Theguardian.com-Why Cant the Worlds Greatest Minds Solve the Mystery of Consciousness

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theguardian.com

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousne

Oliver

Burkeman

Wednesday 21 January 2015

06.00 GMT

Why cant the worlds greatest minds solve the mystery of

consciousness?

One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmersgot up to give a

talk on consciousness, by which he meant the feeling of being inside your head, looking out or, to use the kind of

language that might give a neuroscientist an aneurysm, of having a soul. Though he didnt realise it at the time, the

young Australian academic was about to ignite a war between philosophers and scientists, by drawing attention to a

central mystery of human life perhaps thecentral mystery of human life and revealing how embarrassingly far

they were from solving it.

The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona for what would later go down as a landmark conference on the

subject knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new

agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet thefirst two talks that day, before Chalmerss, hadnt proved thrilling. Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and

boring I had no idea what anyone was talking about, recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible

for the event. As the organiser, Im looking around, and people are falling asleep, or getting restless. He grew

worried. But then the third talk, right before the coffee break that was Dave. With his long, straggly hair and

fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like hed got lost en route to a Metallica concert. He

comes on stage, hair down to his butt, hes prancing around like Mick Jagger, Hameroff said. But then he speaks.

And thats when everyone wakes up.

The audio long read Listen to an audio version of Oliver Burkeman's article

on the mystery of consciousness - Podcast

Philosophers and scientists have been at war for decades over the question of what makes human beings more tha

complex robots

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The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn,

store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your nam

spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all easy problems, in the scheme of things: given enough

time and money, experts would figure them out. There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, Chalmers

said. It was a puzzle so bewildering that, in the months after his talk, people started dignifying it with capital letters

the Hard Problem of Consciousness and its this: why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel

like anything from the inside? Why arent we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to

noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? And how does the brain manage it? How

could the 1.4kg lump of moist, pinkish-beige tissue inside your skull give rise to something as mysterious as theexperience ofbeingthat pinkish-beige lump, and the body to which it is attached?

What jolted Chalmerss audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. At the coffee break, I went

around like a playwright on opening night, eavesdropping, Hameroff said. And everyone was like: Oh! The Hard

Problem! The Hard Problem! Thats why were here! Philosophers had pondered the so-called mind-body problem

for centuries. But Chalmerss particular manner of reviving it reached outside philosophy and galvanised everyone.

defined the field. It made us ask: what the hell is this that were dealing with here?

Two decades later, we know an astonishing amount about the brain: you cant follow the news for a week without

encountering at least one more tale about scientists discovering the brain region associated with gambling, or

laziness, or love at first sight, or regret and thats only the research that makes the headlines. Meanwhile, the fieldartificial intelligence which focuses on recreating the abilities of the human brain, rather than on what it feels like to

be one has advanced stupendously. But like an obnoxious relative who invites himself to stay for a week and then

wont leave, the Hard Problem remains. When I stubbed my toe on the leg of the dining table this morning, as any

student of the brain could tell you, nerve fibres called C-fibres shot a message to my spinal cord, sending

neurotransmitters to the part of my brain called the thalamus, which activated (among other things) my limbic system

Fine. But how come all that was accompanied by an agonising flash of pain? And what is pain, anyway?

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Questions like these, which straddle the border between science and philosophy, make some experts openly angry.

