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Selves and Consciousness - Chapter 1

What is consciousness? That’s a question that has vexed me since high school, and has only become more intriguing and perplexing after doing philosophy in college. In some sense ‘consciousness’ is a word that, on closer examination, is hard to define, and a concept that is hard to grasp - much like love or knowledge. But we sort of understand what it means - to be conscious is to experience conscious thoughts. Again I’ve merely shifted the definition problem here - after all what are conscious thoughts? It’s the sort of thing you have when you imagine a cow, look for a taxi, or listen to and appreciate music. But where do they arise, how do they arise, and who or what it is that ‘experiences’ these thoughts? These are the difficult questions. These are the problems of consciousness. 

In his book, consciousness explained, philosopher Daniel Dennett asks the reader: in as much detail as possible, imagine a purple cow. Imagine a purple cow in detail, and then answer the following questions: Was the cow facing left or right or head on? Was she chewing a cud? Was the udder visible to you? Was she relatively pale purple or deep purple? If you imagined the purple cow with seriousness, you could probably answer these questions.

Now imagine a yellow cow in detail. Now consider this question: What is the difference between imagining a purple cow and imagining a yellow cow? The answer is obvious: the first imagined cow is purple and the second imagined cow is yellow. But what is being rendered with those colors, exactly? Afterall, the thing that is being rendered purple or yellow - the cow, or its image  - is not inside your brain, because if I peer inside your brain all I’d see is just a mass of gray matter. So this thing that is being rendered with a color, and the color itself – they don’t, in an important sense, exist in your brain. Now, of course, one day we might find a correlation between activity in your brain and the images you imagine - we could probably look at a brain scan and tell whether you imagined a purple cow or a yellow cow. Yet, it would be based on a sort of inductive inference - why a certain neural activity should render purple (and again, where is this rendering taking place) and why some other should render yellow? The causal mechanism is difficult to establish. So in an important sense, conscious thoughts exist in a separate space from mere matter, or the brain - they exist in the realm of the mind. And the fact that these mental objects cannot be ‘physically found’ in the brain leads some to conclude that the mind is separate from the brain; aka that consciousness is not identical with brain processes or wholly a part of the brain.

With conscious experience comes the conscious experiencer, since the assumption is that an experience requires an experiencer. Aka, one might assume that there exists a self that experiences these mental sensations. One might even argue that this self exists as a non-material substance. The most famous argument for the existence of this sort of self (called the Cartesian self) in western philosophy is by Descartes, who reasons in his Meditations on first philosophy:

1. I can doubt that the body exists

2. But I cannot doubt that I exist, for through my doubting and thinking, it is evident that there exists a doubter. (Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore I exist. In other words, there cannot be thoughts without a thinker, and thus by virtue of thinking itself, there exists a thinker).

Furthermore:

3. I can conceive of my existence without a body.

4. I cannot conceive of my existence without thoughts, for if I cease to think, I would not exist.

5. Thus, I am a thinking thing i.e. the essential property or nature of my self is as a thinking thing. The essential property of the self is ‘thinking’, aka as mental property or activity. [Note: The word essence or essential property of a thing is the property that a thing has by virtue of which it is that thing, and without which it ceases to be that thing. Aka, it is the defining property of that thing].

6. Thus the self is a mental substance. 

7. Since mental things are distinct from physical things, the self is not a part of the body i.e. the self is not a part of the brain but separate from it) 

Furthermore, it is this conscious self that can do such things as appreciating good food, intuiting moral values, feeling love and attraction. And since only conscious selves can have preferences, only conscious selves are true moral agents. 

This immaterial self is called a soul. Descartes wasn’t the only one to propound an immaterial soul theory for selves and consciousness. Almost 2000 years before Descartes, the ancient Vedic schools construed the idea of a unified singular self that takes different forms in the world - like flames rising from a single firepit. This ultimate self, or Brahman, took different forms or persons (Atman), and found itself trapped in a world of bodies and material substances that it itself had created. To escape this illusory world, the Hindus said, required one to embark in pure and ascetic practices, to purify oneself and to understand the oneness of different Atmans.  

Both the Cartesian self and the Vedic soul theory faced immense challenges from philosophers and religious schools of their times. Objections were raised and the soul theory was challenged by philosophers such as the Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, Hume, Ryle, and Wittgenstein, as well as Buddhist figures such as the Buddha, Nagarjuna, and Vaibhasika.

Elizabeth, corresponding with Descartes, asks what it is that allows a non-material substance such as the soul to interact with matter, such as the brain or body. The more contemporary way  of framing her objection is thus:

1. An immaterial object causing physical changes or reactions would involve entities that mediate interaction between the non-physical and the physical.

2. Since any description of such physical causes is fully explainable under the laws of physics, such posited entities would add extra ‘laws’ that aren’t encompassed by the current laws of physics.

3. This seems unlikely to be the case since the law of physics are well-tested and seem to accurately describe natural phenomena. Plus, since mechanistic actions seem to be fully described within physics, the idea of an agentic soul seems to be an extra theoretical posit that does not add anything new to descriptions of the world and thus seems unnecessary. By the principle of lightness, one ought to discard a belief in such unnecessary entities.

