A Complete Mechanical Solution to the Hard Problems of Consciousness, Part 2
What does it feel like to be a basketball game?
7.
Now we can explain away the “easiest” of the hard problems of consciousness: the Perspective Problem:
How can objective third-person activity—biological dynamics in a brain—get converted into subjective first-person activity?
There is no magical conversion from objective to subjective. It’s forthright mechanics.
Let’s consider the terms, objective vs. subjective. If these terms are to have any practical physical meaning, they must be perspectives. Objective simply means third-person perspective. Subjective means first-person perspective. “Subjective” and “first-person perspective” are synonyms.
And perspective is two mechanical facts: where you stand and which direction you are looking. No additional meaning or philosophy gets smuggled in with the terms “objective” and “subjective.” They refer to camera angles—nothing more.
Your perspective on any and all of your own activity is always first-person. This is the mechanical definition of perspective. Every basketball player automatically and inevitably enjoys first-person perspective on her own game activity. Every brain has first-person perspective on its brain activity. Every module has first-person perspective on its modular activity. Every neuron has first-person perspective on its neural activity. Every molecule has first-person perspective on its molecular activity.
Remember, perspective doesn’t imply anything at all about minds or feelings or awareness. You can set up a (brainless) camera on top of a mountain and the camera will enjoy top-down perspective. You can set up a microscopic camera inside a neuron and the camera will enjoy first-person perspective on the neuron’s activity.
Sometimes it’s suggested that it’s impossible to use “third-person tools” of reason and science from a first-person perspective. This is like suggesting that it’s impossible to use observational tools when you’re at the top of the mountain looking down, even though you can use them just fine when you’re at the bottom of the mountain looking up.
There can be contextual reasons why this might be true in specific circumstances, but there’s not some general or principled reason why you can’t do science while looking in certain directions.
What’s a contextual reason you might be able to use observational tools in one location, but not another?
There might be clouds smothering the top of the mountain. If you’re standing at the top looking down, you won’t see anything at all. Your view is blocked by the fog. If you’re at the bottom looking up, however, you’ll see most of the mountain—as well as the clouds enveloping the peak. If you could acquire a telescope that could see through the fog, such a tool might be helpful for a top-down perspective from a mountain peak covered in fog. But even if you did obtain a cloud-penetrating telescope to use at the top of the mountain, you wouldn’t change your perspective. Even if you could see through the clouds, you’d still enjoy the exact same top-down perspective as before.
When it comes to consciousness, it can feel disorienting and vertiginous to think about switching from third-person to first-person perspective:
How can a neuron be both an objective thing and a subjective activity?
The answer is, it all depends on where you’re standing. Stick a GoPro camera on a basketball player’s head, and the camera enjoys first-person perspective on game activity. Set up the same camera in the bleachers and the camera enjoys third-person perspective on game activity.
Same with neurons.
Put a camera inside a neuron, and the camera enjoys first-person—subjective!—perspective on neural activity. Move the camera outside the neuron, and the camera enjoys third-person (objective) perspective on the same neural activity.
If you are thinking, then you will automatically and mechanically have first-person perspective on your thinking activity, exactly as a basketball player has first-person perspective on her slam dunk. There is no “conversion.”
If you’re standing outside a brain looking in, you see brain activity. If you’re standing inside the brain, you see the exact same brain activity. You’re just seeing it from a different camera angle, exactly like a GoPro cam moving from the bleachers to the court. Nothing more, nothing less.
Here’s a final metaphor to help you understand the solution to the Perspective Problem. Let’s adopt Daniel Dennett’s “Planet Descartes” metaphor. Dennett says that consciousness researchers get flummoxed by the confusing transition from third-person perspective to first-person perspective. Dennett compares it to landing on a distant planet and getting inverted at the moment of landing.
Here’s a better way of thinking about it.
Switching from third-person to first-person perspective on consciousness activity is indeed like landing on another planet. It’s like landing on Venus—a planet covered with fog. From third-person perspective from a telescope on Earth, the surface of Venus is foggy. The objective camera can’t make out any useful detail about the surface of Venus.
