Consciousness Itself
by Reginald Firehammer
In our technical discussions of consciousness, it is easy to forget what we are actually talking about. When attempting to understand the nature of consciousness we forget how we happen to know there is such a thing in the first place. This is about consciousness and what we mean by it, not about its nature or how it functions, but just what it is we are referring to by consciousness.
Knowledge of Consciousness
None of us would ever suspect there was such a thing as consciousness if we were not conscious ourselves. Behaviorists, and some other hair-brained philosophers, deny consciousness, and for all the rest of us know, such people may very well be the kind of unconscious zombies they believe, or at least say, everyone is.
Behaviorists, and other’s who believe consciousness is some kind of delusion, may be like the citizens of H. G. Well’s, “The Country of the Blind,” who were all blind and therefore believed sight was a delusion that could be cured. That, of course, is the problem with consciousness. What the sciences study can be directly observed and demonstrated or is derived from what is directly observed, but we can neither directly observe or demonstrate consciousness. We can only be aware of consciousness, subjectively and by introspection. Just as it would be impossible to prove to a world that was blind we actually see, it would be impossible to prove to a world without consciousness that we really are conscious. We know we can see, not because we can prove it to anyone, but because we do it. We know we are conscious, not because we can prove it to anyone, but because we are.
Consciousness in other people and other creatures is inferred from their testimony (in the case of people) or their behavior (in the case of animals), but cannot be directly observed. We believe the testimony of others about their consciousness, because what they describe sounds exactly like what we experience, and we have no reason to suspect them of deceiving us. If someone were not conscious, it is unlikely they would attempt to fool others into thinking they were. If they were not conscious, how would they know what it is and what possible motive could they have for deceiving others about it?
We believe the animals are conscious because their behavior is exactly what we would expect of creatures who are. When we step on the cat’s tail, the cat’s yowl and it’s attempt to return the favor indicates to us the cat not only reacted to a stimulus, but consciously felt pain.
The behaviorist, however, is unconvinced by this “evidence” of consciousness and considers both human and animal behavior explainable entirely in terms of “mechanical-chemical-electrical” reactions of very complex biological machines to external and internal stimuli. The behaviorist’s mistake is in supposing it is the behavior that is consciousness. The behavior is only evidence of consciousness, not consciousness itself. There is consciousness even when there is no behavior at all, and pain is a good example. I shall use that example and others to explain what consciousness really is.
The Consciousness We Know
The only consciousness we can know with certainty is our own. We can be certain others are conscious, but what other’s consciousness is like, we cannot know at all, because it is impossible to perceive another’s consciousness. In the strictest sense, we do not perceive our own consciousness either. We do not perceive our consciousness, our consciousness is perception.
In general we assume other’s consciousness is like our own, and there is good reason to assume it. In fact, however, other’s consciousness could be quite different, and we could never know it.
Inverted Spectrum
If we try to explain to one another what our consciousness is like, I may give you examples of how I perceive things, and you the same. For example, I might point to a red car and say, “I perceive that color as red,” and you might point to a blue car and say, “I perceive that color as blue.” Neither of us will be astonished that we agree on the names of the colors, but if we think we have any more idea of how the other actually perceives those colors we are mistaken. The actual conscious experience I have when seeing red might be the actual conscious experience you have when seeing blue, and the actual conscious experience you have when seeing red might be the actual conscious experience I have when seeing green.
To illustrate the subjective non-demonstrable nature of consciousness philosophers sometimes use the example of the inverted spectrum. There is no reason why the conscious experience of colors for different people might not be entirely different and even the exact opposite. For example, the way you and I see the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, (r, o, y, g, b, v), might be reversed—what I consciously experience as “red” you might consciously experience the way I experience “violet” (r—v). For the whole spectrum then, our corresponding experiences for each color of the rainbow would be r—v, o—b, y—g, g—y, b—o, and v—r. Since we would use the same name for the same colors, there would be no way for us to know what the others actual experience of seeing a color is, even if they are inverted.
The significance of this thought experiment is to illustrate one aspect of what consciousness actually is. It is the actual conscious experience of colors that are seen that is consciousness. Since, hypothetically, the actual conscious experiences of individuals perceiving the same things could be entirely different, philosophers have invented the term “qualia” for the quality of percepts (for example, colors) as they are actually consciously perceived.
The importance of the concept “qualia” is this: there is no objective physical description or explanation for any particular qualia. It is not possible to describe, in any physical terms, what red will look like, or why it looks the way it does, or even how it looks. Only the individual experiencing the “qualia” can know what it is for him.
Tasting is the Only Test
This impossibility of physical description or explanation is true for all conscious perception. There is no way to determine from the physical characteristics of anything how it will taste, for example, or what any particular chemical will smell like. The only way to know what anything will taste or smell like is to actually taste or smell it.
