Neuroscientists appear to use three labels for the material and non-material activity that goes on in our heads: brain, mind and consciousness. How are they connected and how are they to be distinguished from one another?
“Neuroscientists appear to use three labels for the material and non-material activity that goes on in our heads: brain, mind and consciousness. How are they connected and how are they to be distinguished from one another?”
The brain is a tangible organ of the body of all animals. The brain is a communication system with billions of neurons being the agents of communication. The activity in different areas of the brain is seen using technology - scanners which allow observations of change in neuronal paths in response to different stimuli. (An individual who has brain damage shows by their behaviour the effect of the loss of that area of the brain.) In carrying out their work, neurons have to communicate across tiny gaps called synapses.
We understand:
• How there is movement of neurotransmitters across synaptic gaps, and the conditions necessary for that to happen
• The instructions given by those neurotransmitters and the conditions that allow the flow of communication
How does such a system arise? We appreciate that the single cell resulting from female egg and male sperm coming together, has within it the coding that creates other cells necessary to produce the whole body and all its functions. Some of these cells will become for example, ’mere’ skin cells, brain cells while others will become brain cells or neurones in the brain. Inside every cell there are proteins which are like the engineers that carry out the building process. There is a protein factory inside every cell. The DNA code in each cell instructs the production of different proteins. It also ensures the production of neurotransmitters to send the right protein and other neurotransmitters to the right place in the body. All of this and much more is a cause for wonderment, but it is factual. There is much about the whole body, including the brain, we understand from cell biology.
This knowledge is vital in the context of the current pandemic. Today, neurobiologists give explanations of how different Covid-19 vaccines work and neuro-biologically educate us in the wonders of cell behaviour to a level never before experienced. That such cells are themselves a coming together of particles with understood properties of mass, electric charge, nuclear charge, and quantum mechanical ‘spin’, is becoming widely acknowledged. This knowledge does not answer fundamental questions about consciousness and spirituality.
‘Mind’ is the label we use for the overall outcome of processes seen in the activity of the brain. Science calls what is being processed ‘information’. Small pieces of that information become highly integrated before they come to awareness. That highly integrated awareness allows a label (a meaning) to be given to that information for its communication to the self and to others. How does this work? We may conclude that the information is multi-layered and/or multi-dimensional. It might helpfully be compared to how an SD card in a camera produces a photograph. The SD card file we know as a photo of a sunset has a pixel for a small part of that sunset that is red. There is no communication with the adjacent pixels, no integration. That integration is done by, amongst other means, the computer assembling many ‘red’ pixels for display of the sunset. The brain creates a map of integrated experience to add to trillions of others which says not only “sunset” but the whole range of sensory experience of ‘sunset’. The mapping of all that experience becomes a memory of sunsets that enables comparison between them. That mapping also allows the distinction between the sunset being experienced and, for example, some ‘Northern Light’ show.
When we say ‘Mind’ we are referring to a theory of how such processes are being carried out in the brain. This mapping creates schematic ‘mental’ representations across a wide spectrum of complex experiences. The ‘red’ of that sunset is not the reality. ‘Red’ is a construct we use for the experience the individual has. The experience of the evening breeze and the feeling of awe and delight is not reality. That all happens deep within the process we call mind within the organ called brain. We relate to other human beings by their ability, or otherwise, to have such schematic representations too.
Now we know what the physics is of ‘red’ and ‘cool’ we are thankful for the highly integrated summaries that the Mind makes available in unique form to each of us. If it was not so, our evolution would have been cut short by taking far too long to identify our mind’s summary of an event available by integrating memories across the brain’s neurones. So, for example, we might not avoid fast enough, the collapse of a building undermined by an earthquake, having no integrated forms for that experience for immediate access.
