How Consciousness is Made: Intro: The Song of the Self
A plainspoken mechanical explanation of how consciousness works in the human brain.
Do you not know that our soul is composed of harmony?
.Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting.1
This series of articles pursues a forthright goal. To teach you how consciousness works.
No matter your schooling or job, these articles will help you understand how consciousness is made in your brain and why it’s made at all. Explanations are in plain everyday language. There are plenty of illustrations for readers who find it easier to learn with pictures. You will even be invited to investigate your own consciousness in new ways.
What is consciousness? Consciousness is the slow-building hope rousing you in dim gray light at break of day. Consciousness is the sudden realization you can fix the bicycle’s twisted handlebars with a screwdriver and pair of pliers. Consciousness is being so overwhelmed by love for your child that you squeeze them tight against your chest and vow to never let them go though you know the truth is one day, maybe today, they will go.
Consciousness is one of the most puzzling mysteries to ever befuddle humankind. Consciousness presents a different sort of cosmic enigma than gravity and atoms. Gravity and atoms are perfectly predictable. Consciousness, no. Consciousness is a rather anomalous physical phenomenon found only in yammering, lurching, copulating creatures knitted out of blood and bone. In particular, consciousness is only to be found in minds. And minds are marvelous.
Not one but several mental mysteries are knotted up within the mighty conundrum of consciousness. Only by unraveling these interrelated mysteries can we hope to appreciate the iridescent tapestry of awareness. The most basic of these riddles:
What is a mind?
Another, the mystery of feeling. Rage and delight and sorrow and envy and lust: what are they! Where are they! When I yearn to straddle a rocketship and ride it to the stars, what is this heavy aching longing in my chest made of? How can this dizzy melancholy intangible desire be manufactured by some mundane bodily process like sweating or burping?
A full account of consciousness should also illuminate the presence of meaning in the cosmos. How can hearing spit-spattered grunts from the lippy mouth of a stranger prompt us to visualize winged hippos with pink polka dot hides? How can spotting a stranger’s necklace in our bedsheets incite us to erupt with fury?
Other venerable mysteries are knitted up with consciousness. The mystery of free will. Does our human consciousness somehow liberate us from the chains of fate and predestination? The mystery of art. Why do we find movies, music, and literature so absorbing? So important to create? The mystery of pain. How does suffering work, neurally? How does anesthesia work? And mental illness.
Is autism a consciousness disorder? (Yes, indeed it is, pilgrim! An attention disorder that creates altered consciousness dynamics, as we’ll learn in detail.)
Perhaps the most intimate and relevant of all mental mysteries bound up with consciousness is the quandary of the Self. You. All you know, feel, remember. All your goals, fantasies, fears. All that you are. What manner of inspirited wraith are you, pilgrim? Knowing what sort of self-aware being you are in the cosmos depends on knowing how and why you got aware of the cosmos to begin with.
Yet, for a great many folks who ponder the slippery riddle of experience, the mystery of consciousness is reducible to a single daunting impossibility:
How do ordinary boring chemicals quivering in our cranium—the selfsame molecules we find in gasoline, gravel, and mud—get converted into intangible psychic experience?
Simply put, how does it become me?
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This blunt query is often regarded, misleadingly, as the hard problem of consciousness. It can be expressed in different ways.
· In our physical reality, how does the objective become the subjective?
· How does body become mind?
· How does public physical activity (“the neurons sparking in that lady’s brainpan”) get converted into private mental experience (“I’m swoony and vertiginous as I ruminate on my lover”)?
· How does third-person perspective (“It”) become first-person perspective (“I”)?
In science, a hard problem is a physical phenomenon that appears to be unexplainable even in theory. It looks downright impossible. “A miracle!!” may come to mind. A hard problem declares that 2 + 2 = 1.
The first hard problem to flabbergast modern scientists was the hard problem of gravity.
How can one object pull another object though the objects do not touch?
The reason gravity was a hard problem for many long centuries was because it sure as heck seems to our everyday human perception that some kind of invisible force reaches out from one object to another and drags it closer. A living, breathing cousin to levitation, is gravity. If we stand in our kitchen and release an apple, it reliably and perplexingly plunges straight to the linoleum as if the floor itself hauled the apple down. If we gaze into the heavens, we spy the moon circling Earth as if Earth was tugging the moon to its bosom with phantasmagoric force.
From the dawn of science, scientists were utterly baffled by the hard problem of gravity. Newton himself bewailed of solving it, proclaiming: “That Gravity should act at a Distance is to me so great an Absurdity, that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Newton and other leading physicists ultimately concluded that gravity was simply a manifestation of the divine authority of God and would remain forever beyond mortal ken.
The way folks think about consciousness even today.
You may be aware Newton formulated a precise equation for gravity. One of his greatest claims to fame was the law of universal gravitation. Why didn’t Newton’s ingenious equation solve the hard problem?
Though his equation predicted gravity’s effects with great accuracy (correctly calculating orbits of planets and trajectories of apples hurled from steeples), it left wholly unexplained how gravity was made and why the cosmos manufactured it.
