On Consciousness

There is a nice overview on where science and philosophical thought are on the subject of what consciousness is and how it functions, in the current issue of U.S. News and World Report. Ignore the terrible title of the cover story, “Is There Room for the Soul?” It’s not a soul search that drives the article, but an understanding of consciousness. By the end of the piece, in this nominally conservative publication, Buddhism stands triumphant.

Indeed, let me turn to the third-to-the-last paragraph in the long article of six tightly-packed pages of text to start things off here:

Where is the self or identity on which even a broadminded religious believer might base his notion of the soul? Here Christians and others might turn to the wisdom of Buddhism, in which the self is correctly understood not as an entity or substance but as a dynamic process. As [University of California, San Francisco, neuropsychiatrist David] Galin writes in a collection of essays on Buddhism and science [Buddhism and Science (2003), edited by B. Alan Wallace], this process is “a shifting web of relations among evanescent aspects of the person such as perceptions, ideas, and desires. The Self is only misperceived as a fixed entity because of the distortions of the human point of view.” The Buddhist concept of anatman does not suggest that the self is nonexistent but rather asserts that it cannot be reduced to an essence.

The article lauches a survey of thinking on consciousness, that traces back to Plato’s and Descartes’ ideas of the separation of body and mind. Both influenced – distorted, really – Christian belief: Plato believing that soul or psyche was separate from the material body and that our reasoning self was immortal. Descartes had his “ghost in the machine” where reality consists of two substances, material substance and thinking substance – res extensa and res cogitans.

Most of the article deals with the disturbing variety of beliefs of today’s physicalist scientists. For the most hardened of them, consciousness is the after-vapor of the cold biochemical mechanisms within our skulls. We are somehow deluded into thinking we are actors on the stage of life. “Consciousness explains things that have already been decided for you,” explains Terry Sejnowski, Director of Salk’s Computational Neurobiology Labroatory. “The dopamine neurons are responsible for telling the rest of the brain what stimuli to pay attention to.” Sets of cells fire in our head and somehow create a scene [which researchers call a quale] that we are made aware of. This is all that primary consciousness is.

Some of these physicalists, such as writer and researcher Christof Koch of the Cal Institute of Technology, insist that research is on its way toward identifying sets of neuron firings with specific conscious experience, solidifying the physicalist claim of wholly understanding the delusion of consciousness.

Physical Reductionist Daniel Dennett, a philosopher at Tufts and a controversial writer, argues that consciousness is about “fame in the brain.” Neuronal assemblies vie for the spotlight in our head, competing for attention [or for being the attention], with the winners surviving, a la Darwinism.

But others’ ideas suggest that the experience of consciousness indicates something more is going on. Australian National University professor David Chalmers is known for tackling this so-called hard problem. “There is something it is like to be in an experience of consciousness. How does subjectivity arise out of matter?”

Oxford's Susan Greenfield fuzzes the physicalists set ideas with her insistence that there are varying degrees of consciousness and that emotions are basic.

David Galin objects that researchers are treating consciousness as a ‘thing’ or as the system that generates the qualia or as the central mechanism that directs how it is employed – but those are all different. They don't get at the experience itself.

Physicist Henry Sapp challenges the physicalists directly, theorizing that “conscious experience is not a mere product of underlying brain activity but an interactive event in which the attention and intentions of the observing mind also have effects on the brain.” Thus, he finds a basis for free will. This is a “Top Down Effect” which the physicalists dismiss.

Philip Clayton, a Claremont Graduate university professor, has his own Top Down notions, finding “Mind is more than the underlying physical factors that subserve it. Mind is involved in creating meaning, largely if not entirely through its ability to assert the existence of things through language.”

I find this whole topic fascinating. It gets at the innermost core of us. Not "Who are we?," but "What are we?" And, is our consciousness just meaningless froth? something we could do without as easily as we might do without a pimple on our butt?

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