Consciousness. What we call mind (resisting the definite article and the tendency for it to bring the belief in an organ of mind into being) manages immense amounts of ‘information’ and channels our focus to what we call our awareness. We are now in touch with the puzzle that has challenged us for centuries. We ask ourselves who it is that is aware and how we are conscious of it being ourselves? The experience of consciousness is subjective, and some say not amenable to scientific research. Today we speak of our consciousness being aware that we ‘know’ or ‘think’. The experience of consciousness is common to all human beings and for that reason science must research the phenomenon and scientists expect to prove how it arises.
We give conscious awareness many names such as spirit, soul, anima. What we call mind then, is observed in us as a current reality; some sense that it is this part of our being that survives the death of the body.
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There is a view of reality which demands that all explanations for everything that exists need to be traced back to physical or material phenomena. This is often called the reductionist view: everything is ultimately reduced to physics and chemistry. The challenge for reductionists is to explain how the particles that made up the original universe have somehow developed to coalesce into mind, consciousness, and indeed life itself. One attempt proposes that these particles must possess a kind of quality – what we might call ‘proto consciousness’. That is, the seeds of consciousness must have been present in the original. This of course begs a major question: why should that be so? Yet, the belief of science that these questions will be answered derives from an expectation that one day we will have a Theory of Everything.
Another proposition that we can mull over is the idea that the highly integrated and highly differentiated information, which mind processes, is what we experience in awareness as consciousness.
Or we can use a theological framework: we all exist within the mind of the Creator Christ, and in our limited human understanding, share His consciousness of us. This, in turn, allows us to share consciousness of Him.
“Consciousness is fundamental to our lives. Indeed, without it, we would not be able to have this discussion. Nevertheless, in the following post, Consultant Neurologist Ian Morrison argues that every attempt to define it is fraught with difficulty. That of course does nor make consciousness any less wonderful a phenomenon; perhaps it even enhances our sense of wonder! ”
—Ed.
In clinical neurology, we don’t assess “consciousness”. The Glasgow Coma Scale, for example, is a measure of alertness and ability to interact with the environment. MRI scans and EEG can measure brain activity but the relationship between these assessments and consciousness has not been established.
It could be argued that consciousness is awareness or the voluntary ability to interact with an individual’s surroundings. If an absence of consciousness is a state when someone has limited ability to interact with their environment, any measurement that identified this state would in itself be considered an interaction – the Schrodinger’s Cat of neuroscience!
Is consciousness an awareness of “self”? Disorders of sleep are an interesting argument against this. In sleep, a person can interact with their environment to a reduced extent (e.g. responding to an alarm sounding) but without knowingly doing so when initiating that interaction. The person has awareness of their environment, but not of “self”. Sleep therefore is an altered state of awareness or alertness/ability to interact with the surroundings that doesn’t fit with any current understanding of conscious or unconscious.
In other settings, patients lose their pre-existing memories, personalities, behaviours etc (dissociation). They are alert/aware and can fully interact with their surroundings but their usual mind/self isn’t there. They are fully alert and can interact with their surroundings but the “person” isn’t there and they often have no recollection of this state. Are they conscious?
It is therefore key to establish the definition of “consciousness” and also the “self”. Until these key issues are defined, it is not possible for neuroscience to understand their mechanisms.
It is very good to be part of this forum amongst experts who know a great deal more than I about psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry. I will try to explain a little of my views, more from a philosophical point of view.
We do not know what the connection is between the brain and consciousness. The physicalist will say that this is simply our present ignorance about the immense complexity of how neurons work together, but the honest answer is that thus far we have no scientific explanation. Nor, I believe, do we have much hope of ever knowing.
It is not just that the brain is so immensely complex and that we are still scratching the surface of knowledge about its workings. That is true. It is also because consciousness simply does not have any of the characteristics of something physical. It seems like another category and that category is not material. Jerry Fodor has written: “Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious.”
Here are, very briefly a few thoughts about the phenomenon:
We have private, privileged access to our minds. There is nothing like this in the physical realm. There is a syllogism, which you may or may not agree with:
1/ Mental states can only be privately accessed.
2/ No physical state can be privately accessed.
