Is Consciousness Mysterious?

This is the fifth in a series of posts excerpted from my book, The Four Realms of Existence. (Read posts one, two, three and four.) The key premise of the book is that everything about a human being, biologically and psychologically, can be subsumed within four fundamental realms of existence. These are the biological, neurobiological, cognitive, and conscious realms.

The Philosophical Hard Problem

Some say consciousness is mysterious. But there are two ways to think about this. One is that consciousness is mysterious in the way that the idea of a soul that survives death is, and the other is in the way that the mechanism of evolutionary inheritance was before DNA was discovered.

Today, the mystery of consciousness is often discussed in terms of a special quality—the way it feels to be consciousness. This phenomenal feeling is to be what makes red seem red, and fear feel fearful. Unconscious states come with no such feelings. Philosopher Thomas Nagel refers to these feelings as “qualia," and David Chalmers, another philosopher, has argued that qualia constitute the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Nagle and Chalmers are philosophical dualists who believe that consciousness is not physical and thus will never be explained as a function of the brain. Philosopher Owen Flanagan has dubbed them “new mysterians,” referring to an older dualist tradition that viewed consciousness as dependent on mysterious, non-physical explanations.

Scientists have learned quite a bit from philosophers about how to conceptualize complex aspects of the mind for the purpose of guiding research. But the goals of science are often different from those of philosophy. That’s why some scientists, myself included, believe that the reason Chalmers’s “hard problem” seems so difficult scientifically is because it is a philosophical, not a scientific, problem. And I believe that most of the discussion about the mystery of consciousness has resulted from scientists treating the hard problem as a scientific problem. As Anil Seth notes in his book Being You, scientists should focus on the what he calls the "real problem of consciousness"—how to use scientific research to understand consciousness. Until we accept that consciousness is part of our physical, biological makeup, we’ll continue to be mystified about what it is.

The Limits of Logic

Philosophers interested in the mind typically use logic to construct as close to ironclad arguments as possible. Good logical arguments are very pleasing to the human mind; they feel true and compelling. They can, in fact, feel so right that the claims argued for seem like they must be true. In the case of claims about qualia, they must, it seems, point to something real. Although non-physical consciousness is real to non-physicalist philosophers, who are essentially dualists, to scientists, non-physical consciousness is, or should be, an oxymoron.

William James was both a philosopher and a scientist, and wrote about mental topics wearing both hats, sometimes at once. Describing his inner conflict about the mind as an immaterial soul, on the one hand, and as a physical aspect of the brain, on the other, he lamented, “our reasonings have not established the non-existence of the Soul; they have only proved its superfluity for scientific purposes.”

What I take from James’s dilemma is that when we turn to philosophy for guidance about the nature of the mind, we need to ask ourselves: is the philosopher making a reasoned argument about a philosophical question, or about how the physical brain mechanisms of the mind? Qualia seem to be more of a philosophical problem, and, as James said about the Soul, may well be superfluous for scientific purposes, at least as currently conceived.

I don’t mean to imply that philosophical theories have no place in science. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty said, “A science without philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about.” That’s a bit extreme, but I do believe in a milder version. It goes like this: Scientists are professional collectors and analyzers of data, whereas philosophers are professional thinkers—which means that sometimes scientists can benefit from the logical analyses that philosophers bring to scientific problems. For this reason, I collaborate with philosophers and value their contributions.

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But just because the brain can think logically does not mean that evolution wired the brain to be primarily a logic machine. Channeling James, philosopher U. T. Place noted that “the thesis that consciousness is a process in the brain cannot be dismissed on logical grounds.” In the final analysis, while logic is very useful, it is not the answer to every conundrum in life. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, for example, famously showed that people often rely on heuristics (mental shortcuts) such as referring to what common sense tells them that they or others typically do in similar situations, as opposed to rigorous logic.

Philosophical vs. Scientific Premises

Biology is messy, and ultimately scientists need to know when to use, and when to avoid, philosophical wisdom. If we aren’t careful about the kinds of ideas we bring to the scientific table from other fields, we risk spinning our scientific wheels on what Cameron Brick and colleagues have called illusory essences. These are concepts or labels or category names that take on explanatory power, as if they were real entities. The philosophical notion of “Self” is an example. Qualia may also qualify.

A commitment to a non-physical (say, dualist) view of consciousness is perfectly fine as a philosophical position, but it’s a deal-breaker as a scientific starting point. If consciousness is not a physical state, it cannot be researched scientifically. The physicalist philosopher Daniel Dennett went so far as to say that Chalmers’s hard problem is on par with arguing for the validity of vitalism, the discredited idea in biology that life depends on non-physical elements. While Chalmers responded with a philosophical counterargument, Dennett’s point is not completely off base. When non-physical explanations of scientific phenomena are taken seriously, and used as a scientific solution to a philosophical conception, we end up in a proverbial explanatory rabbit hole.