This, of course, is the reason why it is so difficult to explain what something tastes like to someone who has never tasted that thing. Unless it has ingredients that one has tasted before, it is, in fact, impossible to describe the taste of a thing.
This is true of all the perceptual qualities. It is the reason why no description of sound can make a deaf person know what sound “sounds” like, and why no explanation can make a blind person know what anything “looks” like. Yet, it is quite possible to explain all the physical and technical aspects of sound to a deaf person and of light and imaging to a blind person.
Pain
I mentioned earlier that I would use the example of pain as part of this explanation of what we mean by consciousness. What is particularly interesting about pain is the fact it is not a quality of anything physical. Unlike color, for example, for which there is a corresponding physical attribute (the transmission, reflection, or emitting of light at a specific wave length) there is no corresponding physical attribute of any physical existent that is pain.
All human consciousness is comprised of percepts, and pain is a percept. All perception is consciousness of the physical, and pain is consciousness of the physical. However, it is not consciousness of any physical attributes of any physical existent—it is consciousness of a particular physical state of a living organism.
A broken bone is, to consciousness, extremely painful, but a broken bone, as a physical phenomenon, in terms of physics, has no attribute which can be called pain. No xray, physical examination, or analysis of any kind will find any attribute about a broken bone which can be called pain. The pain associated with a broken bone exists only in the context of a living organism and only to consciousness. Pain exists and is real, it is an indication of a real physical state, but does not itself exist physically, and has no physical attributes or explanation.
There is another aspect of pain that helps illustrate what consciousness is. When I feel pain, I generally react to that feeling, like holding the finger I just hit with the hammer and yelling “ouch!” or something stronger. But I do not have to react at all. I can “ignore” the pain, if I really have to. Nevertheless, I feel the pain just as much—it is the pain I feel that is the conscious experience, not my reaction to it.
No Physical Description of Consciousness
I have already described how the perceptual qualities of things, as they are consciously perceived, like the red of a red car, cannot be described or explained in any physical terms. I will now explain why no description of any physical aspect or physical process related to perception explains or describes any perceptual quality or aspect of conscious perception.
The short of it is, no matter what physical (mechancical-electrical-chemical) actions are described, that is all they can describe. When the biologist and physiologist have described all that the nervous system and brain have done, they still have not described consciousness—they have only described a complex of physical events, which no matter how complex will never be a description of consciousness or any aspect of it.
The TV in the Empty Room
It has been suggested that given sufficient complexity in the proper configuration, it is possible for a physical process to produce “consciousness.” It is supposed, for example, that a complex nervous system like that of the higher animals and human beings in some way produces consciousness. Conscious vision, for example, in this view, is produced by the nervous system providing information from the eyes that are processed in some way by the brain, which process is “seeing.” In fact, no physical process can be vision—even if in some way information reaching the brain from the eye through the optic nerves could be processed into an image, it would be like an image on a TV—but an image on a TV is not vision and can only be consciously seen if someone is watching the TV. That is what consciousness is; it is the “seeing” of the image. Whatever the physical brain does, it cannot itself be consciousness. The behavior of the brain is only more physical action; it only makes available to consciousness what is seen, heard, felt, smelled and tasted—the brain itself cannot see, hear, feel, smell or taste anything.
What is Consciousness For?
Though mistaken, the Behaviorists have actually helped clarify the nature of consciousness. By reducing the concept of consciousness to the observable behavior of an organism, and human volition to “conditioning,” they make it easy to ask the most important question about consciousness—what is it for? Why is it necessary to consciously see, hear, feel, smell, and taste things? Why is it necessary to consciously experience pain and pleasure?
What seems obvious really is not. Obviously, a creature that can see, that can consciously perceive it’s environment and the things in, will have great advantages in dealing with it. It seems that all the higher animals do to survive depends on consciousness—they must be able to detect their food by seeing, hearing, or smelling it; to escape and protect themselves from threats by seeing or hearing them; they must be able to detect their mates, build or find shelter, and move about by means off what they see, hear, feel, smell, and taste.
It is not really true, however. All that is required is that the nervous system produce the appropriate behavior. Given a little thought, consciousness seems superfluous. If an animal needs to find food and it detects the food by means of its scent, all that needs to happen is for the signals that indicate food to reach the brain and the behavior required to acquire that food to be triggered by that information. But suppose the animal needs to chase its food down, how could it do that without seeing it? It could do it the same way it does do it, the visual information reaching the brain could direct the automatic action of chasing the game. There is no explainable reason why the animal would actually have to be conscious of what it was doing, so long as it did it.
If an animal did not consciously feel pain, how would it be able to avoid things that harmed it? By now it must be obvious, it is not the feeling of pain that matters, but the reaction of the animal to its cause. In fact, some reactions to things which are consciously experienced as pain in both animals and man occur before the pain is felt. The nerve impulses that trigger reflexes do not reach the brain until after the reflex action (triggered in the spinal column) has already occurred. By the time the pain is felt, the reaction is over.
