history of philosophy goes on to CHANGE the way that people start to see their conscious experience. They start to think… well what I am…is I’m this conscious creature, sort of perched up here inside of this head…and I’m essentially…sitting in a theater, LOOKING OUT through a set of eyes which are kind of like the screen in a theater…and on the screen what I SEE is the outside world. 

Now nobody ACTUALLY believes this is what is happening. Every person on this god forsaken planet KNOWS that there isn’t a movie theater up in their heads. But hearing and using this metaphor DOES SHADE the way that they see their own conscious experience. The casual use of the metaphor… ALLOWS people to smuggle in assumptions about their subjective experience, that we REALLY have no evidence to be assuming. 

For example, when the mind and body is totally separate…maybe it becomes EASIER for people to believe that they’re a SPIRIT that’s INHABITING a body. Maybe it just makes it easier for people to VIEW their subjective, phenomenal consciousness as something SEPARATE from the body that needs to be explained in itself. WHATEVER IT IS though…the point to Susan Blackmore is that metaphors you use have an IMPACT on your intuitions about consciousness. And she thinks there’s several OTHER examples that fall into the very same CATEGORY as the Cartesian Theater.   

How about the idea that there’s a unified, single, STREAM of consciousness that you’re experiencing. The STREAM being the metaphor there. Susan Blackmore asks is a SINGLE, unified STREAM, REALLY the way that you experience your conscious thought? Like when you REALLY pay attention is that how you’re existing?

She says most likely the only reason people SEE their consciousness in terms of a stream…is because of the specific way that people are often asked to OBSERVE their own consciousness. There’s a BIAS built into the way that we’re checking in. How do people typically do it? Well they’ll take a moment…they’ll stop what they’re doing…and they’ll ask themselves: what does it feel like to be ME right now. They’ll pay attention, they’ll listen, they’ll try to come up with an answer to the question…and they’ll realize that there’s a PARTICULAR set of thoughts, feelings and perceptions that it FEELS like, to be YOU in THAT moment. 

But then that person can wait for an hour…come back later, and ask the very SAME QUESTION in a different moment: what does it feel like to be me right now…and low and behold a totally DIFFERENT set of thoughts, feelings and perceptions come up. 

And then what we OFTEN DO as people at that point… is we FILL IN that empty space between those two moments with some ethereal STREAM of consciousness that we assume MUST HAVE existed between the two. 

But at some OTHER level…RATIONALLY we KNOW…that for the whole time that we WEREN’T doing this accounting of what it FEELS like to be me…we KNOW that there were TONS of different unconscious meta-processes going on…all doing their own things, sometimes interacting with each other, most of the time not. We KNOW that our EXPERIENCE of consciousness is just directing our attention to one PIECE of our mental activity or another… and that all those pieces of mental activity KEEP on operating whether we’re FOCUSING on one of them or not. 

So is there a specific LOCATION where there’s some sort of collective STREAM where all of this stuff is bound together HOLISTICALLY? Is there ANY good reason to ASSUME that it NEEDS to BE that way? Could it be that the continuity of this mental activity is more of an ILLUSION… than it is a reality?

And if this sounds impossible at first…think of OTHER illusions that we KNOW go on in the brain. Think of how any SINGLE sector of the brain CREATES a similar sort of illusion. Memories. We KNOW that DIFFERENT parts of the brain are responsible for different types of memory. Semantic memory in the frontal cortex, episodic memory in the hippocampus, procedural memory in the cerebellum. ALL of these different areas work together in concert with each other, it’s ALL seemingly unified. 

When someone cuts me off in traffic and I’m choosing a reaction…I don’t CONSCIOUSLY, travel down to my cerebellum and say hey 200 million years ago how did my lizard grandfather react when a lizard cut him off in traffic…no MULTIPLE different parts of the brain work together and create an ILLUSION of continuity. And the SAME thing goes for our VISUAL experience of the world. The SAME thing happens with our emotions. 

Here’s Susan Blackmore saying: the traditional METAPHORS that we casually throw around about consciousness…even with just a LITTLE bit of careful observation of your own experience…being someone up in a theater in your head with a unified, continuous STREAM of your own consciousness…this ISN’T even how our experiences SEEM. 

Now it should be said if you were sufficiently COMMITTED to the process…you could ABSOLUTELY carry on in life with a complete LACK of self awareness fueled by the METAPHORS of pop-psychology and MOVIES and TV shows, and you could DEFINITELY LIVE in a state of illusion about it. But that DOESN’T make it right…and what happens she asks when those METAPHORS go on to impact the way we conduct science or break things down philosophically? She says:

“Neuroscience and disciplined introspection give the same answer: there are multiple parallel processes with no clear distinction between conscious and unconscious ones. Consciousness is an attribution we make, not a property of only some special events or processes. Notions of the stream, contents, continuity and function of consciousness are all misguided as is the search for the neural correlates of consciousness.”