They have caused others to argue that conscious sensations, such as pain, dont really exist, no matter what I felt a

hopped in anguish around the kitchen; or, alternatively, that plants and trees must also be conscious. The Hard

Problem has prompted arguments in serious journals about what is going on in the mind of a zombie, or to quote

the title of a famous 1974 paper by the philosopher Thomas Nagel the question What is it like to be a bat? Some

argue that the problem marks the boundary not just of what we currently know, but of what science could ever expla

On the other hand, in recent years, a handful of neuroscientists have come to believe that it may finally be about to

solved but only if we are willing to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might

soon become conscious, too.
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Next week, the conundrum will move further into public awareness with the opening of Tom Stoppards new play, Th

Hard Problem, at the National Theatre the first play Stoppard has written for the National since 2006, and the last

that the theatres head, Nicholas Hytner, will direct before leaving his post in March. The 77-year-old playwright has

revealed little about the plays contents, except that it concerns the question of what consciousness is and why it

exists, considered from the perspective of a young researcher played by Olivia Vinall. Speaking to the Daily Mail,

Stoppard also clarified a potential misinterpretation of the title. Its not about erectile dysfunction, he said.

Stoppards work has long focused on grand, existential themes, so the subject is fitting: when conversation turns to

the Hard Problem, even the most stubborn rationalists lapse quickly into musings on the meaning of life. Christof

Koch, the chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and a key player in the Obama administration

multibillion-dollar initiative to map the human brain, is about as credible as neuroscientists get. But, he told me in

December: I think the earliest desire that drove me to study consciousness was that I wanted, secretly, to show

myself that it couldnt be explained scientifically. I was raised Roman Catholic, and I wanted to find a place where I

could say: OK, here, God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people. Koch assured me that he h

long ago abandoned such improbable notions. Then, not much later, and in all seriousness, he said that on the basi

of his recent research he thought it wasnt impossible that his iPhone might have feelings.

In all seriousness, Koch said he thought it wasn't impossible that his iPhone might have feelings

* * *

By the time Chalmers delivered his speech in Tucson, science had been vigorously attempting to ignore the problem

of consciousness for a long time. The source of the animosity dates back to the 1600s, when Ren Descartes

identified the dilemma that would tie scholars in knots for years to come. On the one hand, Descartes realised,

nothing is more obvious and undeniable than the fact that youre conscious. In theory, everything else you think you

know about the world could be an elaborate illusion cooked up to deceive you at this point, present-day writers

invariably invoke The Matrix but your consciousness itself cant be illusory. On the other hand, this most certain an

familiar of phenomena obeys none of the usual rules of science. It doesnt seem to be physical. It cant be observed

except from within, by the conscious person. It cant even really be described. The mind, Descartes concluded, mus

be made of some special, immaterial stuff that didnt abide by the laws of nature; it had been bequeathed to us by

God.

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This religious and rather hand-wavy position, known as Cartesian dualism, remained the governing assumption into

the 18th century and the early days of modern brain study. But it was always bound to grow unacceptable to an

increasingly secular scientific establishment that took physicalism the position that only physical things exist as i

most basic principle. And yet, even as neuroscience gathered pace in the 20th century, no convincing alternative

explanation was forthcoming. So little by little, the topic became taboo. Few people doubted that the brain and mind

were very closely linked: if you question this, try stabbing your brain repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and see what

happens to your consciousness. Buthowthey were linked or if they were somehow exactly the same thing

seemed a mystery best left to philosophers in their armchairs. As late as 1989, writing in the International Dictionary
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of Psychology, the British psychologist Stuart Sutherlandcould irascibly declare of consciousness that it is

impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.

It was only in 1990 that Francis Crick, the joint discoverer of the double helix, used his position of eminence to brea

ranks. Neuroscience was far enough along by now, he declared in a slightly tetchy paper co-written with Christof

Koch, that consciousness could no longer be ignored. It is remarkable, they began, that most of the work in both

cognitive science and the neurosciences makes no reference to consciousness partly, they suspected, because

most workers in these areas cannot see any useful way of approaching the problem. They presented their own

sketch of a theory, arguing that certain neurons, firing at certain frequencies, might somehow be the cause of ourinner awareness though it was not clear how.

