The Elements of Consciousness and Their Neurodynamical Correlates

The ‘hard problem’ is hard because of the special epistemological status of consciousness, which does not, however, preclude its scientific investigation. Data from phenomenologically trained observers can be combined with neurological investigations to establish the relation between experience and neurodynamics. Although experience cannot be reduced to physical phenomena, parallel phenomenological and neurological analyses allow the structure of experience to be related to the structure of the brain. Such an analysis suggests a theoretical entity, an elementary unit of experience, the protophenomenon, which corresponds to an activity site (such as a synapse) in the brain. The structure of experience is determined by connections (e.g. dendrites) between these activity sites; the connections correspond to temporal patterns among the elementary units of experience, which can be expressed mathematically. This theoretical framework illuminates several issues, including degrees of consciousness, nonbiological consciousness, sensory inversions, unity of consciousness and the unconscious mind. Why the ‘Hard Problem’ is Hard Special epistemological status of consciousness I take the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness to be to understand the relation between our subjective experience and the brain processes that cause it; that is, to reconcile our everyday feeling of consciousness with the scientific worldview (MacLennan, 1995). This problem is hard because consciousness has unique epistemological characteristics, which must be accommodated by any attempted solution. I will summarize these characteristics; more detail can be found in Searle (1992, chs. 4, 5) and Chalmers (1995; 1996), whose positions, if I have understood them correctly, are consistent with mine. First, science is a public enterprise; it attains knowledge that is independent of the individual investigator by limiting itself to public phenomena. Ultimately it is grounded in shared experiences, for example, when we both look at a thermometer and read the same temperature. Traditionally science has accomplished its ends by focusing on the more public, objective aspects of phenomena (e.g. temperature as measured by a thermometer), and by ignoring the more private, subjective aspects (how warm it feels to me). In other words, science has restricted itself to facts about which it is easy to reach agreement among a consensus of trained observers. Although this restriction has aided scientific progress, it prevents the scientific study of consciousness, which is essentially private and subjective. Second, science’s neglect of the subjective is also apparent in its reductive methods. For example, once the experiential phenomenon of temperature has been separated into Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, No. 5–6, 1996, pp. 409–24 * I am grateful to David Chalmers, Jonathan Shear and two anonymous referees for many helpful criticisms and suggestions on two previous drafts of this paper. 1 A more detailed comparison will be found at the end of this paper. 2 It should be apparent that I am using ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ to distinguish private, ‘first person’ phenomena from public, ‘third person’ phenomena. As Searle (1992) observes, progress on the mind–body problem has been impeded by the connotations acquired by these terms, viz., the objective is unbiased and factual, whereas the subjective is biased or distorted. Indeed, I will argue for the possibility of unbiased, factual statements about subjective (private, first person) phenomena. Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -not for reproduction its subjective and objective parts (felt vs. measured temperature), the objective part can be reduced to other objective phenomena (mean kinetic energy of molecules), but the subjective components of the original phenomenon remain unreduced. Although this approach has been very fruitful for the development of physical theory, it fails when the topic of the investigation is precisely that subjectivity that it ignores. In summary, the standard reduction pattern in science, which reduces the objective to the objective, cannot solve the hard problem, which deals with the relation between the subjective and the objective. If reduction is to play a role at all, it must take a different form. Finally, science traditionally seeks facts — observations — that are independent of the observer; this supposes that the observer can be separated from the observed (another aspect of the subject–object distinction). However, in confronting the hard problem we cannot separate the observer and the observed, for consciousness is observation, the subject experiencing the object. That is, experience comprises both observer and observed, the termini of the vector of consciousness. Separating the two breaks the very connection that we aim to study. Scientific investigation of consciousness The preceding observations might suggest that the hard problem is invulnerable to scientific methods, but I believe that progress may be made by loosening a few of science’s self-imposed restrictions, many of which are relics of long discredited philosophies of science, such as naive empiricism and logical positivism. Consciousness is our opening to the world; it is the vehicle by which we experience anything. Therefore we cannot observe consciousness per se, since we observe through consciousness. Nevertheless, with practice we can identify characteristics of consciousness that are relatively independent of its content, and in this way separate them from its content. An analogy may make this clear. The aperture of a camera is its ‘window to the world’, since any image in the camera must come through the aperture. (For the sake of the analogy we suppose the camera cannot be opened in any way.) From within the camera the aperture per se is not visible; all we can see is the image it transmits, the scene at which it is aimed. Although the aperture is visible only by virtue of the images it transmits, observation nevertheless shows that certain characteristics of the image (focus, brightness, depth of field) are more a consequence of the aperture than of its content. Thus the aperture may be investigated indirectly. So also we may investigate the structure of consciousness independently of its content. It may seem that by advocating such private ‘observation’ of consciousness, we have abandoned all hope of publicly validatible science, but it is worth remembering that all observation is ultimately private. Science has developed methods (such as measurement) that, in a context of shared training and experience, lead to general agreement among qualified observers (with varying theoretical commitments), and thus provide a reasonably stable body of public facts, which may be used for the support or critique of theories. To bring consciousness into the scope of science will require a body of appropriately trained observers; the public facts necessary for a scientific theory of consciousness will emerge from their consensus. 3 One cannot ignore the importance of training, shared experience and institutions in the creation of ‘facts’. Even something so simple as accurately reading a thermometer requires training and skill (e.g. reading the top or bottom of the meniscus). Training is all the more necessary for reading bubble-chamber images and gas chromatographs. The histories of N-rays and polywater show how competent observers can disagree over even the existence of a phenomenon (let alone its measurement); ‘cold fusion’ is a more recent example. See Fleck (1979) for an informative case study. 410 B. MACLENNAN Copyright (c) Imprint Academic 2005 For personal use only -not for reproduction The camera analogy shows the importance of training, for the relevant phenomena, e.g. depth of field, might not be apparent to untutored observers. The difficulties with ‘split-brain’ and ‘blindsight’ patients as informants also illustrate the need for trained observers. I believe that the best example of the kind of training required comes from phenomenological philosophy and psychology (cf. Ihde, 1986). In summary, although consciousness cannot be reduced to physical phenomena by the standard reductive methods of the sciences, it can be investigated to yield publicly validatible facts about the structure of consciousness, which can be related, in turn, to the observations of neuroscience.