The MORE you think about the ILLUSIONS that our brains create for the sake of simplicity…the more the question starts to emerge: what if there is no CENTRALIZED HEADQUARTERS of the brain where the subjective experience of YOU…is being produced? 

What if consciousness…is an emergent property that exists…ONLY, when there is a VERY SPECIFIC organization of physical systems? 

There are people that believe that phenomenal consciousness… is an ILLUSION, they’re often called Illusionists…and what someone like THAT may say is sure, fully acknowledge there are other theories about what may ultimately explain phenomenal consciousness…but isn’t it ALSO, ENTIRELY POSSIBLE…that what it FEELS like to be YOU…is an illusion created by several, distributed processes of the brain running in parallel? Multiple different channels, exerting simultaneous influence on a variety of subsystems of the brain. That these subsystems talk to each other, they compete with each other, they ebb and flow between various states of representation. 

But that these different DRAFTS of cognitive processes come together, to create a type of simplification of what’s going on in aggregate… and that simplification is what YOU experience as… YOU. I mean we have our five senses that help us map the EXTERNAL world and they do so in a way that is often crude and incomplete. Could it be… that we SIMILARLY… have a crude misrepresentation of our own brain activity that SIMILARLY, allows us to be able to function efficiently as a person? 

If you were looking for another METAPHOR to apply here that an illusionist might say is probably better for people to think of themselves in terms of… because its not gonna lead us down that rabbit hole of the cartesian theater…its to THINK of phenomenal CONSCIOUSNESS…as being SIMILAR to a USER INTERFACE or a DESKTOP on a computer. 

The idea is: what IS the desktop of a computer? Well its a bunch of simplified ICONS on a screen, that allow you to essentially manipulate the ELECTRICAL VOLTAGE going on in between transistors on computer hardware. But AS you’re pushing buttons to CHANNEL this electricity, getting things DONE on the computer…you don’t ACTUALLY need to know ANYTHING ABOUT the complex inner workings of how the software and hardware are operating.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett INTRODUCES the metaphor here in his famous book called Consciousness Explained (1991). He says:

“When I interact with the computer, I have limited access to the events occurring within it. Thanks to the schemes of presentation devised by the programmers, I am treated to an elaborate audiovisual metaphor, an interactive drama acted out on the stage of keyboard, mouse, and screen. I, the User, am subjected to a series of benign illusions: I seem to be able to move the cursor (a powerful and visible servant) to the very place in the computer where I keep my file, and once that I see that the cursor has arrived ‘there’, by pressing a key I get it to retrieve the file, spreading it out on a long scroll that unrolls in front of a window (the screen) at my command. I can make all sorts of things happen inside the computer by typing in various commands, pressing various buttons, and I don’t have to know the details; I maintain control by relying on my understanding of the detailed audiovisual metaphors provided by the User illusion.”

So if we take this metaphor seriously…then the idea that you are some sort of privileged observer of everything that’s going on in your mind…that starts to seem like it’s just FALSE. To Daniel Dennett…we don’t know what’s REALLY happening at the deepest levels of our brains…we only know what SEEMS to be happening. We are constantly acting in certain ways, doing things…and then AFTER the fact making up reasons for why we ACTED in the way that we did.

Point is: you don’t need to know EVERYTHING that’s going on at EVERY LEVEL of a computer… to be able to for example, drag a file that you don’t need anymore into the trash can on your desktop. You just drag the file into the trash can on this convenient, intuitive SCREEN. In fact you could make the argument that KNOWING about all the information being processed at other levels would get in the way of you being able to get things done that are USEFUL.

But… as its been said many times before…to RELATE this back to our subjective experience of consciousness…to an ILLUSIONIST… we have to acknowledge the fact…that there is NO MORE… a TRASH CAN inside of your computer screen…as there is a separate PHENOMENAL SUBJECT inside of your brain that needs to be explained. THAT…is an ILLUSION. What you HAVE… Daniel Dennett refers to as an EDITED DIGEST, of events that are going on inside your brain. 

So again just to clarify…an ILLUSIONIST… doesn’t DOUBT the existence of access consciousness, they’re not saying that the OUTSIDE WORLD is an illusion… No, just the phenomenal REPRESENTATION of brain activity…just the subjective YOU that experiences the world phenomenologically.

The philosopher Keith Frankish gives the example of a television set to describe the type of illusion they’re talking about. He says: 

“Think of watching a movie. What your eyes are actually witnessing is a series of still images rapidly succeeding each other. But your visual system represents these images as a single fluid moving image. The motion is an illusion. Similarly, illusionists argue, your introspective system misrepresents complex patterns of brain activity as simple phenomenal properties. The phenomenality is an illusion.”

