By Kar Y. Lee, first written in 2007,
revised in 2008
(The writing of this article is not
sponsored by any links that may appear on this page)
“When I consider the short duration of my life,
swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill,
and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am
ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being
here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why
now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have
this place and time been alloted to me?”
-B.
Pascal, 1623-1662, French philosopher, physicist and mathematician-
One of the simplest questions in history brought about one of the most important discoveries in science.
The question was: Why apple fell downward?
The discovery was: There was gravity, and it extended to celestial objects.
However, before one can hit on a discovery, one has to first recognize that there is a problem. A lot of people would not recognize that apple falling downward was a problem and that it required an explanation. In fact, without the indoctrination of science education, a person growing up not exposed to the concept of gravity may not recognize that objects falling downward as being surprising and needs explanation at all. People are so used to things falling downward. To an uneducated person, it may actually be futile to try to convince him/her that apples falling downward need to be “explained”. Explain what? He will ask. In fact, if this person is good at words, things can get even more complicated. Game of words can be played like: “By definition, apples fall downward, because the direction apples fall is defined as ‘down’”. Why does it have to fall at all? “Well, if it does not fall, then you will be asking why it does not fall. It has to do something, either fall or not fall, and either case draws a question.”
We are facing a similar problem in the question of self-consciousness. Some people deny that explanation is required for the first-person experience of self-consciousness. To such group of people, the following thought experiment poses no conceptual problem (drawing from some scenes in Star Trek):
When “Scotty” of the starship Enterprise beamed up Captain Kirk, he reconstructed Captain Kirk on two platforms, producing two identical Kirks. If you are Captain Kirk, which Captain Kirk will you find yourself in after the re-construction?
(For those whose has not been exposed to Star Trek stories, in Star Trek, there is something called the transporter, which is supposed to transports a person by scanning that person’s body “blueprint”, atom by atom, and reconstruct the physical body at another location after de-constructing the original body. The atoms of the reconstructed body could come from the original body, but don’t have to be.)
To this group of people, they will reason, then there will be two Captain Kirks, both of them claim to be the original Kirk, and both of them indeed share the same memory of the original Kirk. End of story. It does not matter which Kirk you wake up in, but to be sure there will be another identical you to dilute your direct heritage of the original copy. To this group of people, the question “if you are Kirk, what is going to happen to you, what is going to happen to your stream of consciousness” poses no special challenges. It appears that some people can easily retreat to the safe-haven of the “third person perspective”, as if they were describing someone else, even though the question is directed to himself or herself.
There of course exist another group of people, who immediately find this thought experiment deeply disturbing and conceptually incomprehensible. How can I become two? If this can be done, what is going to happen to my stream of consciousness? If I wake up in one Kirk’s body, why don’t I wake up in the other Kirk’s body? What breaks the symmetry? (Both bodies could have been re-constructed using new materials. In fact, in quantum mechanics, all atoms of the same species with the same internal states are indistinguishable, i.e. they are identical. Thus, both re-constructed bodies are as original as the original body before de-construction.)
The true solution to this duplication-of-consciousness problem may lie in quantum information theory in which it is claimed that an arbitrary unknown quantum state cannot be cloned – The no-cloning-theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_cloning_theorem). Thus, if human body is a quantum system in this sense, it may only be possible to have exactly one copy, and no more.
However, even if this transporter problem is resolved by quantum mechanics, there are many other issues which we will explore here which do not require quantum mechanics, but are equally disturbing.
Our starting point is physicalism/materialism. This is a conversation between fellow materialists who incline to take a reductionist’s view, but may end up not being one.
Physicalists/materialists don’t like dualism typically because dualism adds an additional layer which is deemed unnecessary to the mind-body problem. We have several reasons:
1) If there is a non-physical soul besides the body, then this non-material soul has to interact with the material body somehow (interactive dualism). The physical body can therefore alter the non-physical soul, which in turn makes the non-physical soul somehow physical. We could then potentially expand the definition of matter to include “soul matter”.
2) If there is a non-physical soul which does not interact with the physical body, then it renders the non-physical soul absolutely undetectable, by definition. In practice, then, the existence of something that is by definition undetectable is a useless concept. This is similar to someone declaring to you that there is something inside your wrist watch, and this something does not have any effect on you because it is absolutely undetectable. Then for ALL practical purposes, the something might just as well do not exist. This non-interacting soul does not exist.
3) Unless the soul has no beginning and end (immortal), otherwise, what we can do with the soul conceptually can already be accomplished by the physical body. There is no need for a mortal soul. However, if the soul is immortal, one would have to explain why out of a sudden there are so many souls. 90% of all human who have ever lived is still alive today. There have been so few people on earth, say, in 200 B.C., compared with the 5 billion population of the world today. If each person has one soul, where do all these souls come from? What were they doing before they were born? How about other planets? Is there a law of conservation of number of soul in the whole universe?
Dualists always add an additional layer of complication to what physicalism can already explain. The evidence of the materialistic nature of our conscious states are just overwhelming.
