The Most Common Error In Consciousness Research

As it stands today, consciousness is a black box of mystery. We don’t know how to define it, we don’t know how to measure it, we don’t have any terminology for it, we comprehensively lack any framework for dealing with it. We operate on “we know it when we see it” standards, and if you go down the P-zombie line of thinking, you may be reduced to “we know it when we experience it”.

That’s fine. I’m not accusing anyone of anything on that front. It is possibly the hardest problem in the world. If you can think of a way to make a hard problem hard, it probably applies to the questions of consciousness.

• Nearly impossible to gather data.
• Nearly impossible to measure anything objectively.
• Nearly impossible to run high-quality experiments; the experiments all involve “bending the ruler” themselves, e.g., one can hardly trust the results of people taking drugs as any sort of scientifically-meaningful “consciousness research”.
• It’s hard to even define what “reproducing” a consciousness experiment would mean.
• Can’t build it. (Yet, at least.)
• Can’t take it apart.
• Can’t isolate it.

Hard problems are hard.The error I’m complaining about is not in the trying to solve it, or define it, or thinking about it, or even people online just randomly musing about it. Given the difficulty in the field, I’m not sure even the state of the art by the smartest minds has progressed much past the random musing of “some guy online”, so by all means, muse away. And again, that’s not a criticism of the researchers per se, it’s a reflection of the difficulty of the problem.

Progress is made on the problem of consciousness when the size of the mystery box is reduced, and there is a net decrease in mystery. I’m not asking for anyone to reduce the mystery to zero in one shot, or asking even for “significant” reductions; who knows what chisel strike will have an outsized contribution to our understanding?

The error I am complaining about is when people propose theories that do not accomplish this goal, and in fact may even increase the size of the mystery box, but seem to act as if their increase somehow solves the problem.

Examples will probably clarify that better than trying to explain directly.

“Quantum”

I have seen a number of claims that the consciousness problem has been “solved” because someone has found a “quantum process” in the brain.

Fine.

Let us freely stipulate that a “quantum process” has been found, despite the uphill battle of proving that in a high-temperature, low-coherency environment (by “quantum” standards). Let us even stipulate that the “quantum process” that is found has some pathway to some real impact on behavior or the internal state of the organism, which is itself a thing that would need to be proved.

Fine. We have a “quantum process” that somehow incorporates entanglement into the black box of mystery of consciousness.

So what?

What problem of consciousness is thereby solved?

To the best of our knowledge, the result of quantum collapse is truly random, quite literally the most random process in the entire universe. By what mechanism does this random, information-free collapse produce “consciousness”? Is it injecting information into the physical brain somehow despite the randomness? Where does this information come from? How does this information go from some process to a being claiming to be conscious? Why does a quantum collapse “in” my brain contribute to “my” consciousness, whereas a quantum process that occurs in, say, the Sun, does not? How does one draw a line between “my” collapses and things that are “not” my quantum state?

So many people speak as if “reducing” the problem of consciousness to “it’s quantum” is some kind of progress. But it’s not! It only enlarges the mystery box. If anything it’s a regression.

That “regression” may be a true problem, which is to say, maybe consciousness is irreducibly related to quantum entanglement and collapses. Many problems have gotten larger the longer we look at them, such as the entirity of biology. And correctly outlining the problem would be a legitimate step forward. But “correct expansion of our understanding of the problem” is certainly no solution! Solutions involve shrinking the mystery space.

Moreover I’d remind you that even the idea that “quantum” has anything to do with consciousness is itself a concession I am making solely for the sake of argument. The work needs to be done to draw out how “quantum” anything gets turned into meaningful physical information.

There may even be such a process! I am writing this post mostly in the scientific context. But taking my science hat off and thinking more broadly, yes, it has not escaped my notice that if there was some component of consciousness that was not purely physical then the apparent randomness of waveform collapse would indeed be a way to “attach” that non-physical thing into the physical universe without breaking any physical laws. That is, our assessment that collapse is “random” is based on observation; it is not a thing we have proved. The Great Simulator can easily use such a process for his own goals and we’d never be able to tell from our end.