But now we send a probe down to the surface of Venus. It plunges through the thick fog and lands on the surface. The third-person telescopes back on Earth cannot see the probe any longer. But down on the surface, the fog is thin enough that it’s possible to make out geometric shapes through the haze: boulders and columns and even some pyramidal structures. From the first-person perspective of the probe, the forms look massive—the size of buildings. Earth’s third-person telescopes only see fog.
But from the perspective of the first-person probe, the planet looks geometric.
The fundamental reason your conscious experience looks like My World! to you, even thought to everyone else it looks like buzzing neurons is precisely the same reason why Venus looks geometric to a probe on the surface, but looks like fog to a telescope on Earth. The same reason a basketball game looks different when you’re cheering on your team from the stands with cries of DEEE-FENSE, compared to when a muscle-strapped LeBron James is powering his arm over your head to slam the ball down on you.
8.
Let’s switch our attention back to activity.
To crack Hard Problem Prime and the Qualia Problems, we need to understand how activity can have a feeling.
Why does three-point-shooting activity have something it is like to be? Why does neural activity have something it is like to be? Why does molecular activity have something it is like to be?
Why does a basketball game—all the multi-perspective simultaneous activity of a game—have something it is like to be?
In this section, we’re going to carve up activity as finely chopped as we can to see what we can learn about the physical nature of activity—and whether this might be relevant to the hard problems of consciousness.
Let’s start with a simple thought experiment to help orient us as we consider why different activities feel different. If the word “feel” bugs you, we can switch back to mindless mechanics. Imagine a microscopic sensor drifting through your bloodstream. What does the drifting activity feel like? Like any physical properties the sensor registers as it moves with the blood, such as the blood’s trajectory, velocity, acceleration, and force.
But can we really say that at any given instant, an activity has a precise and distinctive material identity?
The first man to tackle this challenging puzzle was Isaac Newton, about 500 years ago. He launched human science with his meticulous studies of motion. He realized that none of the math on Earth was advanced enough to characterize the nature of physical activity, so he invented a whole new mathematics. Calculus.
The whole impetus behind calculus was so that Newton could say something useful and true about activity at an instant in time. What he eventually realized, is that it’s not possible to know about activity during a true timeless “instant.” But you could chop activity down to infinitesimal size and measure any physical properties you want concerning the infinitesimal. Indeed, the entire power and authority of calculus stems from its ability to evaluate the physical properties of activity during a duration that is as tiny as you want it to be—as long as it’s not zero.
And if you measure infinitesimal segments of activity over infinitesimal segments of time, you derive different physical values for different forms of activity. A jump shot is physically different from a block. One activity is trying to put the ball through the hoop, the other activity is trying to prevent the ball from going through the hoop. It doesn’t matter if your perspective is first-person or third-person: jump shot activity remains jump shot activity from each perspective. And all jump shot activity is different than blocking activity, whether your perspective is first-person or third-person.
If you are performing basketball activity, then no matter how finely you slice the activity, you will be able to tell the difference between performing a jump shot and performing a block. They are different physical activities in the universe, like electrons and protons.
The key takeaway: If you interact with two different activities at any scale, the first-person mechanical experience of the two activities will be different.
Though calculus provides a well-studied mathematical tool for evaluating the qualities of activities, we can use an exercise of imagination to develop our intuitions regarding the notion that activity possesses distinguishable physical qualities:
Imagine you are a water molecule.
You are always moving, never stopping: you act out molecular activity, just like a basketball player acts out game activity. Does your molecular activity have a “feel”? Even if you’re a mindless molecule-sized mechanical sensor, you will be able to distinguish what sort of activity you are part of.
Imagine you’re in an ice cube. Your activity is rigid and constrained. It’s difficult to move, and when you do, you quickly collide with other molecular activity. From your first-person molecular perspective, ice activity feels solid. (You can define “feel” using whatever physical properties you want—how fast you bounce off the activity, the angle you bounce off the activity, the temperature of the activity, etc.)