From a phenomenological point of view, Hume, in his observations, notes that whenever he tries to find within himself this idea of a ‘self’, he only finds various sensations like heat and cold and lines and colors. All perceptions, including perceptions of a ‘self’ seem to reduce to these basic sensations on closer examination.

The buddhists, in a similar vein, describe that in examining one’s being, one only finds constantly changing events and entities. The body, volition, affections, perceptions, awareness — they all seem to constantly change. There does not seem to be any substance or entity that remains the same — whatever one calls the ‘self’ is a constantly changing bundle of events and experiences. 

For example, when one thinks or says, “I think, therefore I am” that itself seems to be a momentary event or perception. At another moment, when one is say, looking at a flower, or touching a table, and one is not thinking about oneself, then in that moment there is the experience of flower, or table — there is nothing further to experience than that. Aka, there does not need to be an experiencer for experiences to be. Just as a physicalist might claim that the world is completely explained by a series of mechanistic chain of causes and conditioning, the buddhists claim that the world is completely explained by a chain of physical and non-physical event-experiences causing and conditioning one after another.

If what is referred to by this ‘self’ is nothing but this chain of experiences or events following each other, then in what sense do we use words like ‘I’ or ‘self’ or ‘person’ to refer to entities. The buddhists claim that this ‘I’ stands as an abbreviation to refer to a bundle of experiences and entities, and that this serves a normative purpose. For example, when one refers to an object, such as say, a ‘dog’ that allows one to refer to a particular collection of bones and flesh and fur that is able to affect other entities in the world. It is merely a designator used to conveniently refer to a collection of entities.

Similar views were propounded by Ryle in his analysis of Descartes’ argument and the belief in the existence of a non-material substantial self. Ryle gives an example of a man who, in observing a collection of entities labeled ‘The department of Mathematics’, “The department of philosophy’, “The department of physics”, asks “I saw all these departments, but I did not see this famous entity they call ‘The University of Oxford”. Surely then this University of Oxford must be a separate building distinct from them. Or in another example, where a man observes a group of football players and cheerleaders and football fans, and asks “I see these players, and their excitement, and their passionate fans — but I cannot find this thing that they call ‘Team Spirit’. Ryle claims that this is the sort of error that Descartes makes in his analysis of the self. In saying this, Ryle is not claiming that the self does not exist, but rather that Descartes cannot claim that mental substances or a soul as a non-material substance exists. Descartes makes a category error, in claiming that the self must be ‘substance’ distinct from the body simply because he is unable to view or describe it in his observation of bodily things and the properties they exhibit. In Ryle’s view, this self is a different logical type, in the same way that ‘The university of Oxford’ is a different logical type - existentially dependent on but not reducible to the buildings that constitute it.

Yet, non-substantial self views have the problem of explaining what ‘bundles’ experiences together, and why there seems to be a ‘continuity’ of experience from one moment to another. What explains the observation that we experience going to sleep yesterday and then find a continuity of experiences the next day from one moment to another — waking up, drinking coffee, growing up, etc. If the world is simply composed of perceptions, what explains the regularity and unity of perceptual experiences?

Hume, for his part deals with the ‘bundle’ problem by claiming that he does not really have a good answer as of yet. His analysis of causation - aka why certain facts of experience precede one another - leads him to conclude that it is habit that inclines one to believe that a certain event succeeds another. But, in his analysis, there is no justification for the belief that certain events ought to succeed another. Just because you went to sleep the day before and woke up experiencing waking up in the same bed, there is no guarantee that events will similarly succeed one another in the same way the next day. In the space of logical possibility, you could go to bed and wake up as a giraffee in the Savannah the very next day. But why this does not happen, Hume does not have a good answer.

The buddhists address this problem by using the idea of grasping. In an ultimate sense, there is no continuity of self. The cluster of experiences at the time that you went to bed the day before is distinct from the cluster of experiences at the time that you wake up and make coffee, etc. This ‘feeling’ that you were the same you that experienced going to bed the day before and are the same ‘you’ now is an illusion created by the tendency of ‘clinging’ to objects of experiences. All there is, is a series of events - no further facts can be stated. On this view, it appears as if a sufficiently trained buddhist practitioner who can view reality as it is and detach from past experiences and conditions, can in a literal sense, experience waking up as a giraffee the next day.

The buddhist idea, seems to leave a lot “It is possible for this to be the case, but you need to practice a lot to see this for yourself”, which as a matter of philosophical discourse seems unsatisfactory. Furthermore, this additional theoretical posit of ‘clinging’ is, in my view, no more further abstracted away from observed facts as from the idea of a ‘self’ itself is, while explaining even less about observed facts of experience. Well trained buddhists will probably deny this, claiming that things like ‘volition’ or ‘clinging’ is observed more distinctly than whatever this thing called the ‘self’ is. In any case, positing this might just be a soteriological goal within buddhist religion. However, it must also be noted that ideas of goal driven behavior and self-preservation, might accord better with ideas in modern science and technology, than the idea of self itself — and thus might stand as more basic theoretical posits that explain observed facts about the naturalistic world. However, again, this buddhist idea of clinging seems to be distinct than the sorts of ‘self-preservation’ or goal driven behavior in animals or AI as posited by modern science, which can be explained completely in physicalistic terms...