Where do we begin…?
Logic would suggest, the initial question is, “What do we mean by consciousness. How do we define it”? To answer that, it may require breaking consciousness down in some way and analyzing it in all of its parts. For example, what are it's parameters? How do we identify those? How do we know consciousness when we encounter or observe it? Can we observe it? Are there different levels to consciousness? What determines what level is reachable/can be reached? The bottomless pit of unknowns quickly becomes obvious leaving us wondering if these questions are even answerable? What would an agreed upon/acceptable answer to these questions by both the philosophical and the scientific communities look like? Although the mind-body problem was introduce nearly 400 years ago by Rene Descartes, we are still struggling to solve this deeply intimate and scientifically baffling question today.
Clearly with more questions than answers being produced, here it seems is where the preverbal ‘rabbit hole’ begins to spiral out of control. So now what. While some try to scratch the surface of carving out a definition of consciousness, others, like neuroscientist and British professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex Anil Seth, propose the idea of, ‘Is it absolutely necessary to have a precise, laid out and defined explanation of what consciousness is in order to study it.’? According to Seth, perhaps not. How can we accurately define what consciousness is when we cannot explain and understand the components and concepts that make it up? After all, isn’t the very question we are posing ‘what is consciousness’? Yet humans have done this throughout history. Our defined place in the solar system was flawed until the great mathematician and astronomer Nicolas Copernicus studied and observed the planetary properties and mathematical components of physics. His research proved the Earth is not at the center of the solar system but instead, orbits around the sun, forever shifting our understanding and knowledge of our place in the universe from geocentric to that of a heliocentric one. Naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin lifted the veil of mystery on our place in the natural world by showing humans are, in fact, a part of the animal kingdom and not separate from, based off of his observations and research. Neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud changed our understanding about human behavior by showing we are motivated by both conscious and unconscious thoughts and that Man is fundamentally irrational.
‘The Unholy Trinity’- Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud.
So, I ask again, is it absolutely necessary to have a definition first? “Sometimes a definition can follow fundamental insights in explaining something and don’t have to preced them.” (Seth, 2012).
As mentioned earlier, one approach in the study of consciousness comes from the field of neuroscience. It seems to be generally agreed upon by both philosophers and scientists that the ‘something’ that is consciousness has to do with the brain. Therefore, in recent years with the advancement of functional brain imaging technology, neuroscientists have turned their attention to studying brain mechanics and processes as a way to possibly gain some insight into what consciousness is, or at least try to uncover this seemingly crucial yet somehow debatable correlation that exists between the two. Now, it is important to keep in mind before we continue that research in consciousness science does not need to nor is it necessarily out to explain why consciousness exists, but rather what components, if any, of consciousness are taking place in the brain that can help account for a piece of the subjective conscious experience.
‘Consciousness science, at least for now, does not need to explain why consciousness exists, to go about unravelling the biological and physical properties that underlie its many properties, in much the same way that physicists have laid bare many mysteries of the universe without accounting for the brute fact that it is there.' (Seth, 2010).
Now, let us fall further down the rabbit hole.
Researchers such as Anil Seth from the University of Sussex have dedicated years to studying and exploring the physical brain and its mechanics. One of Seth’s main premises behind the need for neuroscience in consciousness studies comes from the question, how much can we rely on our own judgements about what we are experiencing? His 2018 paper ‘Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood’ explains how studying predictive processing accounts of interoception (a lesser-known sense that helps you understand and feel what’s going on inside your body) “have become influential in accounting for experiences of body ownership and emotion. Here, we describe embodied selfhood in terms of ‘instrumental interoceptive inference’ that emphasizes allostatic regulation and physiological integrity.” (Seth, 2018). This notion is startling. Seth’s research is providing insight into the relation between our abstract feeling and emotions to our physical and biological bodies. Experiments like the rubber-hand illusion (RHI) (where subjects reported feeling ownership over a rubber hand), coupled with brain imaging techniques, such as fMRIs, have given researchers a glimpse into the nature of body ownership and the implications that it is not just the presence of a physical body but the brain’s ability to use available sensory input and multi-sensory correlations that produce the experience of body ownership or disownership. This branch of research gives rise to a Bayesian (or predictive) Brain view of the mind-body correlation suggesting that experiences are based on inferences to the best explanation, or Bayesian ‘best guesses’, that are continually formed and reformed on the basis of neurally encoded prior expectations and afferent sensory data.
So what does this all mean? Stay with me. The big takeaway here is, regardless of the current definition of consciousness, neuroscience has begun to make some interesting observations and contribute compelling data toward our quest to better understand the parts or components of consciousness.
While neuroscience research may satisfy some, there are others in the philosophy of mind field such as Professor Barry Smith of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study who argue, while neuroscience can help bring insight into understanding the ‘neural wet-ware’ of the brain, it still fails to explain why there should be any subjective experience at all. “If you ask what is science good for, it’s good at creating false theories and we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are today if we hadn’t ruled out or eliminated a lot of scientific theories of the past… Even if we know exactly what’s going on in the brain, there seems to be an explanatory gap between knowing what’s going on in the brain and wondering why there should be this subjective feeling of experience.” (Royal Institute, 2012).
*Seth, A. K., & Tsakiris, M. (2018). Being a Beast Machine: The Somatic Basis of Selfhood. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(11), 969–981. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.08.008
*Royal Institute. (2012). Alok Jha: Consciousness, the hard problem? - Presentations (1/2) [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=313yn0RY9QI&t=8s
*Seth, A. (2010). The grand challenge of consciousness. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00005
My Thoughts…
Although I agree with the concept of turning to neuroscience as one avenue for uncovering some of the building blocks of consciousness, I am not yet convinced this can account for the subjectiveness of consciousness. As stated earlier, it is the subjective property of the self that completes our experiences. One major hurdle critics point out of a strictly scientific approach to consciousness, is its objectivity. Science seems to be setting out to explain the conception of the world and reality without dependence of the individual’s perception or way of thinking. By describing the world objectively, I can’t help but feel as if a major part of consciousness is being left out, what causes the subjectivity. That is the very nature of the thing we are after and seems to be a fundamental property of consciousness. So perhaps neuroscience and its technological advancements can bring value in the sense that correlations between the mind and body can be tested, studied, observed and perhaps even understood to some level, but I am still in search for that ‘something more’ that is needed in order to explain the individuality of the self.