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Illustration by Peter Gamelen

People thought I was crazy to be getting involved, Koch recalled. A senior colleague took me out to lunch and saidyes, he had the utmost respect for Francis, but Francis was a Nobel laureate and a half-god and he could do

whatever he wanted, whereas I didnt have tenure yet, so I should be incredibly careful. Stick to more mainstream

science! These fringey things why not leave them until retirement, when youre coming close to death, and you ca

worry about the soul and stuff like that?

It was around this time that David Chalmers started talking about zombies.

* * *

As a child, Chalmers was short-sighted in one eye, and he vividly recalls the day he was first fitted with glasses to
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rectify the problem. Suddenly I had proper binocular vision, he said. And the world just popped out. It was three-

dimensional to me in a way it hadnt been. He thought about that moment frequently as he grew older. Of course,

you could tell a simple mechanical story about what was going on in the lens of his glasses, his eyeball, his retina,

and his brain. But how does that explain the way the world just pops out like that? To a physicalist, the glasses-

eyeball-retina story is the onlystory. But to a thinker of Chalmerss persuasion, it was clear that it wasnt enough: it

told you what the machinery of the eye was doing, but it didnt begin to explain that sudden, breathtaking experience

of depth and clarity. Chalmerss zombie thought experiment is his attempt to show why the mechanical account is

not enough why the mystery of conscious awareness goes deeper than a purely material science can explain.

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Look, Im not a zombie, and I pray that youre not a zombie, Chalmers said, one Sunday before Christmas, but the

point is that evolutioncouldhave produced zombies instead of conscious creatures and it didnt! We were drinkin

espressos in his faculty apartment at New York University, where he recently took up a full-time post at what is wide

considered the leading philosophy department in the Anglophone world; boxes of his belongings, shipped over from

Australia, lay unpacked around his living-room. Chalmers, now 48, recently cut his hair in a concession to academic

respectability, and he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever. The zombie scenario goes as

follows: imagine that you have a doppelgnger. This person physically resembles you in every respect, and behaves

identically to you; he or she holds conversations, eats and sleeps, looks happy or anxious precisely as you do. The

sole difference is that the doppelgnger has no consciousness; this as opposed to a groaning, blood-spatteredwalking corpse from a movie is what philosophers mean by a zombie.

Such non-conscious humanoids dont exist, of course. (Or perhaps it would be better to say that I know Im not one,

anyhow; I could never know for certain that you arent.) But the point is that, in principle, it feels as if they could.

Evolutionmighthave produced creatures that were atom-for-atom the same as humans, capable of everything

humans can do, except with no spark of awareness inside. As Chalmers explained: Im talking to you now, and I ca

see how youre behaving; I could do a brain scan, and find out exactly whats going on in your brain yet it seems it

could be consistent with all that evidence that you have no consciousness at all. If you were approached by me and

my doppelgnger, not knowing which was which, not even the most powerful brain scanner in existence could tell us

apart. And the fact that one can even imagine this scenario is sufficient to show that consciousness cant just be

made of ordinary physical atoms. So consciousness must, somehow, be something extra an additional ingredient nature.

Chalmers recently cut his hair and he wears less denim, but his ideas remain as heavy-metal as ever

It would be understating things a bit to say that this argument wasnt universally well-received when Chalmers bega

to advance it, most prominently in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind. The withering tone of the philosopher

Massimo Pigliucci sums up the thousands of words that have been written attacking the zombie notion: Lets relega

zombies to B-movies and try to be a little more serious about our philosophy, shall we? Yes, it may be true that mos

of us, in our daily lives, think of consciousness as something over and above our physical being as if your mind

were a chauffeur inside your own body, to quote the spiritual author Alan Watts. But to accept this as a scientific

principle would mean rewriting the laws of physics. Everything we know about the universe tells us that reality

consists only of physical things: atoms and their component particles, busily colliding and combining. Above all, critic

point out, if this non-physical mental stuff did exist, how could it cause physical things to happen as when the feeli
http://consc.net/books/tcm/reviews.html


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of pain causes me to jerk my fingers away from the saucepans edge?