When it FEELS LIKE SOMETHING to be you…these phenomena are “metaphorical representations” of REAL neural events that are going on…and they definitely help us navigate reality…they definitely ARE useful… but nothing about those phenomena… offer ANY sort of deep insight into the processes involved to produce that experience. So in THAT sense, they are an illusion. 

And Daniel Dennett goes HARD on ANYONE trying to smuggle in ANY MORE MAGIC than needs to be brought in to EXPLAIN consciousness. He wrote a GREAT entry in the journal of consciousness studies in 2016 called Illusionism as the obvious default theory of consciousness. 

Now what’s he GETTING at with that title? Why should consciousness being an ILLUSION… be the DEFAULT theory we should all START from? Well he COMPARES the possibility of consciousness being an illusion…with ANOTHER kind of illusion. The kind of illusion that you’d see in VEGAS at a MAGIC show. 

Because what HAPPENS at a MAGIC show? Well there are GREAT efforts MADE by the magician you’re watching…to TRICK you into thinking that what you’re seeing is real. 

You’re watching the magic show from a VERY specific point of view…CAREFULLY selected by the magician to LIMIT the information you have. They got lights and smoke and music to DISTRACT you, they’re usually wearing some kind of bedazzled, cowboy costume looks like they got it at spirit Halloween, their poor assistant is dressed in God knows what to distract you. 

And when they DO the trick and the ILLUSION is finally COMPLETE…and you’re sitting there AMAZED, WONDERING as to how they defied the laws of nature and actually sawed someone in half and put them back together in front of you…imagine someone in the crowd writing a REVIEW of the show the next day and saying, welp…I guess EVERYTHING we KNOW about science needs to be rethought…I mean this man is CLEARLY a wizard…he is CLEARLY outside the bounds of natural constraints that we THOUGHT existed…it’s time to RETHINK our ENTIRE theoretical model.

Daniel Dennett says who would EVER TAKE that person seriously? They’d be laughed off the internet if they wrote that. And RIGHTFULLY SO. And SIMILARLY when it comes to these modern conversations about consciousness…why would we EVER assume that our entire theoretical MODEL is flawed? Why would we ASSUME the supernatural? Why wouldn’t we assume that anything that seems magical or mysterious definitely HAS a natural explanation…and that we just don’t understand it yet? 

If you ONLY saw a magic trick from a single angle, like sitting in the audience of a theater…it would be silly for us to assume that there wasn’t a different perspective available that would SHOW how the trick was done. Similarly… we ONLY REALLY SEE the qualia of our subjective experience from the angle of introspection. 

This is why to daniel dennett…the DEFAULT position we should be starting from…the MOST parsimonious explanation for a mystery that contradicts everything else we know…is that it’s an illusion. 

It’s funny because it’s an argument that’s coming from a place that’s SIMILAR to where a panpsychist may be coming from, but it’s arriving at a totally different conclusion. Panpsychist might say that we don’t yet know enough about the human brain to write OFF the possibility that consciousness exists at some level underneath. Here’s an illusionist position that’s saying, yeah, we certainly HAVEN’T been doing science long enough to know EVERYTHING about the brain…and think of all the low hanging fruit in the sciences that could potentially EXPLAIN this mystery if only we have more time to study it. 

More than that…to an illusionist…maybe there is something ABOUT the nature of the illusion that we’re experiencing, that is NOT fully explainable by studying the physical properties of the brain. Maybe studying the ILLUSION ITSELF… is where we should be focusing more of our attention. 

But that said…there’s no shortage of people out there that have PROBLEMS with saying consciousness is an illusion. For example… the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, who by the way fun trivia fact is the only person OTHER than phillip goff that we’ve ever interviewed on this show all the way back in our HUME series…anyway HE once wrote an article where he talks about how Illusionism…AS an ANSWER to the hard problem of consciousness…is something that HE thinks HEAVILY relies on the specific definition you’re using of what an ILLUSION is or what CONSCIOUSNESS is. 

To explain what he means… let’s go back to the metaphor about the icons on the computer screen. Massimo Pigliucci says this metaphor that Daniel Dennett presents in Consciousness Explained…is a POWERFUL metaphor when it comes to describing the relationship between phenomenal consciousness… and the underlying neural machinery that makes it possible. It’s great. But what HE can’t seem to understand is why ANYONE would EVER CALL what’s going ON there…an “illusion”? Why USE the word illusion? 

When you hear the word illusion he says… you think of mind trickery, smoke and mirrors. But that’s not what’s happening when it comes to the user interface of a computer. He says, “computer icons, cursors and so forth are not illusions, they are causally efficacious representations… of underlying machine language processes.” 

