It's Many Times Harder Than Just a “Hard Problem of Consciousness”

There are many discussions that talk about a problem of consciousness or a “hard problem of consciousness,” and such discussions tend to make the same mistake. The mistake is in trying to shrink the gigantic problem of explaining human mentality into a relatively tiny problem of explaining consciousness.

The visual below may help show what I mean. We see in the grid various diverse aspects of human mentality. The great big problem is how man got all these diverse mental aspects and capabilities. As shown in the grid, consciousness is merely a tiny part of human mentality.

Reductionist theorists love it when people do not raise the big problem of explaining human mentality but instead raise a much tinier problem of the problem of consciousness. Then such theorists can attempt to offer some little neural explanation and then say, “You see, the brain can explain consciousness.” Whenever such theorists attempt to do that, we should always point out that the problem of explaining human mentality is many times larger and harder than a mere problem of consciousness.

As it happens, our neuroscientists cannot even explain mere consciousness, which is a only a small part of human mentality. Scientific American recently published a fallacious explanation for consciousness that commits the fallacy of mistaking things that come after consciousness as things that cause it. The article had the smug title “Unlocking the 'Mystery' of Consciousness.”

The authors quickly show their confusion on the topic of consciousness by stating in their second paragraph, “We study primary consciousness, the most basic type of sensory experience.” Consciousness is not a type of sensory experience. Sensory experience is instead something that may or may not occur during consciousness. If you are floating in a sensory deprivation tank, you continue to have consciousness, but do not have any significant sensory experience. 

The authors give the following ass-backward “horse in front of the cart” explanation for consciousness:

The special neurobiological features that we identified include an explosion of senses (eyes, good hearing, keen smell), a multitude of new neural processing subsystems, more combining of information from the different senses, more levels of information processing at the top of the brain, more back-and-forth communications between brain levels, and more memory. From these neural features arise consciousness in a way comparable to how the complex property of life naturally arises from the interactions of its chemical and cellular components.

In a nutshell, what the authors are claiming is that things like thinking, sensory experience and memory give rise to consciousness. This claim is clearly erroneous. Instead, consciousness is something that is necessary for thinking, sensory experience and memory. The authors have committed the elementary fallacy of confusing a possible after-effect of something with a cause of that thing. If a mind has consciousness, then it can have sensory experience. If a mind has consciousness, then it can do thinking or information processing. If a mind has consciousness, it can form a memory. But if a mind does not have consciousness, it cannot have sensory experience, cannot do thinking or information processing, and cannot form a memory. It is not at all correct to claim that consciousness is something that arises from sensory experience, memory, thinking or information processing, any more than it is correct to say that a parent arises from its daughter.

Imagine yourself awaking from a coma in a hospital bed. Your eyes closed and your senses dulled by drugs, you may have no sensory experience when you awake. Feeling sleepy, you may be thinking of nothing at all. And you may be remembering nothing. But it is nonetheless true that you have consciousness at that moment when you awake. Many times when you awake from a deep sleep, and lie in bed with your eyes closed, you have pretty much the same situation: consciousness without sensory experience, thinking or use of memory.

The paragraph I quoted above from the Scientific American essay ends with the sentence, “From these neural features arise consciousness in a way comparable to how the complex property of life naturally arises from the interactions of its chemical and cellular components.” This is a nonsensical comparison for several reasons. Life is not a property, a property being a simple aspect of something such as height, weight, length, or width. Oversimplifying biological life, and ignoring its countless functional aspects, we can say that life is an incredibly complicated state of physical organization. Such a vastly complex state of physical organization cannot be compared to consciousness or human mentality, which is a non-physical, mental reality that does not have any physical organization. And life does not arise from cellular components, but cellular components are things that exist after life has already originated. It is not true that we get life after some cells interact, as life already exists when you have those cells.

After discussing some not-very-relevant research of theirs that merely suggests that some organisms other than humans can create mental images and have positive and negative feelings (hardly a surprise), the authors state the following:

The important point is that these features are unique to conscious brains and indeed unique in all of nature. Therefore, it is not surprising or mysterious that something unique in nature—like feelings—could emerge from their unique neurobiology.