For example, if someone consumes too much alcohol, then he/she is drunk, can’t think clearly. If someone is on a certain drug, he or she will behave in one way. If that person is on another drug, he or she will behave in a different way. What the drugs and alcohol act on is our physical brain and there is nothing spiritual about it. As a result, it changes our “mental state” and behavior and this is the strongest evidence that our mental state is really determined by the brain state. (However, I do note that under hypnosis, people can act very differently. But this is just another example of people’s brain state being affect by external stimulations, including verbal stimulations.)
If this is still not convincing enough, think about addicted smokers who try to quit smoking for years without success. These are not cases of weak wills. These are cases of physical effect of nicotine on the brain. However, it has been reported that a long time addicted smoker was able to quit smoking overnight due to brain injury. A mental addiction can be changed instantaneously by some physical alteration to the brain! However, this is not surprising to physicalists.
More example of matter over mind to come: A nice person can turn into a nasty person, again, due to brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease causes a respected wise person to behave like a child with great reduction in mental power, an electrical discharge to the brain during open brain surgery can produce an out-of-body experience. A stroke rendered an intelligent person to lose the sense of boundary between the physical body and the environment (“My Stroke of Insight”, Jill Bolte Taylor), etc.
Looking at examples like these, it is quite impossible for anyone to come away with other conclusions than our mental world is solely determined by our physical brain. Physicalism seems right. There is no mind over matter. It is matter over mind. Material over mind. Materialism explains it all.
However, when we take a first person’s view of ourselves, which I will argue we must, physicalism suddenly seems incomplete.
In fact, one can argue that the term “self-consciousness” cannot be defined with a third person’s perspective. When a system is self-conscious, it behaves as if it is conscious about itself. It behaves as if it has feeling about itself. The word “conscious” has a strong first person connotation. A system can be described as being conscious only if you can project your own feeling into it. It is only when someone can put himself or herself into another system’s perspective and imagine what it is like to be that system for him or her to describe a system “conscious”. Every one can project his or her feeling into another fellow human being (imagine being that person and look from inside of that person). That is why we have no difficulty describing another human as being conscious. However, it is harder for someone to project his or her feeling into a piece of rock. Therefore, it is difficult to describe a piece of rock as being conscious, because there is no “self” inside a piece of rock for you to be identified with, therefore to think of it as being conscious. However, there are people who insist on studying the phenomenon of self-consciousness using a third-person perspective. Insisting on using such an approach essentially, in my view, restricts one to behavioralism. Then you cannot study “feelings”. You cannot say someone looks happy, because happy is a feeling you project into that someone. Unless you are ready to take a first person’s view from the inside of that person by projecting your feeling into him, to feel how he feels, you cannot say he looks happy. All you can study is behavior. You can only say this person is smiling. Taking up the third person perspective, self-consciousness is ill-defined. The best definition I can come up with is self-regulation, the capability to act upon external or internal stimulations. That would include a self regulating valve. So that would be incorrect. Once you take away the “feeling” factor, studying another human being’s self-consciousness is just like studying a robot’s program. Conceptually it is easy. You are simply studying a machine, perhaps a very complicated machine, but still just a machine.
Just think about this statement:
“If I don’t exist, then there is nothing in this universe that could have any effect on me.”
This seems like a very simple true statement. Indeed, if someone does not exist, nothing can have any effect on this person because he/she does not even exist! What else can be wrong? So, I can care less about what is happening in the universe, that is, if I don’t exist. Most people will think about this statement in the following sense: If I die in the next minute, whatever happens tomorrow is going to have nothing to do with me because I no longer exist. It may affect my loved ones. But personally, I won’t be affected. Right? Well, think again. What if this statement was made before, not after, your existence? Of course, this statement remains true until your father met your mother and this historic event in the universe brought about your very existence. So, next time if someone tells you that you would not be affected because you did not exist, ask that person if that included the event of your father meeting your mother.
So, what causes the truthness of the first statement to change?
Maybe one should then change the statement into:
“If I don’t exist, then nothing can have any effect on me, except when my father meets my mother.”
But if you don’t exist, then why would there be someone who is going/designated to be your father or mother? They can have an offspring, who may grow up to exactly look like the you that you turned out to be, but why would that have anything to do with YOU, the non-existing YOU at the moment ?
This is a paradox. I will refer to it as THE PARADOX from this point on.
Things become very easily understandable when one takes the third person’s perspective. When one takes the third person’s viewpoint, the person who is making the statement is just like a robot talking nonsense. When you take the third person viewpoint, there is a system (in this case, a human) that is making a statement about its own existence after the fact. You can tell that person that he is mis-guided. Since from a third person’s perspective, he is just his physical form, the living body. He existed before, but not in his present form and did not have his present functionality. He existed in bits and pieces, in atomic and molecular forms. They got assembled into his current form and he acquired his present “emerging” functionalities and at some point, he was able to make logical statements like the one he has made, and that the premise of the statement that he did not exist before was just plain wrong. There is absolutely no conceptual problem for the third party to wonder how some systems come into being from non-existence because the third person can always have the luxury of taking the functionalist approach: All systems (including living human bodies) are just some things with some functions/capabilities. The physical components (the atoms and molecules) have always existed, but just the functionalities were not there because it had not been assembled into its final form, and therefore lacked the current functionalities like talking and thinking, or rather, calculating. However, this “understanding” does nothing to help the poor person who is wondering why his feeling exists once a certain group of atoms are put together into a form and creates a physical body. The luxury of taking a third person perspective disappears when you are the very person who is inside this body. Once you put yourself into the shoes of someone who is asking this question by taking the first person perspective, the first statement becomes a real paradox. One’s own existence becomes a problem, a problem to be explained: Why does my feeling is linked to this particular physical body, and not any other body.
