A Complete Mechanical Solution to the Hard Problems of Consciousness, Part 3

What is it like to be a basketball game?

Continued from Part 2

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Our engineering account of experience allows us to identify and reject a number of explicit and implicit “Newtonian” assumptions behind the hard problems of consciousness.

WRONG: There is one place in the brain where consciousness happens.

RIGHT: There are dozens of modules in the human brain capable of generating conscious experience.

WRONG: There is one level of thinking activity and consciousness must be explained on that level.

RIGHT: There are four layers of biological thinking activity operating in the human brain simultaneously. The dynamics of experience operate on the third level, while the dynamics of self-awareness operate on the fourth level.

WRONG: Physically and mechanically, there is one form of consciousness.

RIGHT: There are two mechanically distinct forms of consciousness dynamics among vertebrates (awareness and self-awareness)——and a third class within cephalopods.

WRONG: There is an idea, most associated with Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett, that there cannot be a “Cartesian Theater” in the brain. Dennett insisted throughout his long career that there *cannot* be a mechanical place where “all the brain activity comes together” to perform a "mental show" for some observer’s inspection. Dennett asked what he believed was a rhetorical question, Who or What could this mental observer possibly be? Who is sitting in the brain watching the performance in the Cartesian Theater? An imaginary homunculus?

RIGHT: There are many Cartesian Theaters in the brain. Many modules with the resonant dynamics that embody experience. Let's answer Dennett's question: Who is the PERFORMER of the mental show and who is the OBSERVER of the show? The modules take turns! Sometimes one module is resonating and becomes the Cartesian Theater, while the other cartel modules observe and react. Sometimes the module that was hosting the Cartesian Theater becomes one of the "audience" modules watching the performance in another resonating module.

WRONG: Dennett’s own theory of consciousness (rooted upon his erroneous dismissal of the Cartesian Theater) is the Multiple Drafts Model. He claimed that there was “no canonical version of consciousness.” No “official story.” Instead, at whatever instant you decided to see what you were conscious of, the activity whirring in your brain at that exact moment of decision would become your conscious experience. 

RIGHT: Dennett’s proposal is the exact opposite of the truth. The whole point of the engineering design of consciousness is to CERTIFY THE IDENTITY OF OBJECTS before acting upon them which requires a CANONICAL VERSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS——an official story. The all-important dynamic of resonance provides the canonical version of consciousness. We don’t become conscious by peeking into our brain and finding out what’s happening at that moment. Our brain resonates, and we become conscious of the resonance. The resonance lets you——and the rest of your brain——know there is an idea available worthy of being conscious of.

There is a final, profound lesson about experience from the engineering account that the hard problems of consciousness fail to take into consideration. Consciousness is not some kind of end point, climax, or singularity in the universe. From the point of view of evolution and Nature, consciousness is merely a stepping stone on the ladder of purpose, one that leads to ever more adaptive dynamics. Purpose is always climbing, advancing, improving itself to thrive in an ever-broadening scope of chaos.

Consciousness first evolved almost half a billion years ago, in fish. But evolution never stopped tinkering with the design of consciousness, and a few million years ago started adding new biological dynamics (language) on top of the existing consciousness dynamics, creating a mechanically distinct form of experience in the human supermind (idea-focused, rather than object-focused).

Consciousness is still changing, expanding, and improving beneath the purposeful hand of Nature.

The human soul is transcendent and sublime, a treasure beyond all price. But the soul is also like a star: spectacular physical activity governed by complex mechanical properties that can be grasped, with effort, by human sentience.

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We can now explain away the Zombie Problem.

David Chalmers claims he can imagine a “zombie” that is in every way identical to a living human—except Chalmer’s imaginary fellow is not conscious. The mystic light of experience does not illume his inner life. He has no inner life. Sure, he acts like a human, and talks like a human, and insists that he’s human and even professes to feel love like humans and dream like humans—but Chalmers claims he can imagine all this conscious-like behavior getting performed by the gentleman and yet there is no awareness of the behavior behind the scenes.

Instead, this fellow is a “zombie.” Or a robot. Something that looks, talks, and acts like a human, but inside is only. . . well, Chalmers’ imagination fails him here, as he cannot imagine what might be going on instead of consciousness.

This, of course, is not any kind of meaningful claim, let alone a scientific one. It’s precisely equivalent to saying, “I can imagine a world where nobody works and everyone is happy!” or “I can imagine a universe with gravity, but where space and time remain fixed and absolute!” or “I can imagine a world where everything is made of chocolate, except for Mr. Fussypants, who is made of peanut butter!”

