Here’s a 26-minute presentation from the Institute of Art and Ideas by neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland, someone whose work on consciousness I’ve always liked. I like it because she sees the problem of consciousness as not some kind of unsolvable philosophical mystery, but as a scientific problem whose solution comes down to this: if you understand what physiological and neurological phenomena give rise to consciousness and the perception of qualia (sensations), you’ve already solved the problem. What is required for us to be conscious is THE explanation of consciousness, and the rest is commentary. Or so I think.
Here are the website’s notes on her talk:
Have you ever made a decision and wondered why you made it? Or wondered where your morality comes from? Renowned philosopher of mind and founder of Neurophilosophy Patricia Churchland takes us on a journey into the brain, the nature and data of morality and the origins of nonconscious decision-making.
The Speaker
Patricia Churchland is a the distinguished founder of neurophilosophy. A pioneer of eliminative materialism, Patricia heralds a radically different way to understand the brain, arguing that ideas like pure morality and reason will eventually be abandoned in favour of a purely scientific view of the human mind.
Because of her mechanistic approach to the problem, she analyzes and explains what we know about the neural basis of consciousness and unconsciousness. How do anesthetics like propofol and ketamine work? What can restore consciousness when it’s vanished, as in comatose people? You may not consider this a satisfying approach to understanding consciousness, but it’s the only one that, in the end, will make inroads on the problem.
Churchland also discusses the neural basis of reinforcement learning, of pleasure (the interaction of dopamine with specific neurons), and of maintaining life goals (a conscious phenomenon) as well as attaining those goals (unconscious processes, as are the “execution of well-honed skills”).
I was pleased to see criticize panpsychism several times; that’s the harebrained idea that every bit of the universe, including electrons, rocks, and pizza, is conscious. I won’t embarrass the purveyors of this nonsense by naming them, but Churchland tells us, correctly, that their approach to consciousness (roughly, “when the little conscious bits of matter get together in a brain, we get big-time consciousness”) tells us absolutely nothing about the mechanism of feeling pain, how anesthesia works, or other scientific questions about consciousness.
Click on the screenshot to her her short talk:
Planning to watch this on my plane flight tomorrow (first post-Covid vacation!). Sounds like her approach has a lot in common with Pinker’s in How the Mind Works, which I am working through now. Highly recommended!
“if you understand what physiological and neurological phenomena give rise to consciousness and the perception of qualia (sensations), you’ve already solved the problem.”
I can’t shake off the suspicion that when the answer comes in the form above, I am not going to be entirely satisfied with it. Is this because I am misunderstanding what an explanation for something is? Or am I underestimating the explanation ie when it comes, am I going to say “OK – I get it now. That all makes sense”?
I’ve read that mathematicians worry about having a computer proof of a theorem which gives no insight as to why it’s true. I think I am feeling a bit like that might happen.
You may be underestimating what must be known in order to have an adequate understanding of the physiological and neurological phenomena. Many papers on how the brain works claim we already understand this. Not even close. I believe that’s Churchland’s position though she might be more diplomatic about it. Once we come to a much higher level of understanding of brain function, you still might find explanations of consciousness lacking but that’s an argument to have in the future.
I think lots of people will feel that way. But this is already common with things that are already quite well figured out. We want things to be understandable on a level that is intuitive to us so that once we hear the explanation it’s like we’ve been given the missing key and it all falls into place and is obvious to us.
But, sometimes, when you get to the end of it the answer is simply an unsatisfying “because that’s just the way the universe works.” It may be too complex to ever be intuitive to us, or it may be too far removed from the scale we’ve evolved to inhabit, like QM.
I think it likely that much like QM, even after we’ve devised a theory of consciousness that is robust there will be a number of different interpretations of what the theory entails about the nature of our reality and proponents on all sides will sneer at each other.
I accept the results of the double-slit experiment, but I will never comprehend them intuitively. That’s simply the way it will always be.
That’s like saying we’d understand circulation of the blood if we knew the heart is required—even if we didn’t know the heart is a pump. We want to know the mechanism, not just the parts. Learning patterns of neuronal signaling doesn’t help—that just tells us how the parts are connected and interact. Patterns and networks of action potentials must be generating something, analogous to the heart’s pumping, that we don’t understand at all. Perhaps the real problem is that we don’t understand what we’re trying to explain, i.e. consciousness, awareness, whatever you call it, so how can we expect to understand how it’s generated? Anyway, I don’t find Churchland’s perspective enlightening.
I haven’t watched this talk but I’m a fan of Churchland’s take on consciousness. She has a lot more to say about it, of course, but it basically boils down to (paraphrasing) “Let’s learn much more about how the brain works and then we’ll be ready to understand the problem of consciousness. By that time, there may not even be a problem.”