3/ Therefore mental states are not physical states.
We are persons. This is very hard to define but it involves a sense of self and continuity. Once again, it is not easy to see how a material object could be a person.
We have experiences – known as qualia in philosophical terms. The redness of a sunset is not just registration of certain wavelengths of light. There is ‘something it is like’ to experience it.
We have emotions, such as sadness, fear, anger, joy. They, like beliefs, are about things. There is an ‘aboutness’ or intentionality (in philosophical terms) which we cannot ascribe to something physical.
We have free-will. Or do we? Over half of philosophers of mind are physical determinists, many of whom think our sense of free-will is illusory. After all, if all we are is physical, then every aspect of a particular brain state is based on physical laws which would have worked through time to that state, from back at the big bang. If we bring in quantum indeterminism, that too does not rescue free-will, because there can be no autonomy.
Most Christian ‘libertarian’ philosophers, (such as Timothy O’Connor and Nancy Murphy), think that we have free-will because of ‘top-down’ working of the neuronal networks, such that this somehow overcomes the ‘bottom up’ deterministic physics at the atomic level. I am very sceptical of this, however.
My own current view is close to Descartes. Call me a substance or Cartesian dualist if you like. Our selves/souls are immaterial with intimate connection with our brain hardware. This at least accords with what we know about the sheer non- physicality of conscious experience and the autonomy we have in free-will. It also, I submit, accords with our scriptural understanding of our survival after death and the amazing fact, as already well described in the posts here, of our being able to communicate with and know God here and now.
The fact that this seems to go against our understanding of physics (how can something immaterial interact with the brain?) should not surely, as Christians, be a stumbling block.
At the moment, our ability to measure and assess consciousness is limited by the current techniques available in science. Ultrasound was only developed in 1956, MRI in 1971 and even neuroimmunology as a field only became fully developed in the 1980s.
Consequently, the mind is private at the moment because we can’t access or assess it using current technology.
It is highly likely that in the next 50 years, we will have the techniques to understand how the brain processes decision making, learning, personality, mood, experience and most, if not all the other parts of “consciousness”.
Would this be a barrier to faith?
I don’t think it would be a barrier. Natural revelation is addressed in the Bible (Psalm 19:1-4). I would argue that understanding the mechanisms that make us unique, give us thought and consciousness will complement faith through natural revelation, in much the same way that evolution helps us to understand how God made the Earth.
Are human beings merely ‘computers made of meat’?
The mind is an extraordinary thing. Is it just a product of the electrochemical circuitry of the brain or is there much more to us than this? The physicalist will certainly agree with the former view; that our conscious states are merely physical processes. After all, when we use an MRI scanner, we see specific areas of our brain that light up when we have specific thoughts. Does this locate the thoughts to just neuronal activity or is the use of specific areas of the brain merely a correlation with something else going on that is non-physical?
The title question of this essay is important because whatever answer is given affects any definition of what it is to be human. If we are ‘merely’ computers made of meat, then we may conclude (as many have) that we have no more value or dignity than an advanced computer. If we are at least in part non-physical, then this puts us in a different category from physical objects and we may then infer that that there is perhaps something transcendent about us.
Consciousness is that almost indefinable state of mind that seems to encapsulate who we are as individuals. It is a phenomenon that we tend to take for granted. It is something only the individual can access privately. It involves a sense of personhood. It involves all the sensations that we experience. It involves emotions and beliefs. It also involves a sense that we have free-will.
The more one examines consciousness, the more it seems unlike anything physical. But is this sense of it being other than physical just an illusion?
Consciousness is something that philosophers have pondered over and indeed battled over for centuries. Is it definable? Could a computer be conscious? Do we have free-will? These are the sort of questions that we should tackle in this essay.
It is worth having a very brief tour of the main philosophical positions regarding consciousness before we continue.