Unless you do the hard work of specifying the (testable) engineering details that would actually make your fancied alternate worlds exist, you’re not making any sort of intelligible conjecture at all.

Nevertheless, the Zombie Problem does capture most folks’ natural intuition that consciousness doesn’t seem to do anything useful. The Zombie Problem is really the clear-eyed observation: What the heck is consciousness *for*? I can imagine thinking happening in our brain without any experience going on—isn’t that what happens in a computer?

At bottom, the Zombie Problem expresses: Consciousness sure does not seem to have a PURPOSE!

Now that we are armed with a complete engineering account of consciousness, we can see the purpose of consciousness quite clearly. And it is a vital, astonishing, cosmos-shaking purpose: to solve the recognition dilemma (What is this?), the attention dilemma (What should I pay attention to now?), and the learning dilemma (Should I remember this?) within a single dynamic that unites past and present to choose the best course of action for the future.

Put another way,

The evolutionary purpose of consciousness is to facilitate thinking about objects.

Gravity exists because space and time are bendy. Consciousness exists because physical objects are complicated to manipulate and think about.

We’ve made another major leap forward in the science of the soul: we can explain in clear evolutionary and mechanical terms why consciousness exists and its physical and mental roles within the cosmic dynamics of purpose. And we can now see that the role and function of consciousness will continue to morph and expand as new consciousness dynamics are added to the ladder of purpose.

Make no mistake: there are zombie brains on planet Earth. But you won’t find any backbones in those creatures housing unconscious brains. The first and second rungs of the ladder of purpose hold the “Zombie minds,” according to Chalmers’ definition. The minds of amoebas and earthworms and crawfish lack conscious activity. They perceive and act but do not experience, because consciousness is not needed to think effectively about a universe of patterns (neuron minds) or points (molecule minds).

But you do need the dynamics of consciousness if you hope to buy flowers from the corner shop to surprise your sweetheart.

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But why do qualia always evince a distinctive experiential quality? Why is there something very specific “it is like” to be different sorts of activity?

First, let’s define qualia mechanically. We know precisely what qualia consist of from our engineering account of consciousness.

A MECHANICAL DEFINITION OF QUALIA

Qualia is the conscious experience embodied within a resonating feature within resonant activity inside a module.

What do we mean by “conscious experience”?

The mechanical first-person perspective on the activity of the resonating feature.

But whose perspective is embodied in qualia? Your perspective. All your brain activity’s collective first-person experience of the resonating feature.

AN IMPROVED MECHANICAL DEFINITION OF QUALIA

Qualia is your collective brain activity’s first-person mechanical perspective on a resonating feature within resonating modular activity.

Think of resonance manifesting in your brain like Shaquille O’Neal entering a game of basketball.

Shaq dominates any game he’s in, because of his massive size, strength, and skill. None of the other players can move him, while he compels all other players to move around him.

All the other players in the game have a first-person perspective on Shaq’s activity. And keep in mind—the other players are the game. Their player activity forms all the game activity except for Shaq’s activity. Thus, the game’s first-person perspective on Shaq is simply all of the player activity’s first-person perspectives on Shaq.

But of course, Shaq also enjoys first-person perspective on his own game activity. Thus, the entire game enjoys first-person perspective on Shaq. This is a mechanically precise and deconstructable assertion: the game itself experiences Shaq from the first-person perspective of its own activity.

Crucially, the game’s experience of the colossal seven-foot-one Shaq is different from the game’s experience of, say, Isaiah Thomas, a very short and speedy five-foot-nine basketball player.

The game’s first-person experience of itself: My Shaq activity is dominant and influential!

Your brain’s first-person experience of itself: My Resonant activity is dominant and influential!

Every “player” in the game of consciousness—every module, network, and neuron—enjoys a first-person perspective on resonance, the strongest and most stable activity in the brain. To be precise, every modular activity and every network activity and every neural activity enjoys first-person perspective on resonant activity. (Just like every team activity and every individual player activity enjoys first-person perspective on Shaq activity.)

The collective totality of all your brain activity’s first-person perspective on a resonating feature forms your qualia—your subjective experience of the stable, invariant features in the synchronous neural activity in your brain module.

Before we ask why different resonating features feel so different (why does redness feel so experientially distinct from loudness?), let’s first examine one experiential quality all conscious activity shares.

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Let’s address the most fundamental and salient quality of our human experience of reality: Why do we feel so conspicuously and enthrallingly and irresistibly that reality is made of THINGS?