Objectively, it is not possible to demonstrate what advantage consciousness actually provides. Hypothetically, so long as all the behavior is correct, consciousness is superfluous, and since experiencing pain does not actually provide anything useful to the behavior, it’s only purpose seems to be make conscious suffering possible.
In fact, it cannot be objectively demonstrated that any creature actually is conscious, as we have already seen, because consciousness can only be inferred in others from their behavior and their testimony. But it is not proof. The yowl emitted by the cat when you step on it’s tail is not proof the cat felt pain, it is only proof the cat yowled—it could do so without feeling anything at all as a purely physical/biological reaction to the stimulus of having its tail stepped on. The fact that something can behave as though it were conscious, or the way we think it ought to behave if it were conscious, is why the question of the utility of consciousness is so important. So far, we do not know what it is for.
Must Man be Conscious?
Surely, human consciousness is necessary. How could there be volition without consciousness?
If you are a behaviorist, that is not a problem—you simply deny there is any such thing as volition. For you and I it is a problem, because true volition is not possible without consciousness. If you are a physicalist, however, volition without consciousness would hypothetically be possible. If consciousness is nothing more than an emergent phenomena arising out of the complexity of physiological/neurological activity, there is no reason why one would have to be conscious of that activity for it to occur. All that is apparently volitional would be satisfied by the physiological and neurological activity—in everyone but ourselves there would be no way to tell the difference between someone who is behaving as though they were conscious, and those who really are conscious. Since all of the behavior is possible without consciousness, if the physicallist view were correct, there can be no objective reason given for consciousness.
Physically Impossible Attributes
In my article Life I mentioned three unique characteristics of consciousness, continuity, unity, and subjectivity, that could not be attributed to the physical. These attributes were discussed somewhat technically in that article. Here I want to stress why those attributes are physically impossible, if the physical is all there is. I’ve already discussed subjectivity, so will only deal with continuity and unity now.
Continuity
From the moment I open my eyes for the first time to the moment I close them for the last time, I have only one consciousness, and what I mean by “I” is that consciousness. My existence as a person is my consciousness. If my consciousness should cease, whatever happens to my body, I cease to exist.
My consciousness does not cease to exist when I sleep, or when under an anesthetic, or when knocked “out” by a blow to the head. By analogy, in those cases, consciousness is like the life of a seed. A seed is a living thing, although it does not exhibit any of the usual characteristics of life; we say it is “dormant” because under proper conditions it will germinate and grow. If irradiated, or exposed to certain temperatures it “dies” and cannot be germinated. Consciousness, during sleep or when anesthetized, is like the life of a seed, dormant, because when the anesthesia wears off or the hypothalamus is stimulated, consciousness revives. If the consciousness ceases, however, nothing can revive it, and the individual who was that consciousnesses ceases to exist.
I Am My Consciousness
The “I” which is my consciousness remains the same thing no matter what other things change. However little I know or how much I learn, no matter what changes there are to the physical aspects of my body, no matter what I do or how long I live, from moment to moment, day to day, and year to year, I am the same person, because I am the same consciousness. There is no physical aspect of my being that cannot be changed that can change my identity, because my identity is determined by my consciousness—my consciousness, is my “self;” it is my identity.
That identity which is my consciousness, cannot be discovered or described by any physical attribute or any physical action of my body, and no physical attribute of my body or any physical action of my body can account for it or it’s nature.
Unity
Furthermore, I am only one consciousness, one person. I am conscious of what I am thinking, what I am seeing and hearing, and what I am feeling, emotionally, and I am conscious of these, and all the other things I am aware of, simultaneously and continuously. To some extent I can determine what I will be conscious of by where I look and what I do, such as turning on or turning off a radio, or opening a book. In those cases, I am merely changing what there is available for me to be conscious of. But I can also focus my attention on some things I am conscious of and ignore some others, even though I do not cease to be conscious of everything available to my consciousness at any time.
In the more formal description of this aspect of consciousness I said, “It would be impossible, at the physical level, to make all the discrete physical events required for detection of separate phenomena be a single event.” What that means, is, there is no physical system which is able to detect sounds (microphones, for example) images (a video camera, for example), pressure and weight (a transponder system, for example) temperature (and electronic thermometer for example), movement (a electro-gyroscope for example) which can all be recognized in all its detail all this data as a single event or process. The information that all these detection systems provide, at the physical level, must forever remain discrete. The laws of physics and information theory, both determined by the principles that govern physical existence, exclude the possibility that this information can be integrated into a single thing or phenomenon, like my consciousness. If my consciousness were a phenomenon of the physical, it would not be a single thing, but a collection separate and discrete things. Physically, the unity of consciousness is an impossibility.
