Soul Dust

The Magic of Consciousness

Nicholas Humphrey

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400838073
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Mente y cuerpo en filosofía

A radically new view of the nature and purpose of consciousness How is consciousness possible? What biological purpose does it serve? And why do we value it so highly? In Soul Dust, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey, a leading figure in consciousness research, proposes a startling new theory. Consciousness, he argues, is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the "soul niche."Tightly argued, intellectually gripping, and a joy to read, Soul Dust provides answers to the deepest questions. It shows how the problem of consciousness merges with questions that obsess us all—how life should be lived and the fear of death. Resting firmly on neuroscience and evolutionary theory, and drawing a wealth of insights from philosophy and literature, Soul Dust is an uncompromising yet life-affirming work—one that never loses sight of the majesty and wonder of consciousness.

PART ONE

2 Being “Like Something”

So we want a theory of what being conscious is like and how this could result from the activity of nerve cells in the brain. If only it did not make us feel so queasy just to think about it! Four hundred years ago René Descartes described his own plight as a human mind trying to think about the nature of its own experience: “It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top.”¹

We need something to help us get our bearings. Some clever new idea. Yet where to look for it? If I say I want to start with the language people use, you may be disappointed. Surely, you may think, philosophers in the last century pretty well exhausted that approach without solving any important scientific problems. Maybe it is true that Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Philosophical Investigations, helped clear the air around consciousness by showing how the ways people talk about mental states can lead them astray, creating conundrums and mysteries that do not really exist. But did not Wittgenstein’s analysis prove signally unhelpful to understanding what does exist?

Yes, it did. However, that was then. And the zeitgeist of consciousness studies is very different fifty years later. The identification of the problem of qualia as the “hard problem” has changed what questions are worth asking.² When the price of gold goes up, it can be worth reopening seams that were supposedly mined out long ago.

“It is like something.” I do not know when people—at least those writing in English—first started to use this phrase to refer to the essence of being conscious. But the use was already well established when Tom Nagel, in 1974, wrote his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” In that essay Nagel simply asserted (rather as I did in the previous chapter) that being like something is the defining property of consciousness: “Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”³ He took it for granted that his readers would understand what he was referring to. And so it seems they did. The fact that this way of talking has subsequently become widespread in both philosophical and popular writing suggests that it must somehow sit peculiarly well with people’s first-person understanding of what being conscious means.

Why ever should this be? Since words gain their meaning from how they are used across the language, presumably the use of “it is like something” in relation to consciousness must have something in common with its use in other contexts. So, can we look to ordinary English for a clue?

Now, in pretty much every other situation, when we say “X is like Y” (for example, “This wine is like a Beaujolais”), what we mean is that in our view X resembles Y or X shares some salient property with Y. However, we mean something rather more than this too. Note that we would never say “X is like Y” when we know that X actually is Y. So when we say “X is like Y,” we mean X shares some particular property with Y, but—so far as we know at this time—it does not share all its other properties. True, sometimes we may want to imply that since it shares at least this particular property, X could share all of its other properties with Y. But there has to be at the least some uncertainty about it. It has to be unconfirmed whether X is Y in fact. “This wine is like a Beaujolais, it could even be a Beaujolais, though I’m not sure it is not actually a Chianti.”

Suppose, then, that when we say “it is like something for someone to experience a sensation,” we mean the subject is literally likening his sensation to something in just this sense. What might this tell us about consciousness?

I proposed already in the previous chapter that for someone to be conscious of having a sensation must involve his representing the object of experience as something with properties of a special and peculiar kind. But now this would be taking matters considerably further. It would be suggesting that for someone to be conscious of having the sensation involves his representing the object of experience as if it is something that it may not be— something he has certainly not been able to confirm it is.

Let us suppose the someone in question is you.⁴ Then, when you say “it is like something for me to see red,” for example, you would be implying that, strictly speaking, your sensation is a hypothetical entity. Indeed, if we were to follow this line, I would go beyond this: I think you would be implying that the sensation is intrinsically hypothetical, for the phenomenology suggests that the as-if, unconfirmed quality of the representation is not just a temporary or remediable condition. When you say it is like something to see red, you are not allowing that soon enough you may discover the truth about whether the sensation actually is this something. You would never expect to say: “I thought the red sensation merely resembled this, but then I found out it actually was this.”

No. Sensations, it would seem, are always as-if. So, in this regard, the being-like-something of sensations is different from the being-like-something of the wine. With the wine, if you say “it is like a Beaujolais,” you are assuming there is a discoverable fact of the matter as to whether it actually is a Beaujolais or a Chianti. With sensations, however, if you say “it is like something for me to see red,” you are assuming no such thing: whatever the fact of the matter about the red sensation, it is not discoverable by you as the subject—nothing could help you to decide once and for all whether what it is like is what it is.