The substance dualism of Descartes
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is considered by many to be the father of modern philosophy. He is probably best known popularly for his statement “Cogito ergo sum” (1644) This is Latin for “I think, therefore I am”. This statement is foundational to his quest to find some firm truth to hold on to when being sceptical about everything else. If everything else is unreal and an illusion, at least he knows that he is a thinking thing. In his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), in a state of extreme scepticism, he can doubt the existence of his body but not that he is a thing that thinks. This is one reason why he believed the mind to be a distinct ‘substance’, different from the substance of the body (substance in philosophy of mind is an entity that need not be physical). Another reason for him to believe the mind and body are different substances is that everything physical, including the body, is extended (has dimensions) whereas the mind is not extended. A third reason why he distinguished between mind and body is that the body is clearly divisible, but the mind is not.
‘Cartesian dualism’ (after Descartes) claims that there is causal interaction, in both directions, between the non-physical soul and the brain.
His claim that the mind is not divisible is supported by certain forms of neurosurgery. This is when, for a variety of reasons such as severe epilepsy, the Corpus Callosum (a bundle of nerves that connects the two sides of the brain) is severed. The cerebral hemispheres are isolated from each other. After this surgery, if all we are is physical, one should expect that two persons would now exist because of two isolated hemispheres. There are of course some neurological consequences but never any change in personality or evidence of two personalities (Sperry, Gazzaniga & Bogen, 1969).
Leibniz (1646-1716), the great mathematician and philosopher, had similar views to Descartes. He imagined going right into a piece of machinery such as an enormous mill (1714). This is not different in essence from going into the brain and looking into the ‘machinery’ of its functioning. He claimed that if we were to look into any such ‘machine’, no matter how complex it is, we could never find any evidence of thoughts, merely the mechanical workings. There is nothing there that would infer anything conscious. Leibniz therefore anticipated the question of this essay title. He certainly would have argued strongly against us being merely computers made of meat.
Nagel (1974), argues, likewise, that no amount of physical information can tell us what it is like to be a bat. His argument is applicable to humans in the same way; the apparent impossibility of knowing what a person is thinking simply by knowing all the physical information of the brain.
Probably the main thrust of philosophers since Descartes has been to refute this idea of a non-physical mind and to find reasonable alternatives. The Cartesian idea, that the mind is non-physical and able to act causally on the brain goes against anything we currently know of science and the laws of physics.
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[.../cont] Behaviourist philosophy
In the early 20th century there was a vogue in the logical positivist school of philosophy for a behaviourist approach to the mind. It was an attempt to make scientific and measurable any statement about a person’s thoughts. A classical paper upholding this view is that of Rudolph Carnap (1932). According to this view (rarely adhered to now), we can only measure and know about someone’s thoughts through observation of their behaviour. In fact, such behaviour was considered all there was to the mind. A pain, for instance, was simply the outward signs such as screaming, wincing and withdrawing. What the behaviourists left out was of course the very essence of thought, which is an internal process that is experienced. The most obvious objection is the case of any self-controlled person who experiences pain with no outward evidence of it. Type Identity theory
This is a view still held by some, that an experience, such as a pain, is identical to the firing of certain nerve fibres (such as C fibres, for example). In other words, there is nothing else going on to account for the experience. However, the work of Kripke (1980) has convinced most that an experience such as pain could occur without those exact C fibres firing (as in an alien who does not have C fibres). He also argues that such a brain event as C fibres firing could occur without any pain. Functionalism
This is a somewhat mechanistic view that a mental state is a functional state of the whole organism. A well-known defence of the position is that of Putnam (1973). A conscious thought is something that occurs when certain internal states, with their causal relationships, occur with inputs and outputs. The mental state is not dependent on anything intrinsic to itself but rather to the role it plays in the system. Hobbes’ ‘calculating machine’ is a forerunner of this view of the mind (1655). Such a view has been less popular since Ned Block showed, in his ‘Chinese thought experiment’ (1978), that one can reproduce the exact functional states, in a robot, without any conscious thought occurring. Anomolous monism
This is a position taken by Davidson (1917-2003). The problem he tried to deal with (1970) is:
1/ The mind is causal; thoughts cause things to happen in the world. One example he gives is the submarine commander who decides to fire a torpedo.