Suppose one still insists on taking the third person’s perspective to study one’s own self-consciousness, what would be the consequences?
Philosopher Daniel Dennett went so far as to eliminate the “witness protection program” giving special treatment to the first person account of our own feeling. He insists that we should all take the third person’s view, and all the “illusions” will go away.
So, can we do that, and should we do that? Well, we know that we ourselves have feelings. Can I just deny that I have feeling and try to understand the feeling in terms of brain functions, which is deemed more fundamental? Let’s assume that you are your physical body. No more and no less. You feel certain way because your brain is in a certain state. Then we come to the problem of existence of “feeling”. In fact, there is really no need for the existence of “feelings” at all. The physical body is already a complicated enough, and yet complete system that can take care of itself. You don’t have to feel pain to retract your hand from the burning charcoal because the signal of extreme heat will travel up to your brain and cause the required response (may by-pass your brain all together in the case of reflex). You really don’t have to have the feeling of pain to do anything, and yet you do feel pain, and you theorized that is what causes you to retract your hand. Let me elaborate more on this point because people are often confused about this point. A lot of people will say, “Of course I feel the pain. Why else would I retract my hand?” But that misses the point. Think of a robot programmed to retract it hand when its sensor reads more than 80°C. I am sure when this robot retracts its hand when it touches some boiling water, there is nobody (I mean nobody, no conscious being) in this universe who is feeling the pain to cause this robot to retract its hand. The retraction is accomplished anyway. When “my” hand touches some hot object, “my” brain will automatically pull back the hand. There does not need to have someone in the universe to have felt this sensation to cause the response. It is in this light that I said there is no need to have feeling at all. Stated in a more precise way, your body really does not have to cause “someone” pain in order to function properly, just like a self-regulating robot does not need to cause anybody to feel pain in order to avoid obstacles, or to feel “hunger” for it to dock to the station to recharge its battery. And yet, for all the things we do, we have associated some kind of feelings to them.
If there is no feeling associated with an automaton such as a computer, why should there be feelings of pain associated with a human body (which for all purpose is a very sophisticated automaton)? If there is no need to have an internal feeler for a computer, why should there be a feeler within a human body to suffer or to enjoy? A living human body without an inner feeler, functioning completely as an automaton, indistinguishable from any “conscious” human from the outside, is what is known as a philosopher’s zombie. Very interesting concept! Does zombie exist?
If human is just plainly the physical body, which is an extremely complicated machine in its own right, then there is really no need for the existence of “feelings”. Especially, who is doing the feeling? Who is the feeler? A physical system does not need to feel. It only needs to respond, be it a calculated response, a sophisticated response. And yet, feeling is almost the only fundamental thing that any human can be sure of.
I feel therefore I am, a slight alteration of Descartes’ statement.
Why is there a feeler within each one of us? How do I make the connection from my brain states to my feelings? Since when have my feeling been associated with my physical brain? Can I take the third person’s view and make sense out of all these? My answer, as you have already guessed correctly, is NO!
The first-person experience has a special position and the “witness protection program” as depicted by Dan Dennett needs to be re-instituted, if it has ever been abolished at all.
Without the recognition of the existence of the first-person experience, there is nothing to talk about. Without recognizing that apple falling downward instead of upward as being a problem, there is no need for the concept of gravity. If you stop at this level of recognition, if you stop at taking apple falling downward as being so fundamental that it requires no explanation, then you might just as well stop discussing gravity, or similarly in this case, self-consciousness, at all. But there is something more fundamental.
Some may argue, wholeheartedly or jokingly, that the existence of the Self is not a problem, but the destruction of it is. Well, I would argue that the mere existence of the Self is a great problem. Think about this, the universe has been in existence without YOU for billions of years. Presumably, it could continue to exist without you indefinitely. The universe could actually evolve, collapse, reborn, evolve and so on and so forth without you witnessing any part of it. Couldn’t it? Of course it could. Of course, you also know that it did not turn out that way because you somehow got dragged into all this. Because you exist! In fact, if you are reading this article, you are existing at this very moment which we called NOW. Why did you get dragged into all these?