What he’s getting at… is that there’s no ILLUSION going on here. There IS a connection between the underlying processes of the brain and our phenomenal experience of it. If it were truly an illusion, there would BE no real connection. But he says if you wanted to use that same logic…would you say that the wheel of your CAR is an illusion? I mean when you’re driving down the road and you turn the wheel…you’re not aware of the complexity of everything the car is doing, all of the internal communication going on to be able to turn the car in whatever direction you’re going. Does that make it an illusion when you turn the steering wheel left and everything moves that makes the car go left? No, the steering wheel is causally connected to the underlying machinery… and that steering wheel makes it POSSIBLE for you to actually be able to drive the car efficiently. So why would you ever choose the word ILLUSION… to describe… what’s going ON there? 

Massimo Pigliucci thinks there’s an easy trap for someone to fall into living in today’s world…he calls it a sort of reductionist temptation…we come from a LONG HISTORY in the sciences of progressively reducing things to a deeper, more fundamental level of their component parts… and then the assumption has usually been that if you can find a lower level of description about something…for example if we can explain what PHENOMENAL CONSCIOUSNESS is, with a neurobiological explanation…well then THAT explanation, must be MORE TRUE than anything going on at a more macro level…at the level of the consciousness we experience every day. It must be a more FUNDAMENTAL explanation, and therefore a BETTER explanation. 

You’ll see this same kind of thinking going on when someone assumes the atoms that MAKE UP an apple… are more REAL in some sense than the apple in macroscopic reality…the assumption being that the apple as WE experience it is some kind of an illusion created by our flawed SENSES and that it’s somehow less valuable.  

But this whole way of thinking…is UNWORKABLE he says. We’ve learned over the course of THOUSANDS of years of trying to STUDY the things around us…that different levels of description… are USEFUL for different purposes. 

He gives a series of examples: he says, “If we are interested in the biochemistry of the brain, then the proper level of description is the subcellular one, taking lower levels (eg, the quantum one) as background conditions. If we want a broader picture of how the brain works, we need to move up to the anatomical level, which takes all previous levels, from the subcellular to the quantum one, as background conditions. But if we want to talk to other human beings about how we feel and what we are experiencing, then it is the psychological level of description (the equivalent of Dennett’s icons and cursors) that, far from being illusory, is the most valuable.”

Reality plays by different sets of rules at different scales. And different SCALES of reality are USEFUL for different types of inquiry. When you’re going about your everyday life do you assume that the ground is solid? Or do you use the lower level of description at the atomic level where the ground is really 99.9% empty space?

So when it comes to consciousness…if we’re gonna SAY that a neurobiological description of what’s going on invalidates the experience of what’s going on at the level of subjectivity, that subjectivity is nothing but an illusion…then why stop at the neurobiological level he says? Why not say that neurons are actually an illusion because they’re ultimately made up of molecules? Why not say that MOLECULES are illusions because they’re really made up of quarks and gluons. You can do this INFINITELY. 

And maybe on a more GENERAL note…JUST when it comes to this lifelong process of trying to be as clear thinking of a human being as you possibly CAN be…maybe part of that whole process… is accepting the fact that there is no, single, monistic way of analyzing reality that is the ULTIMATE METHOD of understanding it. Maybe understanding reality… just takes a more pluralistic approach, maybe GETTING as close to the truth as we can as people takes LOOKING at reality from many different angles at many different scales, and maybe phenomenal consciousness is an important scale of reality… that we need to be considering. 

So from Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish offering a take on HOW consciousness might be an illusion…to Susan Blackmore offering a take on WHY the illusion of consciousness is such an easy trap to FALL into…I think if anyone you’re in a conversation with calls themselves an illusionist…then unless you’re talking to David Copperfield I think you’ll at LEAST be able to understand the main reasons for why someone may THINK this way about consciousness. 

And this is the point in the conversation where we hit a bit of a crossroads…SAME crossroads that we’ve seen with OTHER theories of consciousness in the series so far. At a certain point...there are GOOD reasons to believe that phenomenal consciousness may be an illusion…and there are good reasons to DOUBT whether that is true or not. As we’ve talked about at a certain point with these conversations you just have to CHOOSE to believe in something, and then deal with the prescriptive implications of BELIEVING it after the fact…and one of the ones with Illusionism in particular is you can start to wonder, the more you think about it, how much consciousness being an illusion, ACTUALLY has an impact on ANYTHING going on in your everyday life or your relationship to society. 

It’s actually pretty interesting to consider…how much the possibility of consciousness being an illusion…DIRECTLY MIRRORS, OTHER, unsolved conversations in the philosophy of mind more broadly. Like for example…the ongoing debate about whether FREE WILL is an illusion. 

In fact in order to be able to talk about the societal impacts of consciousness being an illusion we have to talk about free will being one as well. 

Next episode we’re going to dive into it. Free will, free wont, hard determinism and the implications of ALL of these when it comes to structuring our societies. Keep your eyes open for it, it will be out soon! Thanks for everyone on Patreon and thanks for checking out the website at philosophizethis.org

But as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.