2/ Causality implies laws that exist to account for one thing causing another.
3/ The mind however is not bound by law but is free. (see discussion later about free-will.)
The 3 statements are incompatible. Davidson tried to free the mind from the physical, deterministic state of brain events. He proposed that the mind is ‘supervenient’; produced by brain events but not the same as them. He claimed that this supervenient (non-physical) mind is free from physical laws. Kim (1998) however showed that this cannot be the case. If the brain state is physical and so under the laws of physics, the ‘supervenient’ thought cannot be free, because it is inseparably and causally linked to the underlying brain state. The concept of a supervenient non-physical mind, produced by the brain is a form of ‘property dualism’. This is in contrast to Cartesian ‘substance dualism’ where the non-physical mind interacts with the brain but is independent. Eliminativism
This is an extreme materialist view proposed by Churchland (1981). He maintains that neuroscience will eliminate all psychological concepts as we come to completely understand the working of the brain. He denies that mind even exists. Thoughts are merely neurological events. You can see that this is similar to type identity theory. It is a very reductionist view that would reduce feelings of love, for instance, to nerve action potentials. A belief would be just the firing of neurons.
Of course, his belief in eliminativism could equally be reduced to this neuronal activity. Here is the main objection: If that is all a belief is, then could such a belief be either true or false? How can such an extreme reductionist know that anything we believe is correct or indeed has any ultimate meaning at all? Epiphenomenalism
This position is dualist in that it holds that the mind is non-physical, distinct from and supervenient to the brain (a type of property dualism). It is particularly linked to the work of Jackson (1982). In this view, although the mind is produced by the brain and is causally acted on by it, the mind has no causal effect on the brain or body. This view therefore preserves the idea that only physical things can act on the physical. This is contrasted with Descartes’ dualism which claims that there is causal interaction (both ways) between mental and physical.
Epiphenomenalism leaves the mind is a rather unsatisfactory limbo, inert and unable to cause anything. Our constant experience, however, is that our minds do have causal effect on the body.
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[.../cont] The hard problem
David Chalmers (1996) is particularly known for what he calls ‘The Hard Problem’. For him, and for many others, the phenomenal nature of consciousness does not seem to fit at all with anything physical. He writes (2002, p.248): “There is something it is like to see a vivid green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in that state.”
The hard problem is hard because we may know all there is about the functions of consciousness, such as discrimination, integration, access, report, control (the sort of functions a computer has) – but still ask why these are accompanied by experience.
Indeed, he is one philosopher who describes the theoretical concept of the zombie. A zombie in philosophy of mind, is a person or creature who is not conscious at all. This person may look and behave like us but be devoid of any inner thoughts. One can then ask what the evolutionary reason for consciousness is? Could we not be just as good at survival if we were zombies? Consciousness seems like an ‘add-on’ that is not necessarily needed to survive and reproduce.
Chalmers is a property dualist. His current view seems to be that consciousness may be an undiscovered fundamental part of physics (just like energy and mass), that is yet to be understood.
This very brief survey of some of the main positions taken by various philosophers leaves us with many questions about the nature of the human mind. None of these alternatives to Descartes is without serious objections, more of which are outlined below. Is there still a case for the beleaguered Cartesian?
Let us now look at some of the main characteristics of our minds. Private access
One of the defining features of our minds is private access. Only you have access to the thoughts that you have. You may be very good at describing your thoughts but you, and you only, are in the privileged position at any time of actually knowing them.
This is very different from the situation with a physical state or system. We can examine a physical object, such as computer, and we can determine exactly what is going on. We cannot do this by examining the brain of a person. Here is an argument relating to this from Peter S. Williams (2012):
1/ Mental states can only be privately accessed
2/ No physical state can be privately accessed.
3/ Therefore mental states are not physical states.