Let’s suppose we try to answer this question through the monoic materialistic point of view. That is, you are your physical body, no more and no less. You get dragged into the universe because you are part of the universe. The material forming your future physical body got assembled into an embryo and forming you. Going straight with this line of reasoning will necessary lead to the identifying you with the atoms of your physical body. But that is a dangerous approach because we all know that we are not the atoms of our physical body because over the years of our life, the material of our physical body are constantly replaced by newer ones, and yet, we feel a continuous streaming of consciousness being maintained (yes, this topic has been discussed extensively and the feeling of a continuous stream of consciousness has been shown to be an illusion: Spot search light analogy, but it does not change the discussion here). The “self” who was feeling the pain when you fell on your back at the age of 2 is same one who is feeling the pain when you just fell on your back at the age of 50. So, you cannot be just the material that forms your body. How about the structure? Using the physicalist’s approach, your physical body has only two things, 1) the materials, and 2) the structure that these materials bind themselves into. If it is not the material, it must be the structure. Well, it is not the structure either. This is when the conceptual thought experiment involving the Star Trek transporter comes in handy. There is really no conceptual difficulty to imagine a replica of yourself being produced, atom by atom, as long as one accepts that you are no more than, and no less than your physical body with material arranged in your current form. (That is what the transporter does conceptually: Rebuilding your body at a far away location using your current structural blueprint while destroying your current body when the new one has been built.) But the problem is then, once your replica is created, you and your replica are identical, even more identical than identical twins. If it is the structure that is your self-consciousness, then would your consciousness be associated with your old body or your replica? Or your consciousness splits and you are aware of both bodies? I don’t think so! Most likely to happen is your stream of self-consciousness continues on its own path, and a new person starts to feel being yourself, and has to be told later that he is just a replica. A new “self” has just been created out of nothing, just like a newborn. In fact, it is not too difficult to imagine how it feels like to be this new replica either. You just wake up one day, thinking that you are going to take care of some business that you left unfinished before the scan, but was told not to because you were just a replica. You remembered going into a hospital to get scanned to create your replica, but you turned out to be that replica who had retained all the memory of the original copy. Now the difference between you and your original copy is really just the material that make up you because you both had the same exact structure.
Even though this is just a thought experiment, technically
not achievable but conceptually achievable, it illustrates the point that
structure is not what can be uniquely associated with your “self”. So, you are not the atoms (materials), and
you are not the structure. What
are you? Who are you? (Note: It had been shown
that some simple entangled quantum states can indeed be exactly duplicated at a
distant location, at the price of the destruction of the original “copy”. It does pave a way for possible
“identity-through-structure”, as opposed to “identity-through-material”
understanding of self-identity. It
is related to the “no-cloning-theorem” mentioned above. Interested reader can refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_teleportation
for further reading.)
In fact, it makes no sense for anyone to associate himself or herself with the sperm and the egg that eventually give rise to the physical body later. If the sperm had been not THAT sperm, would you still be you? Or would that be “half-you”? Who are you?
In fact, I would even go so far to argue that it makes no sense for anyone to associate himself or herself with BOTH the material and the structure of the physical body.
Now, I am dangerously close to being an idealist, which I cannot be. To be an idealist is to deny the effect of the material world on the self, which we all feel so real. I don’t believe that “it is all in your mind” because the physical world is so knowable through science.
So, who is doing the feeling? Who am I? How did I get associated with the physical body that is currently referred to as “me”?
There has been a period that I did not exist. In fact, if one goes far back in time, there has been a period that none of us who are living today existed. I have gone through a stage of non-existence. I can guarantee that there will be a time in the future that I will return to that stage, if the stage of non-existence after death is the same stage of non-existence before conception. So, what is the big deal about death? Isn’t it just a return to an original state where we came from? In this view, no rational human should be afraid of death, but we all do. At least we do most of the time, taking exception those moments when someone commits suicide. So, why do we all fear being in a stage of non-existence? After all, we all have been like that before. So, is being unborn the same as being dead?
We will have to answer THE PARADOX if we are to prove that we found the answer to self-consciousness, or to the existence of a feeler inside each one of us, and to the reason of our very own existence. Because of THE PARADOX, the monistic physicalism is definitely incomplete. There must be something else there when we “take away the last atom”, to quote some philosopher (see sections below). If not, the “coming into being” from a stage of non-existence is impossible to comprehend. As stated above, if you don’t exist, then there is really nothing in the universe that can affect you. However, the fact that your father marrying your mother had this profound effect on you (given birth to an entity which turned out to be YOU) even though you did not exist while they got marry is impossible to comprehend if you are only your physical body. There must be something else that give rise to your being, your existence. An existence that is not merely a result of a third person saying, “Yea, you exist.” But an existence that is witnessed by your own sense of existence, that has never happened before until your birth.
Another peculiar thing about one’s own existence is that you exist NOW. I keep wondering what happens if my existence occurred in the 12th century instead of the 21st century. Is that possible? Would that have been probable?
What determined the historic fact that my existence does occur in this century, but not another earlier centuries? Is there a cause that one can attribute to made this happen?
Some people who are philosophically sophisticated or people who have not thought this through may try to sweep aside this question by simply saying “your father and your mother did not meet earlier”. Once again, we come to the same paradox.
The counter argument of course is that the persons who are my parents could have given birth to someone who looks exactly like me, with all my genetic materials (which were all from my parents), and in everyway behaving like me (that is, from the points of view of those who now I interact with), except that I am not the one who is feeling being this person from the inside. Historically, this happened all the time, right? People get born regularly. Never in the past that when someone was born, I be the one who was feeling the birth (perhaps more appropriately, the aftermath of birth because I am not sure if I had any feeling at birth. I simply don’t remember.) Isn’t it peculiar that when this person who people recognized as me was born, I am the one who was feeling being this person from the inside?