Which Cell is Conscious
But we do not have to depend on physics or information theory to see the problem the unity of conscious is to the physicalist view. Even if we only consider vision, the optic nerve is actually a bundle of nerves, each carrying separate signals to the brain. They all terminate close to one another but at slightly different places at different cells. Many cells in the brain respond to these signals, at the physical level, “sight” consists of many interrelated by discrete events. If many different cells are involved in “seeing” how do the separate behaviors of each of those cells become integrated into a single phenomenon I call “seeing.”
Unless there is one “master consciousness cell” that is somehow fed perceptual information by all the other cells of the brain, there is not “one event” at the physical level, but a collection of many separate events that cannot be anything but separate events.
Are Others Conscious?
Whenever I have tried to explain what I mean by my consciousness being one thing, not a string or collection of separate things, some people seem to know instantly what I mean, because their own consciousness is, apparently, the same. Other people seem never able to grasp the significance of consciousness being one thing. I am very near to concluding that not everyone is conscious, that there might be some people who are exactly what the behaviorists claim people are—they behave just as if they were conscious, and since there is no way to know what another person’s subjective experience is, when someone claims they do not know what it means to say consciousness is one thing, it very well may be an admission they are not truly conscious at all.
It is apparent to anyone who is truly conscious that no physical event is what chocolate tastes like, no brain function is what the feeling of one’s lover is in their arms, and no chemical/electrical process is the beauty and grandeur of the music we experience. The physicalist argument that the conscious experience is an “attribute” that just “emerges” from physical events ignores the most important question of all, “how?” If they answer at all, it is the same as all mystic’s answer, “somehow!” They do not know how it happens, but are sure it does.
It is really an odd kind of faith and is based on a kind of paranoid fear of admitting that reality might have attributes other than those of the merely physical. It falsely equates “objectivity” and “physics,” as though anything physics cannot explain cannot be objectively true. It is the same mistake the pythagoreans made in claiming the same kind of universal power of explanation for mathematics (until they discovered incommensurables which drove some of them to suicide.) It is itself a kind of mysticism—a stubborn insistence that no evidence will be allowed that does not fit the physicalist dogma. Once accepted, it apparently makes one blind to the nature of their own consciousness (which is the only one they can know).
I do not really think anyone is the kind of non-conscious zombie the behaviorists describe. I do think there are some people who have lost the ability to identify their own consciousness, not because they cannot be aware of and identify it, but because they are afraid to and will not identify it.
So, What IS Consciousness For?
I said earlier about consciousness, “so far, we do not know what it is for.” I also said, “true volition is not possible without consciousness,” but that does not explain what consciousness is for or why there is consciousness. It assumes there is, “true volition,” (which, if either the behaviorists or physicalists are right, there cannot be), and that, even if consciousness is necessary to volition, that volition is necessary. It isn’t. There is only one living creature that we know of with volition—all the others do quite well without it. As human beings, the advantages of rational/volitional nature are obvious and most of us would not be willing to give it up, with all its problems, for any animal’s instinct.
That fact that we like being consciousness volitional creatures, however, is no explanation for why we are. The truth is, the question is wrong. Volitional consciousness does not exist for some reason—it just exists like existence itself. Even more amazing, it is volitional consciousness that is the reason for the existence of every other attribute of existence. I do not mean volitional consciousness is in any sense a “cause” of everything else, but that volitional consciousness requires a certain kind of existence to be possible and it is exactly the one there is. (I am also not suggesting existence could be anything other than it is, because it cannot.)
Consider the nature of volitional consciousness and it becomes obvious, reality, as we know it, seems to exist solely for the sake of that consciousness. Volition is the ability to act by conscious choice. That would be impossible if there were not a physical existence that was determined by inviolable laws. If existence behaved inconsistently, if things just happened willy-nilly, there would be no way to know what choices would produce what results.
Knowledge is the first criteria of volition. To choose one must know what the consequences of one’s choices will be. A world not understandable in terms of universal principles cannot be known, and no choice would be possible.
It goes deeper than that. Consciousness is possible only to life. Since life is a process, though a unique one, it nevertheless must be a process of something, and no process can be successful unless that which it uses to perform it’s function is dependable, behaving according to consistent principles. A computer program depends on all the hardware of the computer it runs on always performing in the same way. If some of the circuits fail to perform correctly, the program will fail. By analogy, if the physical aspects of an organism, such as the chemical reactions, did not always behave the same way, the life process would fail. Life, which is not itself physical, depends on a determined physical reality for it’s own existence.
There is volitional consciousness because there is. Since volitional consciousness is only possible to living organisms, there must be life. Since life is a process, there must be a determined physical existence for it to be a process of; there must, therefore, be physical existence. Their real question is, what would be the purpose of physical existence, or life, if there were no volitional consciousness?
—(04/19/05)