Now imagine you are in water. Now your activity is loose and flowy. You move around more easily, and naturally find yourself moving up against the surfaces of any container your activity is placed within. You often collide with other molecules, but less frequently than in the solid. From your first-person perspective, water activity feels liquid.
Now imagine you are in steam. Your activity is wild and free. You can move in any direction as far as you’d like. You rarely collide with other molecules. From your first-person perspective, steam activity feels gassy.
In each case, you are exactly the same: a nomadic water molecule. In each case, everything in your environment is exactly the same: other water molecules. In each case, your perspective is the same: first-person. The only thing that changes from case to case is the activity of the molecules around you.
If you replace a water molecule with a mechanical sensor, it will record significantly different physical data as it moves around ice compared to moving around steam. Carve up activity as finely grained as you like, Newtonian calculus tells us that from first-person perspective, we will always be able to physically distinguish the dynamics of ice from the dynamics of steam.
Physically and mathematically, asteroids and electrons can tell if they’re all alone drifting through space—or jammed into a dense crowd of frenetic activity.
9.
In this section, we quickly lay out the engineering account of consciousness.
The goal of this series is to explain away the hard problems of consciousness. The full engineering account would take a short book or a large blog—which you can find right here on the Dark Gift.
The engineering account is rooted upon the Dynamic Mind framework of Stephen Grossberg, mathematical neuroscientist. In 1957, he began applying the mathematics of dynamic systems to the mind, the first scientist to launch such a program. Over the next sixty-eight years, he developed a comprehensive mathematical model of nearly every major human mental function, including vision, navigation, motor control, memory, neural signaling, molecular dynamics, emotion and feeling, free will, aesthetics, arithmetic, language, and meaning. From out of this beautiful and elegant and musical mathematics of the mind, consciousness fell out.
To explain away the hard problems of consciousness, we need to make use of the following facts from the engineering account of human experience:
Consciousness only appears in module minds. All but one vertebrate are module minds, including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and all but one mammal. Their thinking element is the module. They think using modular dynamics.
The general class of activity that embodies conscious experience is modular activity.
The specific mechanical activity that embodies experience is resonance, a type of modular activity.
Resonance takes place within brain modules designed to fulfill specific mental purposes using characteristic modular dynamics. Thus, there are multiple brain structures that generate conscious experience, such as the Visual What-is-it module (visual object recognition), Audio Where-is-it module (locates objects using sound), and the Why-should-I-do-that module (feelings).
When an idea resonates in a module, you are conscious of that idea. If the idea of an “apple” resonates in your Visual What module, for instance, you see the apple and experience apple-featured qualia.
All of the resonant modules in a brain are wired together into a consciousness cartel.
The consciousness cartel is decentralized. It uses winner-take-all and resonant dynamics to select which module’s idea to promote as the focus for the entire mind.
These cartel dynamics simultaneously solve three major mental dilemmas faced by all module minds: the recognition, attention, and learning dilemmas.
The recognition dilemma: What is this thing?
The attention dilemma: What thing should I pay attention to next?
The learning dilemma: Should I bother remembering this thing?
The dynamics of experience obey four laws of consciousness:
The First Law of Consciousness:
Every conscious state is embodied in a resonant state.The Second Law of Consciousness:
Only resonant states with features can become conscious. We can mechanically define qualia as the stable features in a resonating wave embodying an idea.Third Law of Consciousness:
Resonating modules can resonate together.Fourth Law of Consciousness
Adding a layer of resonant dynamics on top of consciousness cartel dynamics creates the mechanical possibility of self-awareness.Armed with this engineering account of consciousness, in the next section we will identify and replace all the misguided Newtonian assumptions fueling the hard problems of consciousness. Then we will explain away the Zombie Problem, explore the mechanical nature of qualia—and finally crack Hard Problem Prime. We begin by explaining exactly why all human experience shares the same fundamental feeling of THINGNESS.
Why does reality *FEEL* so stable and present—so there???
We finally get the elegant and ultimately rather simple solution.
Continue to PART 3 in the Hard Problems of Consciousness series.