That is, some other brains can detect the spectrum of a certain color, but only when MY brain detects that, I feel the color. When and where does my feeling start to associate with the chemical activity inside this mass of gray matter, but not another mass of gray matter? This question essentially is equivalent to what David Chalmers called the “hard problem” of self-consciousness. Simply put, even if you can understand to the atomic level how the brain works from the third person’s perspective (essentially all the so-called scientific works done on the brain is from the third person’s perspective, all work done from the first person perspective is currently not accepted as “scientific”), there is simply no way, not due to the lack of imagination, one can make an association of that third person “understanding” to the first person experience of the subject, or the QUALIA. That is, even if we can figure out what neuron does what kind of firing will create which kind of sensation, one still cannot address the mechanism by which this association is possible. Put it in another form, as a concrete example at a more superficial level, even if we know that the electromagnetic radiation at wavelength of 700nm will cause a person whose eye receives this radiation to have a sensation of seeing red, we cannot begin to even address the mechanism by which this association between the feeling and action happens. The closest thing we can have is a 100% correlation between a certain event (be it a change of brain state, a firing of neurons, or a movement of an atom, or a switching on of a light bulb) and a person’s feeling a certain way. Between the two ends of this correlation, there is a vast gap in between.
So, why didn’t I exist in the past, instead of now? Or did I?
So, why don’t I come into existence two hundred years from now, instead of now? Or will I?
What is so special about NOW? It is probably a good place to point out the obvious: Of all the four dimensions that we live in , time plus the other three spatial dimensions, only the time dimension we have no control of. The other three dimensions, we can move on them. We can go back to the same point from time to time. Only with time, we have absolutely no control of. It seems to have a mind of it own. It just keeps going whether you like it or not. What we feel is what is happening now. Not a moment ago, not a moment later, but now. You may be feeling about the past, but you are feeling it now. Consciousness seems to be tightly associated with the present moment. So, one can really play the game of words in response to my question of “Why do I exist now”: Since you can only feel the present moment, you have to exist now because if you exist in the future, you will call that future NOW when you come to it. Well, that is a misunderstanding of my question. Of course I always live in the present moment, but the environment of the present moment keeps changing. My question should have been rephrased in a more precise way: Why my existence occurs in a 21st century earth environment, but not in a 18th century earth environment, or some environment future to the 21st century? What determines my experience being an adult at this moment instead of being a teen? Some people like to imagine one’s life being like movie. All the events have been recorded. It is only when they get played that they happen. Now, we know that in a movie, we can rewind, we can forward, and we can play it. A movie has to be played to be a movie. A movie in storage is just a reel of tape, or film, or a DVD and nothing get played-out. So, if real life is just like a movie, taking the metaphor one step further, what determines which frame it is being played now? Who determines which frame is now? Or, what makes NOW now?
Time travel is impossible. This is a simple deduction based on causality. However, it does not forbid one from thinking about it and to do some thought experiments about it. Either one is to arrive at something absurd, or we may gain something meaningful.
Suppose you traveled back in time and arrived at your house ten years before you started. Walking into the front door, you find yourself standing face to face with yourself ten years younger. Now, how would you feel? Would you be surprised seeing yourself appearing at the front door 10 years older? Wait…you are the older self… but wait, you are yourself as well, the contemporary self. So what is going on? When you see the future you, or, when you see the former you, which you are you? Which you are you in? Is it possible that there are two yous? Is it possible that there are two selves?
It is always an interesting mental exercise to try to determine where ME ends and the external world begins starting from the inside. One may think that it is our skin, the boundary of the physical body. But it is surprisingly unclear.
But let’s start from the outside instead. If I am driving a car, and when something hit my windshield, and when this event is registered in my brain, I know something just hit my car. However, in daily language, one is equally likely to say that “something hit me”. In this case, ME includes the car. But obviously, you know you did not get hit. Your car did. Now, suppose while you are driving, something hits your hand and causes a scratch. You can now say “something hit me”. However, obviously, your hand is only part of you, and not the whole YOU because you have other body parts as well. When you said “something hit me”, you really mean something hit your hand. The event caused some feeling, just like the event when something hit your car. The sensation may be different. In the former case, your nervous system transmitted a sound, or a feeling of mechanical impact, or some other signal to your brain. In the second case, you nervous system transmitted some feeling of scratch (may be itchy, may be painful) to your brain. Someone even went as far as claiming that you are the nervous system, and the nervous system only. The rest is just the peripherals. So, think of yourself being the nervous system which includes the brain and the nerve cells that extend throughout the body. The rest of the body is just there to provide an environment for the nervous system, the real you, to live in. Whatever the external world transmits to you, it transmit through your body, then to you, i.e., the nervous system. In this view, your body other than the nervous system can be considered as part of the external world where you, the nervous system, lives. If there is a way to simulate all the signals that are transmitted to the nerve system through the body, and feed those signals directly into the nerve system, you may not even know that it is a simulated environment. You may think you are on top of Mt. Everest while you (the nervous system) are actually in a jar, a special one that can simulate all the signals including vision, vibration, etc for the consumption of your nerve system.
