The Natural Problem of Consciousness

Pietro Snider

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783110653670
• eBook ISBN: 9783110524697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The "Natural Problem of Consciousness" is the problem of understanding why there are presently conscious beings at all. Given a non-reductive naturalist framework taking consciousness as an ontologically subjective biological phenomenon, how can we rationally explain the fact that the actual world has turned out to be one where there are presently living beings that can feel, rather than having developed as a zombie-world in which there would be no conscious experiences of any kind?

This book introduces the Natural Problem by relating it to central problems in the philosophy of mind (metaphysical mind-body problem, Hard Problem of consciousness) and emphasizing the distinctive interest of its diachronic dimension. Ranging from philosophy to biology and neuroscience, it offers a thorough analysis aimed at better understanding what could explain why phenomenal consciousness has been preserved throughout evolution by natural selection. This is an original, engaging, and thought provoking philosophical study of a neglected but fundamental question regarding the nature and origin of consciousness.

1Introduction

The main goal of the present dissertation is to introduce and unpack the following question: Why are there presently conscious beings at all? How can we explain the fact that humans and other animals have turned out to be conscious beings, rather than evolving as physical systems with no conscious mental life?

In order to best prepare the ground for the detailed articulation, development, and assessment of my contribution in chapter 3 and following, I devote the first two chapters to contextualising the setup of the discussion. In chapter 1 I introduce some important general issues concerning the nature, study and ways of thinking about problems of consciousness, whereas in chapter 2 I introduce the metaphysical mind-body problem and the working assumptions I endorse in the rest of the dissertation.

I begin by explaining why I think it is worth studying and asking philosophical questions about consciousness in the first place (section 1.1). Then, I argue that science can deal with consciousness (section 1.2). I present the quest for Neural Correlates of Consciousness and discuss some of its limits (section 1.3). I dedicate special attention to the “Hard Problem” of consciousness, clarifying that I am not concerned with that problem (section 1.4). I conclude by claiming that the above-mentioned approaches and problems of consciousness rise within a synchronic paradigm, and that the research question I intend to tackle stems from an alternative, often-neglected, diachronic way of thinking about consciousness (section 1.5).

1.1Why Care About Consciousness

Perhaps no aspect of mind is more familiar or more puzzling than consciousness and our conscious experience of self and world. (Van Gulick 2014)

Consciousness is an essential feature of the human mind. Even though the specific conceptions of what consciousness is vary – sometimes dramatically –, an impressive array of philosophers and psychologists has independently dealt with it one way or another, suggesting that besides the disagreements about what consciousness is, or how we should study it, there is a widespread tacit agreement that consciousness ought to be studied and accounted for. Notable western scholars that dealt with consciousness from the seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century include philosophers such as Descartes (1644), Locke (1688), Leibniz (1686; 1714), Hume (1739), Kant (1787), James Mill (1829), John Stuart Mill (1865), Husserl (1913), Heidegger (1927), and Merleau-Ponty (1945), as well as modern scientific psychologists such as Wundt (1897), von Helmholtz (1910), James (1890) and Titchener (1901)1. Despite a quiet period for the study of consciousness due first to the rise of behaviourism in scientific psychology (Watson 1924; Skinner 1953), and then to the rise of cognitive psychology (Neisser 1965; Gardner 1985), since the 1980s there has been a major resurgence of philosophical and scientific research into the nature of consciousness (Lycan 1987, 1996; Baars 1988; Penrose 1989, 1994; Dennett 1991; Crick 1994; Chalmers 1996). The fact that during the past thirty-five years consciousness has become a more and more popular and widely accepted subject of philosophical and scientific research, and that today there is an across-the-board interest on this subject matter ranging from armchair philosophy, to psychology and neuroscience, does not only indicate that consciousness is again a fashionable subject of research. It also suggests, more profoundly, that tackling this subject matter is somehow crucial to fully understanding human nature, and that the intellectual enterprise of understanding the relationship between mind, brain and natural world requires accounting for consciousness one way or another.

Even if the historical treatment of this subject matter suggests that consciousness plays an important role in the interplay between mind, brain and natural world, it might be argued that this widespread and long-lasting interest in consciousness does not by itself clarify what exactly is the motivation for taking consciousness-related issues seriously and for investigating consciousness further. After all, it might be argued, the importance of consciousness might simply have been overstated without any good reasons, and perhaps the way out of the problem of consciousness consists simply in not worrying about it. The reluctance to concede that consciousness is a valuable object of interest and research could be partially a manifestation of skepticism towards philosophical research in general – linked to the idea that studying consciousness can only be of interest to philosophers –, and partially a consequence of the bewilderment and lack of clarity surrounding this particular topic. I think that the objection is not pertinent, the reluctance unjustified, and that if we aim to achieve a satisfactory scientific understanding of the world we have to take consciousness seriously. However, in order to preventively counter any off-putting attitude or skepticism threatening to diminish the perceived value of any serious research on consciousness, it is worth considering the objection seriously giving reasons explaining why the importance of consciousness is not an overstatement. Appreciating the motivations for studying consciousness should be enough to get past these initial hitches and will serve both as motivation vindicating my decision to work on consciousness in the first place and as a preliminary survey of some of the issues at stake.