Nonetheless, just occasionally, science has dropped tantalising hints that this spooky extra ingredient might be real.

In the 1970s, at what was then the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in London, the neurologist Lawrence

Weiskrantz encountered a patient, known as DB, with a blind spot in his left visual field, caused by brain damage.

Weiskrantz showed him patterns of striped lines, positioned so that they fell on his area of blindness, then asked him

to say whether the stripes were vertical or horizontal. Naturally, DB protested that he could see no stripes at all. But

Weiskrantz insisted that he guess the answers anyway and DB got them right almost 90% of the time. Apparently,

his brain was perceiving the stripes without his mind being conscious of them. One interpretation is that DB was asemi-zombie, with a brain like any other brain, but partially lacking the magical add-on of consciousness.

Chalmers knows how wildly improbable his ideas can seem, and takes this in his stride: at philosophy conferences,

he is fond of clambering on stage to sing The Zombie Blues, a lament about the miseries of having no consciousnes

(I act like you act / I do what you do / But I dont know / What its like to be you.) The conceit is: wouldnt it be a dra

to be a zombie? Consciousness is what makes life worth living, and I dont even have that: Ive got the zombie blues

The song has improved since its debut more than a decade ago, when he used to try to hold a tune. Now Ive

realised it sounds better if you just shout, he said.

* * *


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The consciousness debates have provoked more mudslinging and fury than most in modern philosophy, perhaps

because of how baffling the problem is: opposing combatants tend not merely to disagree, but to find each others

positions manifestly preposterous. An admittedly extreme example concerns the Canadian-born philosopher Ted

Honderich, whose book On Consciousness was described, in an article by his fellow philosopher Colin McGinnin2007, as banal and pointless, excruciating, absurd, running the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to

the merely bad. McGinn added, in a footnote: The review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it. The edito

asked me to soften the tone of the original [and] I have done so. (The attack may have been partly motivated by a

passage in Honderichs autobiography, in which he mentions my small colleague Colin McGinn; at the time,

Honderich told this newspaper hed enraged McGinn by referring to a girlfriend of his as not as plain as the old one

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McGinn, to be fair, has made a career from such hatchet jobs. But strong feelings only slightly more politely

expressed are commonplace. Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with making the whole

debate kickstarted by Chalmers an exercise in pointlessness. Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isnt anything in

addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesnt actually give rise to something called

consciousness. Common sense may tell us theres a subjective world of inner experience but then common sense

told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat. Consciousness, according to Dennetts theory, is lik

a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on

To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in

novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named fictoplasm; the

idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with. This is the point at which the debate

tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is sayin

To Dennetts opponents, he is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain: their inner

experience of sights, smells, emotions and the rest. (Chalmers has speculated, largely in jest, that Dennett himself

might be a zombie.) Its like asserting that cancer doesnt exist, then claiming youve cured cancer; more than one

critic of Dennetts most famous book, Consciousness Explained, has joked that its title ought to be Consciousness

Explained Away. Dennetts reply is characteristically breezy: explaining things away, he insists, is exactly what

scientists do. When physicists first concluded that the only difference between gold and silver was the number of

subatomic particles in their atoms, he writes, people could have felt cheated, complaining that their special goldnes

and silveriness had been explained away. But everybody now accepts that goldness and silveriness are really just

differences in atoms. However hard it feels to accept, we should concede that consciousness is just the physical

brain, doing what brains do.

