Chapter 11 The Hard Problem of Consciousness CONSCIOUSNESS CANNOT BE DESTROYED
Although the limits of scientific knowledge for the most part have been discussed in terms of epistemological shortcomings concerning its truth value, these epistemo-logical limitations have predominantly been attributed to implicit metaphysical pre-sumptions entailed in Cartesian dualism. Particularly its ontological dualism has been held responsible for contributing to the Great Divide between mind and body, subject and object, human and non-human, culture and nature, humanities and natu-ral sciences, and eventually, between Us and Them. I think it would be no exaggera-tion to state that Cartesian dualism has been identified as the most central problem of modern science as well as of modern/colonial world view in general, particularly in the face of its tremendous impact on the unfolding of modern history.3 While Descartes’ dualist model has been subject to harsh critique from the day he published his *Meditations*, the predictive power of Newton’s laws seemed to sustain at least its mechanistic understanding of nature. During the following three centuries, natural scientists would explain more and more phenomena by deterministic natural laws, giving rise to a physicalist picture of the natural universe, including life, the origin of humanity, and finally, the human mind. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, modern science would be drowning in a profound and multi-dimensional crisis. On the one hand, the experimental method of natural sciences had proven inappropriate to cope with social and psychological phenomena, eventually resulting in the “two culture” divide between the humanities and the natural sciences. As discussed in Part I of this work, the humanities’ perspective would denounce the contingent and construed character of science as well as the alienating, reifying, and disenchanting effects of its underlying metaphysical presuppositions. However, the humanities themselves continued trapped by the spell of the critical, disembodied Cartesian subject, only discovering, again and again, the illusiveness of reality lurking behind every single of its critical inquiries. Being unable to bridge the yawning gap between subject and object, mind and body, individual and society, the humanities got lost somewhere in the no man’s land in between matters of fact and matters of concern. In the natural sciences, on the other hand, new findings in physics had shown the explanatory limits of Newtonian physics and its unified cosmology. Particularly, Einstein’s relativity theory and the rise of quantum physics, as the two irreconcilable pillars of modern physics, imposed an intolerably disunited picture of the universe, violating central principles of scientific theory building, like parsimony and non-contradiction. Moreover, quantum physics seemed to threaten the objectivist notion of a “neutral” observer, further exacerbating the epistemological crisis of positivism and empiricism. At first sight the problems highlighted by the humanities and those encountered by modern physics do not seem to have much in common. While the epistemological crisis issued by the humanities primarily drew on a problematic notion of the subject as implied by rationalism, relativity and quantum physics rather emphasised the problematic ontological patterns of the physical universe as revealed by empirical evidence. But of course, the modern notions of the rational subject and empirical evidence are intrinsically related, since they derive from the same dualist ontology that defines these two poles as two separable “things”: the first representing the sole thinking “stuff” observing and manipulating the blind matter represented by the latter. Ironically, it is exactly this separation between mind and matter that renders experience, and hence, “evidence” a pure business of the mind with no determinable relation to the material world “out there”. Natural sciences had been “neutralising” this implicit illusiveness of its empirical evidence, more or less successfully, by reducing the mind to a cumbrous byproduct of matter, trying to explain it away so to say, supposing that matter would be a much simpler thing to handle than this inscrutable thing called “mind” (or “consciousness”, “psyche”, “experience”, “subjectivity”, “phenomenal”, you name it!—nobody even knows how to name this annoying something!). However, relativity theory and quantum physics revealed that matter is at least as mysterious as the mind. In fact, there is no “matter” in the classical sense, only empty, flexing time-space pervaded by probability waves manifesting as particles in-deterministically, or something like that—actually, the “evidence” produced by scientists in their laboratories was so fuzzy and confusing, that a clear picture of what matter might be was almost impossible to be drawn (let alone weird pictures of matter, the two were utterly irreconcilable, allowing for no unified theory of the physical universe. And finally, quantum physics suggested that matter itself might have some properties that thitherto had been ascribed exclusively to the mind. On its fundamental level, matter is constituted by quanta (discrete portions) of the same “stuff” as light or other kinds of electromagnetic radiation, equalling rather a kind of informed energy than classical material objects. These quanta behave probabilistically and depending on the type of measurement, that is, the intervention an observer decided to apply in order to yield a physically detectable manifestation of those quanta, showing either wave-like or particle-like properties. While particle-like manifestations of quanta resemble properties we would expect from classical objects, their wave-like behaviour alludes rather to a kind of “active information”. 