But this is remarkable. What can be going on, such that it would make sense to say of X that it resembles Y, even though you could never in principle have the evidence to alter your opinion about whether X actually is Y?

There is only one set of circumstances I can think of where this might be appropriate: it would be when you recognize that Y does not or could not exist as an entity belonging to the ordinary world where you can test things, but might exist in another world with different rules to which you have no direct access—indeed, where X is evidence of there being such another world.

Imagine, by analogy, that you are facing a wall on which the shadows of solid objects passing behind you are being cast by the light of a blazing fire some distance farther back. What do these shadows look like to you? “This shadow is like a cart.” “This one is like a bird.” But you cannot confirm that the objects are what their shadows resemble because you cannot turn around and enter directly into their three-dimensional world.

I have taken you now—you may be as surprised as I am—to Plato’s famous story of the cave. In The Republic Plato uses this analogy to explain how there might exist a world of transcendental entities—“pure forms” or “substances”—of which human beings have only indirect and partial knowledge. I did not expect our discussion to lead so soon to Plato’s metaphysics. But now that it has, let me cite a revealing remark by the painter Bridget Riley. Writing about visual sensations, she says: “For all of us, colour is experienced as something—that is to say, we always see it in the guise of a substance.”⁵ Does her choice of that word, “substance,” suggest she believes that we do indeed liken sensation to something belonging to a higher level of reality? The phenomenal is transcendental? Is that what we imply by using the language of “it’s like”?

Well, maybe, kind of. I hope all will become clearer in due course. But now let us explore this idea further, without asking for too much clarity at the beginning. Suppose it were so; what kind of transcendental/phenomenal world might we be talking about? With the analogy of the cave leading us on, let me suggest, to start with, that this would have to be a world that requires at least one novel extra dimension to describe it (whether a physical or a conceptual dimension, we will see). And yet what would be the status of such a world? Would it have to exist for real?

I am sure that for most people “consciousness realism” is irresistible. Sensations undoubtedly exist, and sensations are like entities in the phenomenal world. So presumably the phenomenal world must have a substantive existence. But even though this may be how most laypeople see it, it is another question entirely whether theoreticians should see it this way too. Since things in this other world apparently have such exotic properties, and since their existence cannot be independently confirmed, surely we ought to consider seriously the possibility that it is some kind of make-believe—not real at all but an illusion. That is, sensation might be merely appearing, as Riley so well put it, in the guise of a substance.

Yet this would point to further remarkable goings-on. If the phenomenal properties of sensation are an illusion, this can hardly be just a stroke of good luck. Conscious experience is altogether too impressive—even too perfect—to have been thrown together by chance. There would obviously have had to be some method behind it. In short, the evidence that leads you to believe in the existence of phenomenal entities would have had to be planted. We would be dealing, as it were, with a coup de théâtre.

Let us pause for breath and collect these thoughts. From examining the phrase “it is like something to be conscious,” we have now raised an extraordinary possibility, or rather two. First, from the subject’s point of view, consciousness appears to be a gateway to a transcendental world of as-if entities. Second, from the point of view of theory, consciousness is the product of some kind of illusion chamber, a charade.

Is this the clever new idea we need? Consciousness as a Platonic shadow play performed in an internal theater, to impress the soul! It would certainly take us into interesting new territory. It might even explain why the hard problem sometimes seems not just intractable but so gloriously intractable.

The philosopher Natika Newton has remarked, “Phenomenal consciousness itself is sui generis. Nothing else is like it in any way at all.”⁶ The Koran says of Allah, “[Allah is] the originator of the heavens and the earth . . . [there is] nothing like a likeness of Him.”⁷ When the going gets mysterious, mysteries get going. Suddenly the quasi-magical properties of qualia would no longer pose such a problem.⁸ Magic is just what is to be expected in a magic show.

But that is for later. I would say the immediate reason to be pleased with this idea as the basis for a scientific theory of consciousness is that it allows us to start thinking about the brain basis of it all. If sensations were truly to have out-of-this-world properties, there is no question that the search for a theory would be in trouble. However, it is an entirely different story if sensations merely have as-if out-of-this-world properties.

Let us exchange Plato’s cave for a more humdrum analogy. I want to return to the model that you may have realized I have had in mind since early on: the “real impossible triangle” with which I opened the previous chapter. It is becoming clearer where to steer the line of thought.

Suppose, once more, you were to be confronted by the wooden object, the Gregundrum, as shown next in figure 3. Now, however, for the sake of argument, I want to place you squarely in the special position of Observer A in this diagram, the one position from which it appears that the top arms of the triangle are coincident so that you see the whole thing a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Invitation
• Prelude
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Envoi
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index