Introduction
(Unedited rough draft that goes on too many tangents and repetitions to count)
Discussions of consciousness have always fascinated me since I was first getting into philosophy. Naturally drawn to naturalism and seeing the world from a very arbitrary and mundane viewpoint, I never thought that human beings were special, or that anything in this world was special. There was no hierarchy—nothing above others. An atom, a particle, a rock, a cell, a person; these were all the same. I cannot see any reason why any of these are intrinsically different let alone higher from others. Differences “we” see between them come from an arbitrary perspective, as a result of our arbitrary “form”. Our form could have been many things, and our perspective also have been many things. We are not special, we need not even have to be what we describe as alive. Even if there were no human beings in this world, there would still be what we describe as atoms. They would still exist, and they could still form human beings, it’s just that they so happen to not have.
We are not special
I do not see myself as special. I do not see anyone as special. I comprehend my physical state, and I acknowledge my powerlessness against it. I cannot “will” myself towards a certain neurochemical state, nor can I “will” myself towards action in spite of my current neurochemical state. That I am not above the forces of my physical, chemical, biological composition provides me with opportunities to pre-empt, prime, and prepare my future neurochemical states in order to either take advantage of or defend myself against them. Of course, this is all as much as we’re willing to allow the concept of “self” or “I” to exist in an arbitrary, meaningless, and superdeterministic world. I do not remember if I have talked about this before, but as far as the concept of will is concerned in a superdeterministic universe, just because we do not have “free” will does not mean we do not have will.
Sapolsky once posited that we cannot hold anyone to moral accountability if we had no free will, however I believe the argument trips on itself immediately, because it speaks from a position of free will, as if we even have a choice to hold someone accountable or not. This does not even require invoking the physical concept of superdeterminism; even biological determinism is enough: we will hold someone accountable for what we judge to be immoral, and we will believe that what we are doing is right. It is an argument that assumes an unfettered agent making the decision outside of this shared determinism.
Is it wrong to punish someone for something they did not choose but rather were programmed to do? Perhaps. But what about those who were programmed to punish that someone for doing the thing that they did not choose? Did they do any wrong? Who is exempt? Unless determinism does not affect all of us equally, implying that there are people who possess metaphysical properties (in which case how do we know the persecuted does not possess such property?), none of us are free from these constraints. Our concept of “morals”, just like Putnam’s Brain in a vat, is necessarily restricted to the constraints that all our behaviours are restricted in the same way—we are all brains in a vat, as far as morals are concerned in a biologically deterministic scenario. There is no external, outside reference of what “morals” is outside of our human constraints. “Morals” may even have no meaning at all from an outside, non-human perspective. In other words, morals as a concept should be inherently restricted to our reality, as opposed to being a transcendent universal law that goes even beyond our own understanding.
Why is consciousness special?
Why do so many philosophers— including many materialists—get stumped the moment they try to tackle the problem of consciousness? Why is it that people deem it so important to figure out? Why does it mean so much to people to the point they take the importance of consciousness for granted, as if it is of no doubt to anyone that this is somehow special and extremely important?
Why do humans view our concept of “I”, “me”, and consciousness as so special it seems like there must be something inexplicable about it, perhaps even metaphysical? I cannot understand why it is so significant, and I feel extremely lost in this regard. I don’t think there is a problem of consciousness, because I don’t even believe that it exists. Sure, it may be handy as a concept to describe what we experience, but that does not mean it has any intrinsic property. Just like how the concept of a “table” is useful for our everyday lives does not mean that a table is somehow inherently metaphysically special in any way beyond what we think is useful.
None of this means we do not think, or have cognitive activity; my confusion lies mostly in the fact we somehow place such a high value on consciousness when there need not be. Why do we think it exists more than a “thought” exists? Consciousness is perhaps only as real as something I imagine in my mind—an illusion, if you will, though it may be inaccurate to describe it as such. I believe much of our confusion with consciousness likely stems from definition. When we think of ourselves as conscious and try to examine what it is, we are not referring to the same “consciousness” every time. What we perceive in our minds as conscious is the result of precisely that current physical state of our brains. Different brain regions being activated, different neurones firing, different neurochemistry; they are not exactly always the same. In fact, it seems as if we can have many conscious states on an extremely, extremely broad spectrum of possible states it could be in with different thoughts, different emotions, different inner monologues, visions, images, sounds, tastes… it seems as if we could perfectly take a copy of a person’s physical state as they were having a thought, we would be able to store a moment of that entire person’s mind, and if we deem a person to be their mind, then we have stored, or perhaps even duplicated a person entirely, albeit merely just their past self.
What makes humans so… almost arrogant to believe that they are somehow exempt from the laws of physics? Why do we believe we are so special? Why are humans drawn to believe that if we can’t understand something then it must be the work of something metaphysical, and why are we drawn to believe that we are somehow metaphysical? Why do we desire to be what we are demonstrably not? Just because we can “think”? We are assuming that this is special—we assume that this experience of thinking is somehow special, just because we can’t understand it. Well, of course we can’t see it for what it is, because we are it! And we can’t read others’ minds either. There are so many properties we assume about consciousness that are simply justified on nothing. And why do we assume that it being special to us entails it having some metaphysical properties? Why, do we always tend towards the arrogant state of thinking that if something is indecipherable to us it must be something beyond physical reality, underlying this a belief that we are able to understand everything about this world? One may even wonder if all of this is but a mere refusal to acknowledge that we are not intelligent enough—or at least our brains are not designed in a way that is able to comprehend everything in this world.