What reasons are there to keep on tackling the captivating but slippery walls of a controversial and hotly debated topic such as consciousness? Why would it make sense to keep on working on better descriptions, a better understanding, and better explanations of consciousness? I think there are four main reasons. First, consciousness underlies every aspect of our life that we take as having a quality or meaning, i.e., every conscious experience2. Since experience is that in virtue of which we value and treasure life, there is a good prima facie reason to study consciousness (section 1.1.1). Second, studying consciousness is complex and challenging. This makes it a stimulating intellectual enterprise, since there is much to do, and virtually none of it is dull research work (section 1.1.2). Third, studying consciousness can lead to both theoretical and practical gains. The possibility of achieving knowledge about a fundamental aspect of our life while also having an impact on how to deal with consciousness-related matters in every day life is a strong motivation to work on consciousness (section 1.1.3). Fourth, it is possible to study consciousness scientifically, and we are getting better at that. The science of consciousness has progressed hugely and constantly in the past few decades, and there are reasons to be optimistic about the future potential of scientific consciousness research (section 1.1.4). These four reasons taken together suggest that it is worth caring about consciousness and taking it seriously as object of study and research, and that now more than ever before there are good odds of making serious progress in the understanding of consciousness.

1.1.1Nothing To Care About

A first reason to take consciousness seriously is that in the actual natural world consciousness3 is contingently linked to the mattering of things, of any thing. Anything that matters to us – whether our beloved ones, health, scientific research, career, politics, ethics, economy, art and so forth – matters to us (in a specific way) by virtue of the fact that we are conscious. To put it the other way around, if we were not conscious, nothing would matter to us. We would not care about anything at all, at least not in any way close to what we usually mean by “caring”. Take consciousness away, and we would have no drive or compulsion to care about, invest in, or study anything. We would not taste or cherish life, but rather blindly walk through it. Thus consciousness is a fundamental aspect of life as we know it. It is what makes our life, our activities and our relationships matter to us and be valuable to us. I think that studying consciousness has a deep – almost primordial – theoretical interest because it comes down to studying the phenomenon in virtue of which things matter to us. The pervasiveness and prominence of consciousness in our life make it deservedly a more than worthy object of study.

1.1.2An Intellectual Challenge

A second reason to take consciousness seriously is that better understanding consciousness is amongst the few remaining great intellectual challenges facing humanity together with understanding the origin of the universe, and a fistful of others. Any such challenge is inherently stimulating because it tackles fundamental questions about the nature of mankind and the universe – philosophical questions concerning our origin and our nature that everybody wonders about at some point. The lack of straightforward solutions to these challenges should not be seen as something frustrating and off putting, but rather – on the contrary – as a motivation fostering the spreading and development of innovative thinking strategies, as well as new theoretical and practical paradigms. Facing big intellectual challenges such as the nature of consciousness, regardless of the adequateness of the resulting answers, is a culturally and intellectually enriching process. I take this to be a second good reason to persevere and keep on confronting the titan (even if just with wooden spoons).

1.1.3Practical and Ethical Applications

A third reason to take consciousness seriously is that a better understanding of consciousness – what it is and how it works – besides having great theoretical interests would also have an impact in terms of practical gains and applications in everyday life. For example, the mapping of neural correlates of consciousness (see section 1.3) is an important first step toward the medical identification and treatment of dysfunctions of consciousness. Moreover, if it were possible to clearly identify whether (or when, or in which way) a specific individual is conscious, many problematic and controversial issues related to the divide between conscious and non-conscious beings in medicine and ethics would dissolve or at least be better informed. If consciousness and its neural underpinnings had no more secrets, handling thorny topics such as abortion, euthanasia, animal rights, and so on would be at least a little easier. This could also have consequences in terms of legal resolutions and attributions of moral responsibility. Furthermore, if we could understand what makes one conscious and if it were possible to reverse-engineer the process, we could envisage making conscious what is naturally not so. For example, we could engineer conscious machines – machines that would not only pass the Turing test for intelligence, but also feel.

I am not claiming that an understanding of consciousness sufficient to reach such futuristic goals is in sight as yet. As a matter of fact we might well never get that far (that might be either a disappointment or a relief to science fiction fans). Nonetheless, at least in principle, and at least to some – more modest – extent, a better understanding of consciousness can have concrete repercussions (such as informing new developments in medical procedures and legal regulations) that could add on to the already remarkable theoretical benefits of better understanding consciousness. This, I think is a further reason to take consciousness seriously.

1.1.4A Hopeful Research Project in Philosophy and Science

A fourth reason to take consciousness seriously is that nowadays consciousness is not of interest only to armchair philosophers, but also to scientists. Current scientific consciousness research is successful and its future potential is promising, even if – for contingent reasons – that has not always been the case. For a long time scientists avoided tackling consciousness. As Dehaene puts it:

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the question of consciousness lay outside the boundaries of normal science. It was a fuzzy, ill-defined domain whose subjectivity put it forever beyond the reach of objective experimentation. For many years, no serious researcher would touch the problem: speculating about consciousness was a tolerated hobby for the aging scientist. (Dehaene 2014, p. 7)

The philosopher John Searle confirmed this trend by recalling asking a famous neurobiologist about consciousness as a young philosopher and being struck by hearing him reply exasperated “look, in my discipline it’s okay to be interested in consciousness, but get tenure first.”4 In short, there was a widely spread conviction that consciousness was not a serious and respectable field of study for a scientist, the reason for this being that it was not clear how an ontologically subjective phenomenon such as consciousness could be accurately objectively empirically studied. The scientific rebuff of consciousness is nicely illustrated by fact that, as Dehaene reports, until the late 1980s the word “consciousness” was taboo during lab-meetings in cognitive science. No one was allowed to mention the “C-word”:

The general feeling was that using the term consciousness added nothing of value to psychological science. In the emerging positive science of cognition, mental operations were to be solely described in terms of the processing of information and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Funding
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Metaphysical Problem of Consciousness
• 3 The Natural Problem of Consciousness
• 4 Consciousness as Feeling. Defining Criteria
• 5 Working Out Diachronic Claims
• 6 Why Do We Feel?
• 7 A Hypothetical Biological Function of Feeling
• 8 Causation and the Conscious Mind
• Appendix: Objections and Replies
• Bibliography
• Name Index