The history of science isfullof cases where people thought a phenomenon was utterlyunique, that there couldnt b

anypossiblemechanism for it, that we mightneversolve it, that there was nothingin the universe like it, said Patric

Churchland of the University of California, a self-described neurophilosopher and one of Chalmerss most forthrigh

critics. Churchlands opinion of the Hard Problem, which she expresses in caustic vocal italics, is that it is nonsense

kept alive by philosophers who fear that science might be about to eliminate one of the puzzles that has kept them

gainfully employed for years. Look at the precedents: in the 17th century, scholars were convinced that light couldn

possibly be physical that it had to be something occult, beyond the usual laws of nature. Or take life itself: early

scientists were convinced that there had to be some magical spirit thelan vital that distinguished living beings

from mere machines. But there wasnt, of course. Light is electromagnetic radiation; life is just the label we give to

certain kinds of objects that can grow and reproduce. Eventually, neuroscience will show that consciousness is just

brain states. Churchland said: The history of science really gives you perspective on how easy it is to talk ourselves
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into this sort of thinking that if my big, wonderful brain cant envisage the solution, then it must be a really, really

hard problem!

Solutions have regularly been floated: the literature is awash in references to global workspace theory, ego

tunnels, microtubules, and speculation that quantum theory may provide a way forward. But the intractability of the

arguments has caused some thinkers, such as Colin McGinn, to raise an intriguing if ultimately defeatist possibility:

what if were just constitutionally incapable of ever solving the Hard Problem? After all, our brains evolved to help us

solve down-to-earth problems of survival and reproduction; there is no particular reason to assume they should be

capable of cracking every big philosophical puzzle we happen to throw at them. This stance has become known asmysterianism after the 1960s Michigan rocknroll band ? and the Mysterians, who themselves borrowed the nam

from a work of Japanese sci-fi but the essence of it is that theres actually no mystery to why consciousness hasn

been explained: its that humans arent up to the job. If we struggle to understand what it could possibly mean for the

mind to be physical, maybe thats because we are, to quote the American philosopher Josh Weisberg, in the position

of squirrels trying to understand quantum mechanics. In other words: Its just not going to happen.

* * *

Or maybe it is: in the last few years, several scientists and philosophers, Chalmers and Koch among them, have

begun to look seriously again at a viewpoint so bizarre that it has been neglected for more than a century, except

among followers of eastern spiritual traditions, or in the kookier corners of the new age. This is panpsychism, thedizzying notion that everything in the universe might be conscious, or at least potentially conscious, or conscious

when put into certain configurations. Koch concedes that this sounds ridiculous: when he mentions panpsychism, he

has written, I often encounter blank stares of incomprehension. But when it comes to grappling with the Hard

Problem, crazy-sounding theories are an occupational hazard. Besides, panpsychism might help unravel an enigma

that has attached to the study of consciousness from the start: if humans have it, and apes have it, and dogs and pig

probably have it, and maybe birds, too well, where does it stop?

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Growing up as the child of German-born Catholics, Koch had a dachshund named Purzel. According to the church,

because he was a dog, that meant he didnt have a soul. But he whined when anxious and yelped when injured h

certainly gave every appearance of having a rich inner life. These days we dont much speak of souls, but it is wide

assumed that many non-human brains are conscious that a dog really does feel pain when he is hurt. The problem

is that there seems to be no logical reason to draw the line at dogs, or sparrows or mice or insects, or, for that matte

trees or rocks. Since we dont know how the brains of mammals create consciousness, we have no grounds for

assuming its only the brains of mammals that do so or even that consciousness requires a brain at all. Which ishow Koch and Chalmers have both found themselves arguing, in the pages of the New York Review of Books, that a

ordinary household thermostat or a photodiode, of the kind you might find in your smoke detector, might in principle

conscious.

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The argument unfolds as follows: physicists have no problem accepting that certain fundamental aspects of reality

such as space, mass, or electrical charge just do exist. They cant be explained as being the result of anything els

Explanations have to stop somewhere. The panpsychist hunch is that consciousness could be like that, too and th

if it is, there is no particular reason to assume that it only occurs in certain kinds of matter.