This argument is strong. However, it runs counter to the prevailing physicalism of most philosophers and neuroscientists. That is why consciousness remains a subject of fascination and intense debate. Personhood
To be human involves a sense of personhood. There is a continuity in this; I know that I am the same person that I was 20 years ago. I have a first-person knowledge of “me” which seems to defy a physical description.
It is very hard however, to ascribe personhood to a physical object - even a very advanced computer. Artificial intelligence enthusiasts may maintain that if a machine behaves like a person then they may be conscious ‘persons’. But this is a sort an approach that relies on external appearances (like the behaviourists we have discussed above). Appearances that mimic human behaviour have no bearing on whether anything conscious is going on inside.
Personhood is therefore another reason to question any idea of us being ‘merely computers made of meat’.
Sensations
We are constantly having different sensations. We experience these consciously and they have a phenomenal character. There is something it is like to see the colour blue, to smell coffee, or to hear a bird singing, for example. These experiences are known as ‘qualia’ in philosophy of mind.
Seeing a colour involves much more that registering a certain wavelength of light. A machine can do that easily. Our seeing involves an experience that seems impossible to reduce to anything physical.
There is a famous thought experiment known as ‘Mary’s room’. (Jackson, 1982). Mary is the most knowledgeable scientist in the world on the subject of human vision. She knows every detail of the anatomy, physiology and biochemistry of vision. There is nothing about the physical process of colour vision that she does not know fully. However, Mary has never seen any colours. She has been brought up from birth in a black and white room with only black and white objects in it.
One day she goes outside the room and sees the colour red. This is the first time she has ever experienced colour. Has she learnt something new (a fact) about vision from this experience? Most philosophers would say yes, she has. Look at the following argument which relates to Mary before she sees colours:
1/ Mary knows all the physical facts about vision.
2/ Mary does not know all the facts.
3/ The physical facts do not exhaust all the facts.
This is a strong argument for asserting that we are not merely physical objects. Emotions
We all have motions such as sadness, fear, anger, hope and love. Emotions are always ‘about’ something and have deeply personal content. This ‘aboutness’ is known as ‘intentionality’ in philosophy of mind. The question then arises: can a physical object be ‘about’ anything? Could a computer one day be angry or sad ‘about’ something? Common sense seems to say that the answer is no.
Intentional thought has a quality that seems to defy any physical limitations.
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[.../cont] Beliefs
Beliefs are in a particular category of thought that is also very hard to classify in physical terms. I might, for instance, believe that Dostoevsky was a better writer than Tolstoy. There may be concrete reasons for stating this belief and a host of examples comparing the two writers, but in the end, it is a subjective feeling in me that is not reducible to something physical.
Imagine trying to program a belief into a computer. Even if there was some complex algorithm which judges between the works of the two writers, there would still not be a ‘belief’ as such. There might be an answer given as to which writer the computer says is best, but this would be some sort of tick-box exercise, not a belief.
Beliefs are not reducible to physical states. Free-will
Human beings act most of time as if they have the freedom to make choices. This can range from the banal (which brand of shampoo will I buy?) to decisions relating to one’s job or future spouse. Of course, such decisions may be tempered by upbringing and culture, but they do seem genuinely ‘free’.
It is why rewards are given to those who make very honourable and difficult decisions. The Victoria cross is given to those who, despite grave danger to themselves, act heroically in battle, when they could have freely done otherwise. This is also why there is a justice system that punishes those who ‘decide’ to commit a crime.
Our belief in freedom of the will is why we hold people responsible for their actions. If there was no freedom, then there would be no responsibility. We do not hold a computer to be responsible, but we do so with human beings.
