A Worldly Mind: Natural History and the Experience of Consciousness

1.

Research into the physical foundations of consciousness and the theories that attempt to organize these data into a philosophically meaningful context continue to be guided by deeply-engrained Western habits of thought and terminology. The guidance I speak of, however, is bewildered: it continues to lead us to the brink of a chasm separating experience and physiology, thought and neurons, mind and brain.

Like many others, the so-called "mind-body problem" is an historical, semantic, and self-insistent paradox. It happens like this: we believe ourselves to be physical beings, but we also believe that we are conscious beings whose awareness of physical beings cannot be physical. It would seem that we are both physical and non-physical: the problem is, how do the physical and non-physical relate, how does the physical lead to the non-physical, or how does the non-physical lead to the physical? Since by definition the physical and the non-physical have no means of communication or relationship, we have a problem.

There are two ways of translating this problem into a "solution":

1) Consciousness is simply a name for physical processes that are practically infinite in complexity; strictly speaking, there is no "consciousness," no non-physical phenomenon in need of explanation. ¹

2) Consciousness is a way of denoting a non-physical dimension or faculty of living things that is irreducible to physical processes; if we do reduce consciousness to physical processes, we have simply thrown away the experience of awareness that we say we are attempting to understand. The nature of their inter-relationship is a mystery. This view can sometimes shade into a stronger idealistic or monistic version: the brain is an instrument that acts as an interface between pure mind/spirit and the extended world. ²

Between these two positions is a range of views that characterizes the relationship of body and mind in different ways, including Daniel Dennett's "explanation" that consciousness is an un-centered and un-experienced cognitive event distributed spatially and temporally in the brain (his modeling drawing on Joycean drafts rather than a Cartesian theatre) and Searle's double-aspect theory, i.e. that consciousness is what the brain does, but this doing is not simply a word: it is an experience with an undeniably empirical existence. ³ Much as they are opposed to each other's positions, they share a deflationary attitude toward consciousness that helps to establish one's credibility in the field: Dennett wants more or less to explain away what may remain of the transcendental aura of the word by employing computer modeling, and Searle likes to compare consciousness to digestion. Both would like to accommodate an explanation of consciousness within a well-established world-view. Although Searle is a trenchant critic of Dennett and other reductionists, neither seems to think that consciousness requires any changes in how we habitually conceptualize and locate the self. ⁴

The simplest way of solving the problem and avoiding the reductive and the dualist explanations is simply to dissolve the problem, retire words like "body" and "mind," since they are remnants of a physics originating with Aristotle and ending with Einstein and Bohr. But if we did this, if we simply stopped talking about bodies and minds, about the physical and non-physical, about matter and spirit, we would not be able to understand what we were claiming. This is because, for better or for worse, we think historically and via deeply-engrained terminologies. Participants in the consciousness debate may or may not accept consciousness or the ego intellectually, but nobody seems in doubt about either term when the battle is joined.

Most researchers of consciousness tend to deny that any fundamental rethinking needs to be done: they pretend that only time and research stand between us and an understanding of consciousness, that we understand more than we do, and that we have actually escaped dualism and are capable of living...