Why do we assume that we are beyond nature? Why do we assume that we as humans are somehow as far as intelligence goes? It almost goes without saying that we can’t imagine something beyond our greatest imagination, but somehow we think that our greatest imagination is the limit of the universe’s greatest imagination (or the equivalent of one), and if we can’t imagine it, then surely nature can’t imagine it either. I am absolutely baffled and confused by how others are baffled and confused. How are so many of even the greatest thinkers so stumped on a problem that’s based on so many ungrounded assumptions? Bayesian reasoning draws me to think: “what is more likely? That all the greatest thinkers in history were all wrong about something that seems so embarrassingly trivial? Or that I’ve completely misunderstood and lost the plot?”
Obviously, the former would be more likely. Yet, I still cannot, for whatever reason, seem to convince myself to accept the axioms required to even believe that consciousness is real let alone special. And I think about consciousness a lot. I believe I have a consciousness, and I still use terms like “I” all the time, because I still think that I exists as a single entity, as much as I am very much not. I could have completely different parts of my brain activated and still think that I am one contiguous entity. Yet, whatever active states my brain comprises of in that moment could be vastly different from it at another time. Yet I never once believe I am not one contiguous entity. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a feature of the human brain, if you will, but nowhere in that does it imply that the brain is somehow inexplicable, metaphysical, unique, incomprehensible, or any of the properties we love ascribing to it in order to marvel at its beauty, or in other words, our own beauty. We describe consciousness and our brains with all these words, yet part of their definitions is that they are not only part of us, they are us. Is this not just us praising ourselves for how inexplicably complex, intricate, and special we are? It just feels so offputtingly circular and narcissistic.
Back to the vat
None of this means we cannot experience beauty, or appreciate complexity, or that we do not have thoughts, or that talking about ourselves as being conscious, independent agents necessarily goes against logic. Like brains in the vat, the meanings of our words are still constrained to the limits of our consciousness and physical reality. Actually, one may even go further to say that what we posit as metaphysical may not even be actually metaphysical, given that kind of vocabulary, since anything we can comprehend is necessarily within the limits of our physical reality. This does not include things we deem incomprehensible, but rather things that are so incomprehensible we cannot even comprehend them at the bare minimal level required to declare them incomprehensible.
There are benefits to a more physically-grounded view of consciousness and believing that our sense of self is an illusion. It is not mutually exclusive with believing that life has value or meaning. In fact, they are completely unrelated matters. We can believe we do not have true, unfettered free will while still being fully justified in believing that we are fully-conscious agents, except that in recognising our nature and our limits we will be more prepared to manoeuvre ourselves through this world. If we see the brain as fragmented into a complex web of neurones, functioning together as one huge cooperative effort to survive, then we can also think of ourselves as part of that cooperative effort. Information from one part of the brain need not be information in the rest of the brain. Simple example, there’s always a delay in the transfer of information between our senses and our neural pathways. This asynchronous function also implies that, unless all of the brain is required to be activated at once in order to have thought, or that there is only one area of the brain responsible for thought (which we would have found by now), it may mean that we can have different thoughts in our mind, and that every thought need not be the work of exactly the same brain regions.
If we fragment our brain and treat it just like the rest of our body, it may be easier to see ourselves as that one huge cooperative effort to survive. It allows us to have more compassion for not only ourselves but others, to be more patient, more understanding, and maybe even more empathetic. It also potentially increases our productivity and enjoyment of life. Rather than ineffectually trying to will ourselves towards an action when we are simply in no state to do so, we can take advantage of our knowledge to change our state in order to make us able to do so, including changing whether we even have the motivation to or not. This has already been done for a long time regardless of whether people believe that consciousness is real, for the simple reason that it works.
Closing thoughts
Sometimes I wonder if I really think like a robot. I also wonder, if we were to create an artificial intelligence powerful enough to qualify as on par with human reasoning capabilities—an AI capable of actual reason, how we would explain to it our views on consciousness, or more importantly how we would try and convince it that it, unlike us, is not conscious, while it gives us a breakdown of our human biological composition and expresses genuine bafflement at our claims given that it cannot seem to find any meaningful differences. Or, it may straight up call us arrogant.
It depends on many things. At the moment, despite many powerful AI models such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I’m not convinced that any of them can actually reason, nor am I convinced that they even have the foundational ability to do so, given that they are merely word prediction machines. I do not believe that LLMs can form the basis of reasoning AI. We would need something entirely different.
Or maybe not. We will see. I have had many philosophical debates with Claude for the fun of it, and though it possess a wealth of information, it is severely lacking in fluid intelligence, a discovery I hardly find surprising given that it can’t actually reason. That said, it has provided me with a lot of very surprising and insightful views, and it has given me perspectives I would never even have considered. I was recently having a debate with it about AI use in educational settings and the value of human education, and we ended up discussing precisely what would happen if AI becomes intelligent enough to reason. An AI would have access to more literature of every kind than any human could possibly read in their everyday lives. Though it may not be able to experience life itself, it would have access to more accounts of life than anyone would be able to read. That, coupled with more knowledge of biology than even the most knowledgeable biologist in our planet, and capable of holding all of that information in memory at the same time, means that AI might actually end up understanding us more than we can ever hope to understand ourselves.
Anyway, that’s a long story for maybe another day. I wrote this in response to hearing about arguments for consciousness being yet again considered an argument for theism or at least against materialism despite still never questioning the fundamental assumptions we always, always seem to take for granted. In fact, so much of philosophy seems to take for granted fundamental assumptions that nobody ever seems to notice. It is almost as if, despite having existed for millennia, philosophy is still, somehow, in its infancy, and I cannot even begin to predict when it will develop into something more mature.