Potatoes. Pebbles. Porsches. Pinballs. Pilots. Protons. Humans love nouns, in our conversation and writing and thoughts. To human conception, the cosmos is a giant Santa sack stuffed full of packages that can be labeled and manipulated and spoken about: banjos, bottles, bacteria, bosons, blossoms.

The irresistible THINGNESS of reality presented to us in our conscious experience seems so potent and irrefutable it prompted Plato to imagine that the things we experience in our mind must be flawed facsimiles of perfect things hidden away in another dimension—the “Platonic forms.” Our mind’s irresistible compulsion to conceive of reality as THINGS is a perpetual pitfall ensnaring each new generation of scientists. Indeed, the number one reason for the existence of so many “hard problems” in science is the fact that the physical dynamics of experience compel untrained scientists to mistake activities for things.

Chemists believed that combustion was a substance, phlogiston. Physicists believed heat was a fluid, caloric. Astrophysicists believed space was made of ether-stuff. Biologists believed life was a substance, elan vital. Physicists thought electricity was a fluid. For centuries, scientists believed gravity was a thing: an invisible force.

In each case—combustion, heat, space, life, electricity, gravity—the true physical explanation for each wrongly labeled thing is the same:

Complex physical dynamics. Activity, not things.

We might call mistaking activity for things the Natural Fallacy of Sentience.

The Hard Problem Prime is largely a victim of the natural fallacy of sentience. As we saw, consciousness researchers from Descartes to Chalmers have proven immensely susceptible to the constrictive perspective of thingness, proposing pontifical neurons, quantum microtubules, pineal glands, claustrums, cosmic primitives, and many other misguided Holy Grail-Things of Consciousness.

The true world-mastering power of thingification comes from our fourth-rung ability—unique amongst living brains—to thingify intangible abstractions, like Justice, Love, Intelligence, Genes, Mental Illness. We feel deeply in our sentience these are real THINGS. We instinctively attempt to quantify these abstractions as if they were commodities, reducing intelligence to a number (IQ), searching for the gene for autism, or approaching love as a binary thing: true love or not love at all.

What is going on? What physical phenomenon causes our qualia to thingify our conscious experience of reality?

The mechanical qualities of resonance.

When you experience the thingness of reality, you are feeling the brain dynamics of resonance. You are experiencing the specific character of the physical activity of resonance from a first-person perspective. You are all the basketball players reacting to the dominant activity of Shaq.

And from a first-person perspective, resonance feels like ice. Invariant and solid.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the mechanical nature of resonant activity. Resonance is simultaneously activity and thing, one reason it earned such a vital role in the dynamics of consciousness. A resonating melody is stable and unchanging. It is analog activity—but it is also frozen in time, like any material object.

The stability and invariance of resonance are essential for understanding your subjective feeling of qualia. For understanding the quality—the flavor of your experience.

When you experience consciousness of an object—a pumpkin, say—a literal THING consolidates inside your brain like a statue of the idea. This THING is made of STABLE BRAIN ACTIVITY that loops round and round holding the waveform steady for all the rest of the brain to see. Like giant unmovable Shaq entering a basketball game.

From the first-person perspective of all the other non-resonant activity in your brain, the resonant activity feels THINGLIKE. In our basketball game analogy, the brain’s perspective on its resonant activity is like a player’s first-person perspective on the BASKETBALL (an unvarying stable thing!) while the brain’s non-resonant activity is like the EMPTY AIR AROUND THE BASKETBALL.

That’s why your experience of reality feels so thinglike.

Because a material thing literally manifests in your brain whose stable, invariant, and loud activity is experienced differently than the rest of your brain’s ephemeral, transitory activity. Over any stretch of time longer than a few tenths of a second, the only invariant activity in the brain will be resonant activity. If you’re a molecule bouncing around the brain, you will experience a solid state of activity when you interact with resonant activity, but you will experience a liquid or gaseous state of activity when you interact with non-resonant activity. This material differential holds true at every scale—molecular, neural, modular.

Just like you can differentiate a jump shot from a block whether you evaluate the activity of the entire basketball player while performing each activity—or if you measure the activity of a single molecule in the player as they perform each activity.

The natural fallacy of sentience makes it difficult to think clearly about consciousness, an activity rather than a thing. Our mind naturally wants to ponder a “consciousness-generating microtubule” rather than consciousness-generating activity governed by complicated math.

We still need to perform the crucial hard-problem-solving step and explain why ALL your brain activity’s first-person perspectives on resonance get grouped together into a seamless unified experience—your experience.

But first, the mystery of redness.