The issue is this: to have freedom of will, there must be autonomy. A purely physical object or system such as a network of neurons cannot have autonomy. This is because it is entirely subject to the laws of physics and the laws of causation. A particular brain state at a given moment is not ‘free’. It depends on the inputs and outputs of the system in a physical universe. A purely physical system is, many would argue therefore, deterministic. In physicalist terms, the fact that I decide not to pull the trigger on my gun to shoot the thief in my house, is determined, not by free-will, but by physical laws, from which my brain cannot escape. I might think I decided myself but that would be an illusion. There are many philosophers, such as Susan Blackmore (2005, p.257)), who have therefore concluded that free-will is entirely an illusion. The philosopher A.J. Ayer (1954), strongly denied free-will, arguing that if our wills are not free, we would not be able to know if they are free or not. In other words, a ‘feeling’ of free-will is hardly enough to persuade someone of the truth of it.
The issue is debated fiercely by philosophers and there are different views: from the pure determinist, to the compatibilist to the libertarian. ‘Compatibilism’ tries to allow for freedom within a deterministic universe (and in my opinion fails). Libertarians, such as I, hold to the reality of freedom of will.
The issue has been somewhat clouded by experiments first done by Libet (1983 ), in which volunteers were found to have evidence of brain activity from scalp electrodes, milliseconds before consciously aware of making a decision to press a button. Some have concluded from this that conscious decisions are determined by prior brain activity that is not in the control of the person. Libet himself however, concluded that such subjects still have ability to veto any decision made to press the button and that free-will was not in doubt. There is no consensus that Libet’s work out-rules free-will and there are doubts about the validity of the experimental procedure (Swinburne, 2013. pp 108-12).
Some, such as Roger Penrose (2005), look for some form of freedom for our thoughts in quantum physics. We know that in the quantum world there is uncertainty, unlike in normal physics. The uncertainty of fundamental particles gives some people an idea that this could allow the mind to have free-will. The problem with this is that uncertainty is just that - uncertainty. This unpredictability makes it highly unlikely that quantum events could be harnessed to give genuine freedom.
Nancy Murphy (2006) is a Christian philosopher who believes human beings are physical only and is therefore a monist (someone who believes we have only one unitary nature). She is a ‘non-reductive physicalist’. What this means is that she rejects any idea that the brain is dependent on the way the smallest parts work (the atoms, molecules and neurons). In her book she prefers to believe that the larger structures and processes in the nervous system, in combination with the environment, have ‘downward causation’. She maintains that this allows the brain to have freedom from the cause and effect of physical laws at the atomic level. Her thesis is however very unconvincing, failing to separate the clear causal links between the micro-processes in the brain and the overall macro functions.
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In my book ‘The Enigma of Consciousness’ (2012) I argue that the only way we can have genuine free-will is to have a non-material soul which is not dependent on physical processes. A non-material soul can act freely because it is not beholden to the laws to physics. This is a form of Cartesian dualism. I would maintain that this is the only actual way to break the inevitable ‘locked in’ physicalist determinism that is the alternative. This is a view put forward in great detail by Richard Swinburne (2013). He describes humans as ‘pure mental substances’ writing (p.228):
“I have argued that it is an unavoidable datum of experience that we are pure mental substances; and that when we perform intentional actions it seems to us strongly that we are exercising causal influence”.
Much of his book is in support of the idea that we are immaterial souls, linked to the body and having (Cartesian) interaction, in both directions, between the two.
Much of philosophy of mind literature now is about working out ways to deny this because, though intuitively and logically the Cartesian model seems correct, the idea of an immaterial soul having any effect on the physical body seems unacceptable. The problem with this physicalist position, however, is that it is, in the end, a worldview: that the universe is physically ‘closed’. A physically closed universe, which I discuss later, is one that cannot have anything non-physical acting causally upon it. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The question now is whether computers can be conscious. On a purely physicalist position, if the human brain is all there is for the mind to work, then surely one could reproduce the brain’s neuronal networks in a computer, and it would then be a person who is conscious. So-called ‘Strong AI’ enthusiasts claim that this is indeed possible. (Advocates of ‘Weak AI’ merely claim that computational states are needed for a mind to function). Scanning a person’s brain and then uploading the ‘person’ on to a computer, as described by Bamford (2012), is a hot topic amongst so-called ‘transhumanists’. If such a process is possible then we are indeed ‘merely computers made of meat’.