We cannot say we understand consciousness until we develop a theory that makes reliable predictions. For instance, a theory that can tell when a person under anesthesia is actually awake and can feel all the pain of a surgery (it unfortunately happens in a few cases). Or can tell when a person in deep coma is actually conscious and we should not disconnect that person from life support machines.
Just saying that consciousness happens because of some neural interactions or information processing, without providing any operational details, only provides a narrative with the same predictive power of a theory that postulates that consciousness is generated by little angels running around inside our brains
The neurophysiological approach to consciousness strikes me as being very much too low level. A cliché analogy is trying to understand the macroscopic behaviour of a computer in terms of semiconductor physics. In a sense that is indeed all there is to it, but it is not a remotely useful way of describing the phenomena of interest.
Another cliché analogy is the early failures to make flying machines based on properties of birds (flapping, feathers, etc). If/when a “consciousness machine” is made, IMO it will have very little connection with action potentials, dopamine, or even neural-like networks.
Also note that there are many species with mostly the same neurophysiology as humans, but apparently without human-like consciousness. So neurophysiology seems very unlikely to be the key.
“if you understand what physiological and neurological phenomena give rise to consciousness and the perception of qualia (sensations), you’ve already solved the problem.”
I’m not sure that solves the entire problem. I see three difficulties related to fully understanding consciousness:
– How does it rise? That’s what Churchland is investigating.
– What is it for? It’s not as obvious as it at first appears. T. H. Huxley was persuaded that it didn’t do anything at all, that it was just an epiphenomenon without causal power.
– How does it cause actions? This assumes Huxley was wrong, i.e., that consciousness is useful and that it influences behavior. This also is not so obvious as it seems at first. Is it a strong emergent phenomenon entailing downward causation? That is, does it have properties not contained in, or deducible from, the underlying system, which underlying system is affected by it? Or is it just a normal emergent phenomenon, reduced in principle to its underlying systems, that is, the biochemistry of the brain, etc.? If so, it’s a strange loop indeed: brain biochemistry affects our mental activity—thoughts and feelings—which in turn affects our brain biochemistry. What exactly is the difference between our brain biochemistry and our mental states (consciousness)? And how does the latter affect the former if the latter is the result of the former?
“…if you understand what physiological and neurological phenomena give rise to consciousness and the perception of qualia (sensations), you’ve already solved the problem. What is required for us to be conscious is THE explanation of consciousness, and the rest is commentary.”
In line with some others’ comments above, in particular CdeL’s, this doesn’t seem like a solution since it only involves correlations (what phenomena apparently “give rise” to consciousness), not *how* it arises (the mechanism). The latter is what’s needed for an explanation. Churchland doesn’t deign to define consciousness, but as you say qualia (sensory experiences) are the generally agreed upon target of the hard problem. Hard, because qualia aren’t observables. but only exist for the subject of experience; they aren’t measurable and quantifiable as are their neural correlates (which Churchland helpfully describes). If they were, there would be no hard problem. If you’re a realist about qualia (Dennett for example isn’t) and want a good naturalistic explanation, then of course we should continue full steam ahead with neuroscience, as she recommends, but correlation isn’t enough. We need a settled theory (and I agree panpsychism doesn’t cut it) of why and how just certain neural processes entail the existence of phenomenal consciousness.
As my dad used to say, “I may be dumb but i’m not stupid” and of course I know that you need more than a correlation. You need a testable explanation. That was what I was talking about, and perhaps I was obtuse. And there are ways to see if qualia exist and to measure their intensity.
As I think we agree, qualia aren’t directly observable or measurable, so their existence and intensity is always a matter of report or behavior (by non-language-using animals), which we then correlate with observations and measurements of neural processes. We also agree that we need more than correlation for an explanation, so the question arises as to what about the correlated processes might account for qualia – a question which Churchland notably fails to raise since she didn’t define the explanatory target. So I didn’t find that her talk addressed the basic issue, even though it had some good stuff about the neural correlates of consciousness. In any case, there’s no settled theory of consciousness as yet, even though there are some leading hypotheses like GWT, IIT, and AST. So we have to stay tuned, but not panpsychism!
As far as I know, IIT is so far the only theory of consciousness that is actually trying to make quantitative assessments and generate testable predictions (even though some of those results are a little bit laughable, like the conclusion that a thermostat has some low degree of consciousness)
Jerry, Patricia Churchland was Greater Manchester Humanists Darwin Day speaker back in February this year. She was excellent. I’ve just finished reading ‘A Thousand Brains’ by American neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins, with a gloriously humorous, scientific and poetical seven page foreward by Richard Dawkins. A fascinating new theory of intelligence involving the disputatious nature of our old (reptilian) brain versus the more recently evolved neocortex. It’s 150,000 cortical columns provide us with intelligence, knowledge and maps (reference frames) of our existence. Fabulous stuff!
Ian Stevenson has trown a bucket of cold water over this kind of theorising. There might be something more to it.