So, in this sense, the rest of the body is just part of the external world, just like the jar, the simulator. So, you are the nerve system. The boundary is the boundary of the nerve system.
How about the nerve system? We know that some nerve cells are there just to transmit signals back and forth between the brain and other locations in the body. Presumably, these ever extending nerve cells can be replaced by some artificial connector fibers as long as the same signal gets transmitted into the brain. So, part of the nerve system can be viewed as part of the external world as well because replacing them with artificial means will not jeopardize the nature of the SELF. So, you are really just the brain. That is where you reside. So, the boundary is the boundary of your brain.
How about the brain? Let’s look at the visual cortex. Let’s assume in some future day, the visual cortex is completely mapped and its functions completely determined. We can then completely identify the interface between the visual cortex and its interaction with the rest of the brain. Furthermore, there is definitely no conceptual difficulty to imagine that we can design an artificial drop-in replacement for the visual cortex. The difficulty is only technical, not conceptual. Again, replacing the visual cortex, as long as the interface is clearly understood and properly maintained for the operation, poses no danger to the nature of the “self” because the rest of the brain does not even know its visual cortex has been replaced assuming it is done right. Therefore, with the same spirit as considering the body without the nerve system the external world, we can consider the visual cortex something that is just there for the rest of the brain to interact with, and therefore, part of the external world. The boundary between ME and the external world has just taken a giant step inward. So, you are your brain minus the visual cortex, and that is the boundary.
Let’s look at the rest of the brain…..
Theoretically, we can do the same for all other parts of the brain. We can do that until there is no brain left. If you don’t agree with this deduction, that you have to admit that there is a point in the brain that is you. But there isn’t. The nature of the brain is a neuron network. It is probably very close to a distributed computer with each part doing different things but with no part being central. I believe this point is quite clear at this point from current brain study.
So, where is the boundary between me and the outside world? There does not seem to have one! Any specific area in the brain that can be identified as you can be further subdivided. Any physical system can be subdivided, down to an atom. Indeed, there is no “Cartesian theater”, to use Dan Dennett’s words. There is no place in the brain where YOU can be found.
We just proved that there is no boundary between ME and the external world. That is, physically, we have no way of defining what ME is and what the external world is. Yet, when my brain’s visual cortex gets stimulated with certain stimulation, I see RED. I gain this feeling of red. So, where is ME? Where is my SELF?
As pointed out in Julian Jayne’s book “The Origin of Consciousness In The Break Down Of The Bicameral Mind”, human languages are full of metaphors. However, if carried out too far, a metaphor becomes meaningless at best, misleading and simply wrong at worst. A metaphor is like a mental model of certain event, with an extension of a concept applying to a different situation other than the one originally intended, made possible by some similarities between them.
With this in mind, let’s see what kind of metaphor there is for self-consciousness with respect to the physical body.
Taking a hint from the time traveler’s thought experiment, I want to post a question: Is it possible that there are two instances of me exist at the same time?
I am taking a hint from physics: An anti-electron (positron) traveling forward in time is equivalent to an electron traveling backward in time. In fact, it is fair to say that the reason we “feel” a positron moving forward in time (everything moves forward in time of course), is due to our lack of capability to feel an electron moving backward in time. In the event that an electron did move backward in time, we feel it as an anti-electron moving forward in time. So, when a positron and an electron meet each other and annihilate each other into a photon, the alternate but equally valid description of this event is an electron moving forward in time and emits a photon and the recoil knocks it into traveling backward in time. This is just a plain statement of the Feymann diagram involved. But because of our inability to perceive an electron traveling backward in time, we see it as an anti-electron traveling forward in time and collide with another electron to become a photon. The truth is, it has been the same single electron that has been zig-zaging back and forth in time. There is really only one electron, and not two. So, in particle physics, a single elementary particle zigzagging back and forth in time will manifest as a lot of particles interacting at the same time.
Now, let’s me move back to the question of two instances of me at the same time. If you have forgotten the thought experiment posted above regarding the time traveler, let’s review it here. If I travel back in time to ten years ago, and stood face to face with the younger me, would I be the younger me or the older me. How would I feel? Or would there be two “I”s?
I refer to these two “I”s the two instances of me. Now, time travel is impossible, but the result is easier to imagine because we all see that this time traveled me is the same as the younger me and they both contained the same ME, and yet, these two ME’s are distinct from each other, as if there were different persons when they met. On the other hands, spatial travel is possible, but the possibility that all different individuals of the world are merely different instances of ME is difficult to imagine.
But what if this is true?
Think about a computer with a multithread multitasking operating system. Hardware wise, it has a CPU (let’s not consider multiple CPU parallel computer for this metaphor because it complicates the problem) and some memory for programs to run. Software wise, there are programs that is current running, and then there are programs that are dormant waiting to be launched. In a multitasking system, there are multiple software programs that are concurrently running. These are all instances of different software. If you play SimCity, you know the software can get very sophisticated. Not only a piece of software behaves like a living thing (think about a virus or a worm), it can simulate the behavior of a living person (think about the computer game The Sims family). Different pieces of software can run independently. They can interact with each other. They may violate each other space and cause other software to crash. They may compete for resources (CPU time, for example, memory space, another example). One program may not have access to the information contained in another program. But they may share information, if programmed to behave as such. A computer system is very good metaphor for a human society, or even for the whole world. The programs are good metaphors for the living things, in particular, the human beings. But what is the common characteristics that is shared by all these programs? They are all run by the CPU!