4 This wave-particle dualism at the very fundament of the physical universe was soon associated with the mind-body problem, with some of the leading quantum physicists 5 suggesting that the wave-like properties of quanta might somehow be related to the emergence of conscious experience and free will. There have been many attempts to get the wave-particle dualism into a single coherent ontological framework, resulting in a confusing variety of (often incredibly odd) proposals concerning the place and role of mind and matter in our physical universe. So, notwithstanding all the attempts to keep the physical realm clear from this recalcitrant phenomenon called mind, with quantum physics it intruded on the scene again through the “backdoor” of wave-particle dualism—but this time right in the heart of fundamental physics. Now, the ontological roles of mind and matter would not only be decisive for the epistemological status of empirical evidence, as highlighted by the humanities, but also for making sense of it in terms of a unified theory of the physical universe. Despite the numerous efforts to come up with a convincing ontological interpretation of quantum theory, to date none have attained consensus. There are still many different proposals in the running, suggesting radically different worlds, with different roles for waves and particles, mind(s) and matter. So, quantum physics (still?) does not explain what mind and matter actually might be, nor how they emerge, or how they are connected with each other. However, there is yet another scientific field of research particularly concerned with questions of this kind, located somewhere between cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and philosophy, and which is generally referred to as philosophy of mind. While neurosciences have been rather explaining consciousness away, reducing it to a mere epiphenomenon of neuronal activity, recent contributions in philosophy of mind have been insisting on the ontological status of consciousness as an irreducible observable. David Chalmers ( 1995) famously argues that the *hard problem of consciousness *is not about tracing all neuronal processes and their correlation with cognitive processes, but about explaining why such physical activity is accompanied by phenomenal experience at all. So, again, the mind-body problem has to be treated at its ontological level to make sense of our empirical evidence. And, again, there are many 35211The Hard Problem of Consciousness radically different worlds in the run, suggesting different ontological roles of mindand matter. Conspicuously, the ontological frameworks discussed in philosophy ofmind reveal some fundamental parallels compared to ontological interpretations dis-cussed in quantum physics. Of course, these convergences have long been noticed andsome authors made an effort to evaluate, compare, and where possible, to integratedifferent models into a coherent, unified ontological framework able to do justice bothto the findings from quantum physics and philosophy of mind. It goes without saying that all this is work in progress and will need a lot more discussion and research before anything definitive can be said about the possibility to really accomplish this ambitious objective. However, the persistence of the mind-body problem, representing the core of an *ontological bottleneck* science has to go through before it can finally transcend the limitations it inherited from Cartesian dualism, dictates that we must never give up trying. As a reminder: Without a fun-damental theory of mind and matter we do not know how and what we know (due to the induction problem and relativism); the knowledge we produce makes no sense to us (due to the epistemic gap between objective description and phenomenal experience); we do not know exactly what kind of knowledge we are producing and for what purpose (since we are not aware of our metaphysical suppositions and their objective impacts); and we have no access to other kinds of knowledge (since we think we think too differently to talk to each other). This is why the *hard problem of consciousness* ultimately amounts to the real *hard problem of modern science*.6 Moreover, while the preliminary character of the ontological models that are cur-rently being discussed is something these proposals share with any other scientific hypothesis, they are based on extraordinarily solid empirical evidence (from 11.1The Hard Problem of Modern Science353 experimental physics) and on logical arguments approved in the course of a long-lasting academic discourse (philosophy of mind). Anyhow, what counts for my purpose here is the intuition that some of the most promising proposals for a unified ontological framework capable of serving as a fundamental