Some believe that if we could simulate human thought with a computer then we will have achieved consciousness artificially. The ‘Turing Test’ (Turing, 1950) is a way devised to test this (after the famous computer scientist Alan Turing). The test is done basically as follows: a person sits in a room with a keyboard which can send written messages. The messages are sent to two adjoining rooms. In one room sits a human who can send answers to the questions. In the other is a computer which answers the questions. The person prints the responses and has to decide which answers are from the computer and which from the human. If the person cannot decide which is the computer, then the Turing test is passed. Thus far no computer has passed this test.
Of course, this is like the behaviourist model already discussed, and indeed dismissed. Even if a computer did pass the test, it has nothing to do with whether it is conscious. The computer merely simulates consciousness.
The mathematician Gödel, in his ‘1st incompleteness theorem’ (1931), showed that certain mathematical truths cannot be proved using mathematics or computational systems. In other words, we can understand these truths, but computers cannot. This at least demonstrates that there is an aspect or aspects of the mind that cannot be reproduced by a computer.
Probably the best-known critic of computer consciousness is John Searle (1983). Searle describes what a computer actually does. It operates with a formal system using abstract symbols (sequences of zeros and ones, for instance). A particular series will determine a particular state or operation of the computer. But the symbols themselves are meaningless; that is, they have syntactic (symbolic) but no semantic (meaningful) content. In total contrast, our thoughts are about things (intentional) and meaningful.
His famous thought experiment of the ‘Chinese Room’ illustrates this powerfully. Imagine being in a room with two windows. You have a large book of instructions. Through one of the windows come bits of paper with marks on them. Using the rule book, you match these pieces of paper with others that you have and put them out the other window. Now assume that the pieces of paper coming in are in fact questions in Chinese. You follow the instructions in your book and put answers out the other window. The answers you put out could be perfect Chinese, indistinguishable from a native speaker, yet you have not understood even one word of Chinese. This is the same with a computer. It merely gives an output based on the input and a set of rules. The computer itself does not understand Chinese. All it has done is manipulate symbols.
Searle maintains that this conclusion does not depend on how advanced a computer might be; it applies to all computers both now and into the future. He has, in my view, demolished the idea that we are like computers or that they can ever be conscious.
[cont/...]
[.../cont] Physical closure of universe?
When we discuss Cartesian dualism, as I have already mentioned, invariably the objection is raised that many cannot entertain the idea of non-physical ‘stuff’ acting causally on physical matter. In the Cartesian model, the immaterial soul has causal effect on the brain (and vice-versa). This is deemed impossible as it goes against the laws of physics. This is an understandable reaction, but is it valid?
There are a variety of versions of the ancient ‘cosmological argument’ for a first cause of the universe. Perhaps the best modern exponent of this argument is William Lane Craig (1998). Adapting an earlier version of the argument he offers the following:
1/ Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2/ The universe began to exist.
3/ The universe has a cause.
There is no space here to expand on this, but at least this argument points to a non-physical cause of the physical universe. It is a strong argument against physical closure and points to the possibility of a non-material mind acting on what is physical. The amazing ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe (Craig, 2017), likewise, points to a ‘Mind’ behind the physics. Physical closure is therefore not so much based on evidence but more on a particular physicalist view of reality.
Conclusion
Consciousness, which defines who we are, is an enigma that defies reduction to physical causes. We have looked at Descartes’ ‘substance dualism’, which is under attack from a variety of philosophical viewpoints. Serious objections or doubts have been offered in this essay to all the non-Cartesian alternatives.
First-person access, personhood, qualia, intentionality, emotions, beliefs and free-will – all point to a non-physical aspect of who we are.
We have looked in detail at the case for conscious artificial intelligence and found it to be seriously flawed.
I conclude that we are not ‘merely computers made of meat’.
---
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