The Seemingly Unexplainable

In this video, Daniel Dennett discusses the necessity of 'deflating' consciousness in order to make it eligible for scientific explanation. By deflating, he means removing the facets of our perception whereby consciousness is left untouchable to the rational enquirer, too amazing, too vast, too mystical to comprehend.

It is certainly true that many people would be thoroughly perturbed by the idea that their entire conscious existence is reductable. Such a realisation would no doubt push many to the brink of depression or dejection. They don't want to know that everything they understand to be true about existence could be seen as the subjective experience of the brain in its current phase within the evolutionary process, that everything they have ever understood or been able to understand, or loved or hated, or admired or feared is subject to hypothesis, experimentation and scientific explanation.

Many people would claim that so much of what they are or what they believe in is unexplainable, unreductable. This quickly leads to the claim that such things are sacred, and should not be given to examination. The role of language plays a key part in this defence... if it can not be expressed in language then it is beyond explanation, beyond enquiry, and therefore scared or holy. God, if you like, is beyond language so God must be immune to rational enquiry.

Gerald Edelman takes this a stage further and describes the emergence of language as the tipping point where the primate transcended 'primary consciousness' (i.e. the identification of a banana as food) and began to explore 'higher-order' consciousness (i.e. the identification of a banana as food coupled with the existential lament that one must climb the tree to get the banana if one is to survive, or indeed the belief that an intelligent designer must have created the tree on which the banana grows). He writes:

"The emergence of the self leads to a refinement of phenomenological experience, tying feelings to thoughts, to culture, and to beliefs. It liberates the imagination and opens thought to the vast domains of metaphor."

Therefore language as a means of contextualising the self leaves room for interpretation of conscious process as amazing, mystical, transcendent. "Surely there must be more! Surely we can just be physical, we are spiritual beings!"

Just remember the hackneyed cliche that, before Galileo, people wholeheartedly believed the Sun circled the Earth. It took scientific examination to reveal this widespread conviction to be false. Just because consciousness seems to be too vast to comprehend now, we may have to start readjusting our deeply ingrained faith in the fact that some things simply can't be explained.

The Problem Of Thought

One of the hardest tasks for researchers of consciousness, aside from providing a suitable definitive explanation for the term itself, is to try and explain how it might be constructed. Philosophers of mind have generally had a very difficult time in categorising the component parts of consciousness and have struggled for centuries to agree on even the kind of language that should be used. We might talk about emotions, feelings and thoughts but who could possibly say where one ends and the next begins? Thinkers from Plato onwards have grappled with the implications of qualia but have never managed to fully tie this expression down.

The problem is that consciousness is intangible and invisible and we are beings who rely our senses and memories to explain configurations of the matter around us whereby we can settle on a common, albeit subjective, understanding. You can not imagine a thought... although trying to do so depends entirely on thought itself; but you can think about other things. Not being able to imagine or visualise thoughts as distinct units of the mental process means that we can not visualise how they might link and merge to form part of the spectrum of consciousness; at least not in the same way that we can visualise how bricks can be combined in certain configurations to construct buildings.

Added to this is the problem that it quickly becomes redundant even trying to understand mental events as distinct linear phenomena given that we can all attest to having had several things on our minds at any given time, not to mention the constant onslaught of sensory and nervous information and even the subconscious processes that are continually contributing to the ever changing mesh of experience we call the self.

Do you look at a river and see individual droplets of water? Could you decipher how each one of these droplets is influencing the movement of those around it? No, but that doesn't mean that any section of that body of water couldn't be broken down to its component parts and measured.

Even if thoughts could be looked at as unique pieces or blocks, are they entirely individual? We might often think of the same thing at different times but does that mean that we are experiencing the same thought again?

Surely a truly deterministic theory would have to allow for the fact that a mental event that seems to have been repeated or experienced before is actually unique in that it comes at the end of a chain of events concerning bother matter and consciousness. You might think of an object one day, and that thought will be coloured by feeling, emotion, recall and sensory input but thinking of that same object two days later will very possibly result in an entirely different experience given that the conditions will have changed. Thus, the same thought can never be thought of twice.

It might take the kind of systematic process of analysis that only a supercomputer could apply before we are able to discuss this subject in a less ambiguous and speculative way. The kinds of causal chains, interlinked events and variable looping configurations we would like to quantify are beyond our current understanding of quantum and chaotic engineering. The problems of decoding consciousness seem to echo those that still frustrate scientists looking at finding a harmonic resolution in the macro and micro aspects of the physical universe. It seems as if we are not yet intelligent enough to understand our own intelligence.

However, as technological progress accelerates, so too do our chances of finally facilitating the framework of tools and conditions needed to turn theory into fact on one of the greatest enigmas of existence... the conscious self.