scientific theory of mind and matter may be more commensurable with Other ontological conceptions than scientistic prejudice. In the following chapter I will provide a brief summary of recent debates on the ontological status of consciousness before I turn to ontological interpretations of quantum physics and what they can tell us about the possible nature of mind and matter. The whole issue has been treated in great detail by others before me, so that I will rather lean on these second-hand summaries than on my own research in these vast discursive fields. Particularly, I will refer to David Chalmers’s7 groundbreaking contributions to a more comprehensive, unified discussion of the hard problem of consciousness, and to Nikolaus von Stillfried’s8 recent monumental effort to synthe-sise both ontological interpretations derived from the philosophy of mind and quan-tum physics into a single coherent theory of mind and matter. *** *(A) Consciousness Exists* Although modern epistemology is entirely based on the idea of an autonomous, thinking subject, a significant number of scientists and philosophers seem to be prepared to assume that the self and its free will is an illusive notion, entirely explainable in terms of neuronal and cognitive processes.23 Moreover, one should suppose that physicalists experience the same rich and lively qualia as, let’s say, dualists or idealists, and still they seem prepared to assume that their experience is just a meaningless byproduct of their brain activity. How come if consciousness is such an obvious and undeniable fact? Chalmers admits that the existence of con-sciousness is not logically necessary once we suppose that our behaviour and even the content of our thoughts might be explainable by solving all the “easy problems” 21“The hard problem is that of explaining conscious experience. Where the easy problems are concerned, it suffices to explain how a function is performed, and to do this it suffices to specify an appropriate neural or computational mechanism. But where the hard problem is concerned, explaining cognitive and behavioral functions always leaves a further open question: why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? Because of this, the standard reduc-tive methods of neuroscience and cognitive science that work for the easy problems do not work for the hard problem” ( of neurosciences. However, Chalmers insists that such a view would be “utterly unsatisfying”, since his own experience is so “baffling” and imbued with phenom-enal qualities that they simply demand an explanation. So, if people with phenomenal experience cannot ignore it, this would lead to the conclusion that physicalists do not have any phenomenal qualia, just like Chalmers’s “zombie twin in the universe next door”.24According to Chalmers’s conceivability argument (which I will treat in more detail in a moment), there should be absolutely no way to actually distinguish “zombie”-philosophers-of-mind from their conscious mates, since their behaviour would be exactly the same and we cannot, per definition, know what it is like to be a “zombie” who does not at all know what is like to be. Be this as it may, one could also ask why Chalmers spends so much effort in proving the evidence of something which is either too evident to be ignored by any-one who experiences it, or neither evident nor logically necessary at all, simply depending on the experiencer’s worldview. Conspicuously though, in Descartes’s days, philosophers of all different schools of thought would agree, quite unani-mously, that they have phenomenal experience, and that experience is the only access to reality—independently from their different theories concerning the pos-sible nature of experience. This is why for those philosophers the problem was rather to avoid solipsism than to prove the existence of consciousness. So, once oneself happens to experience qualia and feels this deep conviction that there is something demanding to be explained, it does not matter much whether other peo-ple are “zombies” or not, since this is something we cannot, by definition, ever know.25The only thing which one knows for sure is that there are qualia popping up before one’s inner eye.26Of course, if a significant number of other people report sharing similar kinds of experience, and if one is prepared to accept the hypotheses that they and the physical world around exist (even though there is no absolute proof of that), one may easily come to the conclusion that consciousness might be a gen-eral property of human beings and maybe even of the universe in general. 27 However, this still leaves us with the question of what consciousness is. Chalmers himself does not offer a clear definition of consciousness, but rather identifies consciousness with the phenomenal character of conscious states or qualia, which ultimately amount to the part of reality that cannot be described in terms of physical properties. Though one can doubt this definition, it might be a good strategy, since it avoids the Cartesian identification of consciousness with the self, and thus, also avoids criticism from those who argue against the Cartesian self. K RAJARAM IRS 29526 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZopwZQTVtR%2BWDYfO0zy4b3xFEum4m2srqs-Eu4jWbd2eKg%40mail.gmail.com.