Kochs specific twist on this idea, developed with the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi, is narrower and

more precise than traditional panpsychism. It is the argument that anything at all could be conscious, providing that

the information it contains is sufficiently interconnected and organised. The human brain certainly fits the bill; so do

the brains of cats and dogs, though their consciousness probably doesnt resemble ours. But in principle the same

might apply to the internet, or a smartphone, or a thermostat. (The ethical implications are unsettling: might we owe

the same care to conscious machines that we bestow on animals? Koch, for his part, tries to avoid stepping on

insects as he walks.)

Unlike the vast majority of musings on the Hard Problem, moreover, Tononi and Kochs integrated information theor

has actually been tested. A team of researchers led by Tononi has designed a device that stimulates the brain with

electrical voltage, to measure how interconnected and organised how integrated its neural circuits are. Sure

enough, when people fall into a deep sleep, or receive an injection of anaesthetic, as they slip into unconsciousness

the device demonstrates that their brain integration declines, too. Among patients suffering locked-in syndrome

who are as conscious as the rest of us levels of brain integration remain high; among patients in coma who aren

it doesnt. Gather enough of this kind of evidence, Koch argues and in theory you could take any device, measure

the complexity of the information contained in it, then deduce whether or not it was conscious.

But even if one were willing to accept the perplexing claim that a smartphone could be conscious, could you ever

know that it was true? Surely only the smartphone itself could ever know that? Koch shrugged. Its like black holes,

he said. Ive never been in a black hole. Personally, I have no experience of black holes. But the theory [that predic

black holes] seems always to be true, so I tend to accept it.


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It would be satisfying for multiple reasons if a theory like this were eventually to vanquish the Hard Problem. On the

one hand, it wouldnt require a belief in spooky mind-substances that reside inside brains; the laws of physics would

escape largely unscathed. On the other hand, we wouldnt need to accept the strange and soulless claim that

consciousness doesnt exist, when its so obvious that it does. On the contrary, panpsychism says, its everywhere.

The universe is throbbing with it.

Last June, several of the most prominent combatants in the consciousness debates including Chalmers,

Churchland and Dennett boarded a tall-masted yacht for a trip among the ice floes of Greenland. This conference

at-sea was funded by a Russian internet entrepreneur, Dmitry Volkov, the founder of the Moscow Centre for

Consciousness Studies. About 30 academics and graduate students, plus crew, spent a week gliding through dark

waters, past looming snow-topped mountains and glaciers, in a bracing chill conducive to focused thought, giving th

problem of consciousness another shot. In the mornings, they visited islands to go hiking, or examine the ruins of

ancient stone huts; in the afternoons, they held conference sessions on the boat. For Chalmers, the setting only

sharpened the urgency of the mystery: how could you feel the Arctic wind on your face, take in the visual sweep of

vivid greys and whites and greens, and still claim conscious experience was unreal, or that it was simply the result o

ordinary physical stuff, behaving ordinarily?
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The question was rhetorical. Dennett and Churchland were not converted; indeed, Chalmers has no particular

confidence that a consensus will emerge in the next century. Maybe therell be some amazing new development tha

leaves us all, now, looking like pre-Darwinians arguing about biology, he said. But it wouldnt surprise me in the lea

if in 100 years, neuroscience is incredibly sophisticated, if we have a complete map of the brain and yet some

people are still saying, Yes, but how does any of that give you consciousness? while others are saying No, no, no

that justis the consciousness! The Greenland cruise concluded in collegial spirits, and mutual incomprehension.

It would be poetic albeit deeply frustrating were it ultimately to prove that the one thing the human mind is

incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, onecould argue that nothing else could ever matter more since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a

consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Yet theres no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate

vessels for the voyage towards that answer. Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the Hard Problem, on som

distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we would even recognise that wed found it.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread

This article was amended on 21 January 2015. The conference-at-sea was funded by the Russian internet

entrepreneur Dmitry Volkov, not Dmitry Itskov as was originally stated. This has been corrected.
https://twitter.com/gdnlongread

Documents

Theguardian.com-Why Cant the Worlds Greatest Minds Solve the Mystery of Consciousness