Consciousness, Existentially

Make sure you use the right paradigm for the job.

Eros and Psyche, from Wikimedia Commons.

No subject is more frequently debated than consciousness, particularly nowadays that there’s a whole new virtual class of entities to debate about. We’re not limited to discussing human p-zombies anymore, folks, we can talk about Claude and Grok and waste time that way instead! I mean, I won’t, but you can on your own time.

For those without the context—the hard problem of consciousness is a term coined by the most eminent philosopher of theory of mind, Chalmers. “Easy” problems of consciousness are essentially those solvable by science, how the brain actually works and so on. The “hard” problem is why the functioning of the brain gives rise to a subject or ego or self or qualia at all. It seems perfectly self-consistent that it wouldn’t, that brains doing brain things would no more create subjective experience than would a rock doing rock things. But if we accept that humans with brains really are having a qualitatively different experience than rocks, there remains the question of why.

There are three primary answers to the hard problem. First is dualism, which is simple, you are conscious and a rock is not because you have a soul and a rock does not and the soul is the conscious part. Naturally questions arise about how the soul is actually connected to the body and brain and how causally efficacious it could be, etc., but in any case this is a popular belief among the religious. Then there is physicalism, which comes in various flavors, but essentially boils down to “there is something special about brain activity that makes you conscious, but it all really arises as brain activity.” This generally takes the form of accepting consciousness as an emergent property, that perhaps one neuron is not conscious but if you put enough together some sort of feedback mechanism induces self-awareness and consciousness is the result. All secular persons hold to this interpretation. The final possibility is panpsychism, the notion that all matter is conscious, that consciousness is just an inherent property of matter itself. In our earlier example of “what makes a brain different than a rock with regards to consciousness?” the panpsychist answers that there is no qualitative difference, they’re both conscious. This is a totally consistent, perfectly intelligent position that as far as I can tell almost nobody holds outside of philosophy departments.

(As an aside, each of these approaches gives a different answer to the is-AI-conscious question; dualism “no,” panpsychism “yes,” physicalism “maybe.”)

Friends of the blog know where this is going—they know that the hard problem is a question of speculative philosophy. But when we turn from answering questions to living life we turn from the speculative to the existential, and therein speculative concerns are swept away as dust before the wind. The existential hard problem of consciousness is not “what are the origins of subjective experience” but “what are the origins of subjective experience for me—what is my relationship to consciousness?” Not just “my subjective experience,” mind you, but in general. Consciousness pertains to the existential category; trying to examine it speculatively leads to error before long.

If you hold a physicalist account of consciousness, then for you the self is a temporary thing, a phenomenon with a clear beginning and end. It is not as durable as a dualist consciousness, which is typically understood as created by God ex nihilo and existing into infinity. For the panpsychist consciousness is as durable as matter, as creation, as reality itself. These sorts of beliefs take on existential dimensions. Let us see an example.

For the panpsychist consciousness is necessary, while for the others it is contingent. A contingent consciousness could have potentially been something, someone else; the necessary consciousness is firmly rooted in itself, as it cannot be but what it is. The paradigmatic physicalist, for instance, lacks the same existential grounding and is more afflicted by Kierkegaardian despair—despairingly wishing not to be oneself, losing oneself in possibility. Conversely, the paradigmatic physicalist is inured against the deeper form of despair, despairingly willing to be oneself, while this condition is a greater possibility for those understanding their consciousness as either necessary or immediately contingent on none other than God. For these sorts there is less escape from the self, less possibility that the self could become something other than itself when the physical world is not the origin of consciousness and does not have ultimate sway over it.

I have spoken of one’s speculative attitude as if it determines one’s existential attitude, but this is not really the case. Christian annihilationists believing in the oblivion of the hellbound soul, while espousing different metaphysics, hold a similar existential attitude towards consciousness as do paradigmatic physicalists; existentially they are in a similar position. Nietzsche would probably endorse the physicalist position, I think—but with his notion of eternal recurrence he places himself existentially in the same position as a paradigmatic dualist believing in the immortality of the soul.

What matters for the individual, ultimately, is his existential orientation. For you, here, now, it matters not at all which speculative theory is the case—what matters is the realization of a life-philosophy, what Kierkegaard was getting at when he called Christianity an existence-communication. Life is the greatest truth. If consciousness is accidental, does this lead you to realize in your own inner world a durable concern for other beings or a callous abandon? If consciousness is not body but spirit, does this lead you to mortify the flesh? And so on. The resolution to the existential hard problem of consciousness is what you do with it.

To close with a tangent—through this essay you may have noticed that it seems to me that panpsychism is in many ways a strengthening of dualism, or further along a particular spectrum away from physicalism than dualism itself is. As a Christian I have a religious commitment to dualism, but I find the panpsychist attitude somewhat attractive. I think there is something to it, in part because (as I have perhaps alluded to above) the existential corollaries are compelling. How much more excellent, how much more solid is a world in which every step is remembered by the grass underfoot, in which every breath makes an infinite impression upon the wind, wherein every action is recorded in the Akashic record, the Book of Life written in all the souls of creation itself?