Each program is an instance of processes being run by the CPU, in a time shared way. Even though each program may behave as if it has a life of its own, without the CPU, there is no life to a piece of software. It has been the CPU that is running all these processes, as if there are a lot of CPUs (Virtual machine, WindowsXP versus DOS, etc). In fact, there is only one CPU, but many instances of processes.
What if there is a correspondence between the CPU and ME? Between the different instances of software and the physical bodies? What if the Qualia is really the qualia of the CPU? The qualia of ME?
Who is the feeler inside each individual of us? Can it be ME? But just by assuming different bodies in different instances, the CPU has no access to the environment experienced by other software which it is not currently running. The CPU, in each instance, is only aware of the environment of the software that it is currently focusing on. The CPU essentially takes on the identity of that piece of software temporarily. So, that is ME.
As Max Velmans expressed in a book put together by Susan Blackmore, “The universe has different views of itself through you and me.” I think this thinking hints on a metaphor I just described. The CPU experiences different Qualia through the software it is running.
The term Materialism refers to the branch of philosophy that takes material or matter as the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The universe includes living and non-living things. Everything else is emerging properties caused by the interaction of matters. In this view, there is no place for the concept of souls. As someone put it, “There is nothing left if you take away all the atoms.”
However, we know that materialism (or physicalism) immediately runs into the problem of the existence of qualia. There is just no way qualia can arise out of physicalism.
The success of modern psychiatry pretty much lend a strong support to the view that human behavior which seems so “mental” is fundamentally material, or physical. Materialism seems to have provided sufficient accountings of the universe, in principal. That is, until one encounters the phenomenon of first-person experience of self-consciousness and feeling.
That was exactly the reason that led Descartes to come up with the view of dualism to “explain” the mind-body problem.
One common recognized problem of dualism is, as I mentioned above, that if the mental part is non-physical, and yet it interacts with the physical body, that alone will make the mental part of the equation physical. The mental part is then controlled by the law of physics. That make the mental part physical.
But we just saw that it is not necessary the case. If we use the computer’s software/hardware model, even though the CPU (hardware) interacts and assumes the identity of the software it is currently running, that does not make the CPU a piece software. It remains the hardware. The hardware in this case is the mental world, and the software, funny enough, is the physical world, and they feed on each other. (Usually, in other occasions and in other context, we think of the software being the intelligent thing, the mental thing, and the hardware being the physical thing. But in this case, it is the opposite that we have arrived at.) As we have also seen, the CPU have no choice but to follow the rules of the software. The CPU has no intelligence whatsoever. All the intelligence is really in the software (software upgrade will make a software “smarter”). And the software is the physical world that we see. The intelligent is in the physical brain of a person. All the CPU does is to faithfully follow the process. Without the CPU, there is no software that can get executed. The CPU is the intrinsic part of the world in this metaphor.
So is the mind. And all it does is to provide qualia. Using this metaphor as a model, the mind is indeed an irreducible, fundamental component of the world. It would imply free will does not exist because it is the material that determines the outcome. That is, it is the software that dictates the outcome. It would imply epiphenomenalism is correct. The mind is just there to run the world, tagging along, just to feel, but really has no influence over the decision (outcome). Just like the CPU is just there to carry out the steps, which is already predetermined by the software programming.
Let’s revisit this topic. It has always fascinated me that I live NOW instead of 800 years ago. Or not 800 years later because I will have been dead. In the long history of the universe, there really is no reason for me to experience the 21st century earth but not the 29th century earth, or for that matter, the 13th century earth. There must be a reason. Or put it in another way, there is simply no reason on way or the other that my qualia is exclusively confined to the period somewhere in the 20th and 21st century. People were born, and people died throughout the long history of the universe, and I only find myself associated with one of them, and for no particular reason.
If now I use the metaphor I just developed, I get an interesting way of looking at myself: “I” am fundamentally everyone. I just assumed my current body and I am me. But in the next moment (or may even be concurrently), I will assume another individual’s process and forget all about ever been me before. I am circulating among all the physical beings that can assume consciousness, and be the feelers inside them. Yes, it is just ME.
If I look at it this way, the question of “why now” becomes meaningless. And, in fact, all the type of “Why I am not you?” questions become meaningless as well. Conceptually, it is very satisfying to come to this conclusion indeed.
In the book “Conversations on Consciousness” by Susan Blackmore, David Chalmers was quoted as saying, “So what we have to do when it comes to consciousness is admit it as a fundamental feature of the world-as irreducible as space and time.”
I think it is the view I will take, but now with a specific metaphor for understanding this fundamental feature.
A metaphor is not a theory. But it can be turned into a theory with further
development. However, at this
point, I don’t see any predictive power this metaphor has over other models of
consciousness except that it gives you a way of looking at qualia,
self-consciousness and feelings.