But we do not at all know that the features of human mentality are “unique to conscious brains,” and such an idea is merely an assumption of neuroscientists. In near-death experiences human minds have strong thoughts and feelings even when their brains have shut down after cardiac arrest. So it is not true that features such as feelings are unique to conscious brains.

As for the author's reasoning about what is surprising or mysterious, it is fallacious. Imagine if there was a song that was only sung by one type of thing: a tree. Imagine there was some forest where a row of twelve trees all sung that song. It would be fallacious to reason that it was not surprising or mysterious that the trees could sing the song, because trees were the only thing that had been observed singing the song. Just as we do not have any idea of how trees could sing a song, we do not have any real idea of how a brain could produce most of the aspects of human mentality, such as consciousness, self-awareness, creative thoughts or abstract ideas. We do not to any degree make this wonder any less surprising or mysterious by claiming that only beings with brains have been observed to have consciousness, self-awareness, or abstract ideas.

The rest of the essay adds nothing of substance to the author's case. In their last paragraph, they state, “We conclude that the 'mystery' of consciousness and Levine’s 'explanatory gap' and the 'hard problem' can be naturally and scientifically explained.” But they have given no such explanation. Confusing after-effects of something with a cause of something, the authors have vacantly listed sensory experience, thinking and memory as things that give rise to consciousness, when such things are instead things that cannot occur until consciousness already exists.

Philosophers of mind (and any scientist claiming to explain the mind) should stop talking about “the hard problem of consciousness,” and should instead be talking about “the hard problem of human mentality.” This is the problem of explaining the main features of human mental experience, and also the most anomalous features of human mental experience. The hard problem of human mentality involves questions such as the following:

1. How are humans able to form abstract ideas, a capability that seems beyond anything that neurons could do?
   
2. Why do humans display empathy, compassion and guilt, things that have no clear survival value for an individual organism?
   
3. How are humans able to instantly form memories, much faster than can be explained by imagining that synapses are strengthened by protein formation (which takes minutes)?
   
4. How are humans able to remember things for 50 years, which is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses?
   
5. Why do humans who have their brains shut down during cardiac arrest continue to have extremely vivid near-death experiences that they can remember very well?
   
6. Why do humans have so many traits (such as artistic creativity, spirituality and intellectual curiosity) that can never be explained on some natural selection basis?
   
7. How are humans able to instantly recall very old memories despite the lack of any known physical characteristic in the brain (such as indexing, neuron numbering, or a neuron coordinate system) that would allow the brain to perform the “instantly finding the needle in a mountain-sized haystack” operation needed to instantly find an obscure memory?
   
8. Why do humans even have a sense of selfhood, something not necessary for biological survival?
   
9. Why are savants so often able to have astonishing mental skills far beyond those of ordinary people, even though such savants often have major brain damage?
   
10. How is that people with hyperthymesia (and brains not significantly different from ordinary people) are able to remember in great detail what happened to them every day since reaching adulthood?
    
11. Why do five percent of the population (gay people) have a sexual drive completely different from what we would expect from Darwinian assumptions?
    
12. Why do epilepsy patients who have half of their brains removed (to stop seizures) show little damage to intelligence and memory?
    
13. Why do some humans show psychic abilities such as ESP in careful scientific experiments, thereby showing capabilities completely inexplicable in terms of brain activity?
    
14. How could a human ever be able to memorize vast amounts of words (such as 10 major operatic roles), when the words use a language that is less than a thousand years old, which human biology (having only very old genes) should never be to store as neural states?
    
15. How could a French civil servant (and the patients Lorber documented) have had either fairly good or above-average minds when almost of all their brains were destroyed by diseases such as hydroencephaly?
    
16. How were humans (alone of all species) ever able to develop language, when it seems that you could never establish a language among a group unless you had an existing language to enforce the conventions of that language?
    
17. How are toddlers able to learn a language at a rate vastly faster than we should expect from their mere exposure to their parents speaking?
    
18. How could a brain store memories, when it seems to have neither a mechanism for writing memories, nor a mechanism for reading memories?

Once we consider such questions, the “mystery of mind” (that our Scientific American authors have clumsily tried to sweep under the rug) comes back a thousandfold.