Apprehending the solution to a hard problem of science always involves a transformation of worldview. What philosphers of science call a paradigm shift. Making sense of the impossible demands fresh perspective on familiar structures and activities long ignored or dismissed because they didn’t seem related to the hard problem at all. Hard problems inevitably spring from unproductive tunnel vision that must be radically expanded to a more panoramic conception of reality if one hopes to detect the human delusion squatting inside.
The hard conundrum of gravity provides an example of the personal transformation of perspective one must undergo to fathom the solution to a so-called hard problem. To unmask a hard problem as illusion and misconception, we must voyage beyond the apparent and conventional and consider factors nobody believed had anything to do with the hard problem at all.
In the case of gravity, the key overlooked factor was space.
Ever since Isaac Newton proposed his equation for gravity, scientists believed we could ignore space when thinking about the hard problem. Space, in their view, was mere background. The paper you wrote a story on, not the story itself. After all, when tackling the hard problem of gravity, physicists didn’t concern themselves with trying to explain the nature of the space separating two objects, such as the space between Earth and moon. They were trying to explain why Earth and moon exerted an invisible, unstoppable pull on one another. Space appeared wholly irrelevant to the matter.
Ever since Newton, space was viewed as fixed and absolute. An unwavering stage, perhaps divine, where the great drama of gravity was performed. But in the early 1900s, one man realized that boring neglected empty space was the key to comprehending the mystery of gravity. Albert Einstein turned his attention to space and discovered it possessed a hidden nature, a secret identity.
Albert Einstein’s revelation was that space possessed structure. Shockingly, space was bendy and stretchy. Space curved. The precise way space stretched and curved was dictated by the presence of objects within it. Every physical object bends space around it. The more massive the object, the greater the bend.
Einstein proved the hard problem of gravity was human delusion. There is no gravitational pull. No mysterious force reaching out through the heavens. No interaction at a distance. Objects appear to tug one another, but in reality each object curves the space around itself. As other objects veer through space they travel along these invisible curves. Moon orbits Earth not because Earth broadcasts a magical tractor beam that hauls moon down. It just looks that way to naïve human brains. Rather, Earth’s plump butt warps space around it and moon’s trajectory follows the circular curve formed by Earth’s heavy presence.
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The hard problem of gravity was solved by realizing There is no otherworldly force. Objects shape space and space shapes how objects move.
The hard problem of consciousness was solved by realizing there is no third person perspective. No otherworldly transition from It to I. The hard problem is illusion and misconception, like the force of gravity.
It is I and I is It.
If that sounds rather cryptic and philosophical and unsatisfying, don’t worry—it shouldn’t make much sense just yet. We must learn some interesting things about architecture and flow of minds before we’re ready to tackle the hard problem head-on. We must read the articles! But now you know our destination:
A worldview-transforming explanation of misunderstood physical structures and activities that will make plain why the hard problem of consciousness is a convincing mirage—why human experience and the human soul is far more complex, fascinating, and cosmically relevant than you realize.
To get there, we must consider factors that on first blush seem little to do with awareness. Just as Einstein developed new intuitions about space, time, matter, and motion to explain the hard problem of gravity, we must develop new intuitions about purpose, mind, thought, and attention to explain the hard problem of consciousness. Ultimately, we must each undergo our own epiphany of comprehension.
How will we know if we’ve arrived at a convincing account of how consciousness is made? When we can answer these questions with clarity and confidence:
· What was the first creature to attain consciousness?
· Is our human consciousness the same as chimpanzee consciousness?
· Can cities and nation-states become conscious?
· Is it possible for digital AI to become conscious?
· Is our visual consciousness the same as our auditory consciousness?
· How are we conscious of feelings, like passion and shame?
· Are conscious feelings different than conscious pain?
· What are the biomarkers of consciousness? What detectible neural activity is associated with different phases of consciousness?
· How are we conscious of symbolic meaning? Such as reading a story, solving an equation, or feeling pride (or disgust) when viewing a flag?
· Why does consciousness exist at all? What is its purpose? What mental challenges does it solve?
But the real payoff from a thorough understanding of consciousness is the revelation of deep insights into the fundamental nature of our cosmos. An account of consciousness should make surprising predictions about reality itself, predictions never imagined by those in thrall to the hard problem.
One fine example is the black hole.
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As long as scientists believed that gravity was inexplicable—centuries and centuries of disbelief—nobody considered the possibility that black holes might exist. But after Einstein published his new ideas about gravity, another scientist studied Einstein’s equations and immediately discovered within the thorny tangles of space-bending math a stunning forecast: the existence of objects so monstrously heavy they twist space all the way around themselves into a one-way tunnel from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Eventually, scientists confirmed that this fairy tale-sounding notion of voracious black holes was quite genuine: our own solar system orbits a gargantuan hole in the heart of the Milky Way.
In other words, once the hard problem of gravity was solved, strange and unheralded phenomena were predicted and discovered.
If our solution to the hard problem of consciousness is sound, then the equations and laws of consciousness should also supply unforeseen yet testable revelations. One such “black hole prediction” that emerges from an account of how consciousness is made is a precise physical explanation of how autism is made in the human brain.
A major medical mystery, illuminated by the account of how brains manufacture awareness. Another black hole prediction is that certain types of desirable immortality may not be attainable in our reality, while other types might be.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The first step on our journey of fathoming the human soul is a humble one. We must acquire a solid sense of what a mind is.
Cosmically.