According to this metaphor, since the rules of interaction are still
specified by the software (the physical world, the laws of physics),
physicalism remain 100% correct outside of the qualia problem. There is no mind over matter and epiphenomenalism is correct. Free will does not exist but just an
illusion. As science advances, it
only tells us more about the rule of the physical world.
What will this
metaphor tell us about someone in a state of coma? Well, I think qualia exists for someone in coma. But because of the brain structure, the
person may not remember what it was like to be in a coma when he/she comes out
of it.
At this point, the
“theory” is still a piece of “work in progress” and I don’t know where it will
lead us, or ME.
I mention epiphenomenalism above. Why are there some strange people who think the mind does not affect the physical world? You think, then you act, and you change the world. What can be simpler than that? And yet, some philosophers claim that your thinking process does not matter. Are they missing something? Or are they onto something?
My understanding of epiphenomenalism goes like the following: The mind experiences the world. However, it does not make decision with consequence that change the world. It is epiphenomenal. It is only tagging along as the feeler when the brain changes its state. The mind only feels like it is making decision, without knowing that the decision has already been made on its behalf by the brain. Since the brain being only a physical system means that the input and output of the brain has to follow physical laws. It is therefore deterministic. Even if quantum effect is taken into account. To the mind, whatever the brain decides, the mind takes ownership of the decision believing that it is its own.
If this view sounds ridiculous, read on.
Suppose you have a tooth that is aching. People who believe that self-consciousness is a result of evolution would argue that the fact that a tooth is aching is a signal to the conscious self that something is urgent and need taken care of. As a result, a conscious decision is made to take care of it, and then it is taken care of. The existence of self-consciousness thus enhances the survival chance of the individual (especially in those cases when the pains are associated with more severe problems). This thus satisfies the “you think (perceive), then you act, and you change the world (in this case, your body)” sequence and it seems to be a direct refutation to epiphenomenalism. So why is it still possible that epiphenomenalism is correct?
However, if one examines the sequence further, one would immediately come to the conclusion that all these can be handled by the brain alone without self-consciousness. An aching tooth sends a strong signal to the brain indicating that there is a problem with the tooth. The worse the problem is, the stronger signal will be. It is no different from a software interrupt being issued for time critical event in a computer system and the interrupt is prioritized sizing up against other tasks being performed according to the severity of the message. The brain thus prioritizes the message and decides on its action, all without the mind being involved. However, with all these events going on, the mind perceives all these brain activities as a certain type of qualia. It therefore assumes that the action is taken as a result of the qualia (in this case, the pain). I am arguing that the feeling of pain is not the job of the brain. The brain receives the signal, but not the pain, but the mind perceive the brain signal as pain because it is the qualia, which is the mind’s specialty. So, epiphenomenalism can still be correct.
So, is it possible to find something that is a direct result of qualia, without which, there is no consequence? If we can find such an example, then we can prove that the mind thus directly participate in the decision making process, and not just a by-stander, and therefore it has consequences, in contradiction to epiphenomenalism. The best direction will be to look for qualia intensive events. Good candidates will include pain, humor, feeling of love, and perhaps being surprised.
We already took care of pain.
What is love? Love is blind. I am sure everyone has heard of this phrase. So, is love really blind? If it is blind, why is it blind? Let’s focus on romantic love, as oppose to the kind of love exist between a parent and a child. When two people are in love, both experience this intense level of affinity toward the other. “I cannot help thinking about him.” “I keep thinking about her.” One can make a case about the qualia being the agent of change and so the mind is involved. However, when we get down to the neuron levels, we can understand all these in terms of brain states. I know some people will object to the scientific treatment of romantic love in terms of chemistry. But if we are going to be scientific about love, the chemical process being involved would be what we are going to find. Now suppose we understand all the hormones being secreted in a male body in the presence of a female, and vice versa, and understand to the very fundamental level of how the two brains spiral into a courtship, we would wonder what the feeling of love is there for? You really don’t need the feeling of love at all. All the chemistry and physical processes can explain it all. These processes happen in human bodies, and these processes happen in other animals as well. So, the illusion that the mind is responsible for some decision making in a romantic relationship can be shown to be just an illusion. That is why love is blind. What really gives it away is statements like “I cannot help thinking about him.” The mind is hijacked by the brain processes and all those chemistry involved. The mind has no choice but to go along, picking up all those brain processes as qualia, and thinking the intense feeling is what is causing the courtship. If one really wants to feel it, one can stand back as a bystander and try to witness a romantic relationship unfolding by itself. So, I don’t see a convincing argument in love as a non-epiphenomenal example.
How about humor and being surprised? I only need to go through the same argument again as I did in the case of romantic love and I will come to the same conclusion that the mind is epiphenomenal.
The critical point here is to distinguish between the brain and the mind. The brain is the physical machinery that is doing the signal processing, but the mind is the one that is getting the qualia.
I think this view of a universal mind that operates on all the instances of physical beings and provides the qualia to all the self-conscious beings is so far the only one that has solved the mind-body problem, especially the “hard problem”. The unsatisfactory part is of course the mechanism of how the mind circulates among the conscious beings is not identified. I can still only imagine using the metaphor of the CPU (the mind) running all the programs (conscious beings) in a multitasking environment.