On the subject of consciousness
Dear SMN members and visitors,
Further to helping Jo format her "Ladder of Credibility" for publication at this site, I've become more alert to articles or news reports which showcase the significant bias towards reductionist models within many or most scientific fields of research.
All of which underscores the need for the replacement of the standard reductionist model, with a congruent framework that encompasses subjective experience as a valid and irreducible dimension to personal reality (and how to subsequently frame or qualify the veracity of subjective experiences with Jo's Ladder of Credibility).
Background:
During this last week I watched an ABC television debate in which it was explained that our level of resiliency in the face of adversity is genetically determined or influenced. Oh dear, I thought, there they go again ... seeking to reduce consciousness - our thoughts and feelings -- to the functioning of a few molecular bits and pieces.
Then just yesterday (Friday 11th May), I had a lunch-room chat with a lecturer at a university concerning the deeper nature of consciousness. I quoted David Bohm's affirmation that consciousness (more correctly, "intelligence") cannot be reduced to any knowable (physical) order or system.
As Bohm wrote:
The actual operation of intelligence is beyond the possibility of being determined or conditioned by factors that can be included in any knowable law ...
Intelligence is thus not deducible or explainable on the basis of any branch of knowledge (e.g. physics or biology). Its origin is deeper and more inward than any knowable order that could describe it.1
In other words, consciousness has its roots in a metaphysical reality, beyond our everyday reality of cars, cats and computers.
This assertion was met with disbelief, with the reply argument being that consciousness can be severely disrupted or entirely curtailed, by operations on the brain. Ipso facto, the argument went, consciousness is resident within, and entirely reliant on, the physical brain.
So there I was thinking how best to explain the nature of systems, downward/nonlocal causation -- that even though consciousness is indeed highly contingent on a healthy functioning brain, consciousness is also reliant on underlying nonlocal "processes" that not only transcend the physical brain, but also transcend our local time and space.
More disbelief, despite my emphasis of the fact of nonlocality and the extraordinary implications thereof -- paraphrasing the likes of physicist Nick Herbert's emphatic statements:
immediate, unmediated (nonlocal) connections are present not only in rare and exotic circumstances, but underlie all the events of everyday life. Non-local connections are ubiquitous because reality itself is non-local.2
and
Whatever reality may be, it must be non-local. Since (Clauser’s) experimental verification of Bell’s theorem, we know that any correct model of reality has to incorporate explicit non-local connections. No local reality can explain the type of world we live in.
Furthermore, since Bell’s result is based on experimental facts, it is independent of whether quantum theory is correct or not.
...without 'faster than light' connections, an ordinary object model of reality simply cannot explain the facts.
Then with the introduction of the subject of delayed-choice experiments and the evidence for temporal nonlocality (connections across time), that pretty much ended the chat. [btw, there's some great material at Scientific American on do-it-yourself delayed-choice experiments, and how to do the experiment in your home. Also, recent reports on nonlocal (instantaneous) connections now experimentally confirmed across 144 kilometres. Also, there is this NewScientist article which suggests it won't be long before we will observe a macro-scale demonstration of changing (choosing) the past].
Later in the day while surfing the net for current arguments on consciousness I found this Time article by Steven Pinker who essentially explains that consciousness is "NOT ONE PROBLEM ... BUT two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem."
Pinker essentially categorises the Easy problem as being the measurable, verifiable aspects to consciousness. In other words, the Easy part of consciousness is what science is good at -- quantifying our perceptions and experiences through the use of words and symbols (e.g. mathematics, measurement of brain-wave frequencies etc).
The Hard problem is, according to Pinker, "explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place."
Pinker goes on to explain that the Hard problem remains just as "hard," even with the many advances in terms of mapping or understanding the brain.
Despite this, Pinker writes that "whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain."
In other words, the Hard problem of consciousness, it is argued, will eventually be reduced to the function of some molecules.
This view is, I believe, quite widespread ... that dis-eases will be cured by finding and correcting the relevant body-machine piece (gene); that the cause for dis-ease is reducible to some physical component or entity (e.g. germs or genes).
I think it's time to expose the incorrect and untenable assumptions upon which all reductionist models are based.
I'll be working to present a paper at our next? SMN meeting on this very subject.
Steaphen Pirie,
Sydney Coordinator.