But putting my scientific hat back on, my previous paragraph is of no scientific value. Current science can not eliminate the possibility of such a mechanism, but it is certainly at the moment the disfavored hypothesis against the much simpler “all collapse events are as truly random as they can be”. And even if there is such a mechanism, simply asserting that “something is making some collapses not entirely random after all” is not really a theory so much as a very large class of theories. Exactly how is this being done? Exactly how is the non-randomness propagating up to the level of affecting action? And again, where is the information coming from?

Just saying “consciousness is a quantum phenomenon” does nothing.

A Sidebar on Action

I refer to “action” because it seems to me relatively clear that consciousness must be able to affect an organism’s behavior to be of any value. If nothing else, it leads an organism to be able to say “I am conscious.” Otherwise you end up with the complement of the p-zombie problem, a world in which all the people are conscious somehow but the consciousness is undetectable because it has no impact on behavior.

You are welcome to believe in such a thing, but it also really doesn’t get you anywhere… if consciousness has no effect on behavior, then why do so many of us believe that we are conscious? If that is false, then what exactly is the nature of the falseness? There’s still a question there.

In general, the rather popular “solution” to the problem of consciousness that simply denies it even exists still faces the question of what exactly it is that we all seem to be experiencing then. Similar to the people who get incredibly pedantic and claim that color “doesn’t exist”.

OK.

Fine.

I stipulate that color doesn’t exist.

Now, explain what it is that I am experiencing, because trying to define away “color” doesn’t change the fact that my subjective experience of what I am pleased to incorrectly call “red” seems to subjectively clash with my subjective experience of what I am pleased to incorrectly call “green”, and your declaring that “color doesn’t exist” has not moved me any closer to understanding my subjective experience.

Pan-psychicism

Another example is pan-psychicism, that “everything is a bit conscious”.

Very well. Let me stipulate that “everything is a bit conscious”.

Now, answer me the question, why is the 3 pounds of brain matter in my head observably more “conscious” than 3 pounds of rock?

Any definition in which you claim that there is no difference, well, whatever phenonemon you are investigating, it has nothing to do with “consciousness” as I experience it. That’s fine. People can investigate whatever they want.

But don’t be surprised when I don’t consider it in answer to the “consciousness problem” when you define “consciousness” as essentially nothing more than “a measure of mass”!

I’ve already got a measure of mass and it’s working fine for me.

This claim doesn’t reduce the size of the mystery box any. The question about my brain versus a rock is really just a restatement of the original problem we had about consciousness all along. Rocks that are “a little bit conscious” don’t seem to do anything for the original problem.

There is still the problems of: What arrangements of mass are more “conscious” than others? Why? Can we measure it? How do we increase the “consciousness” of a system? How do we decrease it? If we have a measure of consciousness, then that implies that there is some system that would have the maximized value of “consciousness” within some constraints, such as, a permitted number of atoms or amount of energy. How close to maximum consciousness am I? What would maximized consciousness look like? What effect on the universe would it have? Can you answer the two previous questions in anything remotely resembling a scientific context rather than immediately going to mysticism? (I’m actually not a scientific materialist at my core either, but I think that it is really helpful to know when you are operating scientifically and when you are not, and not to wander around confused about it.)

Given that consciousness arises from the minimal consciousness of atoms, if not subatomic particles, how does “consciousness” compose then? What is the minimal conscious system above a certain threshold? Does your measure of consciousness admit of what would seem to be a pathological condition where you claim that some 8-atom system is more conscious than I am? (Be careful! This is a really easy trap to fall into without realizing it.) If so, of what use is the measure? If all matter is equally “conscious”, why is my consciousness apparently localized to my brain? Is my liver even more conscious than my brain but unfortunately unable to act in the world like my brain? Why doesn’t the consciousness of some random grain of dust several galaxies away contribute to “my” consciousness? What even is “my” consciousness versus someone else’s, exactly?

These are just restatements of all of the original problems of consciousness. Every problem of consciousness framed in the context of a universe in which consciousness is a uniquely brain-oriented process has an exactly corresponding question in the universe where everything has some consciousness, therefore, saying “everything is a bit conscious” is not obviously progress. Perhaps you’ve shifted the questions but you haven’t eliminated any of them. I might say in this case that this may not necessarily expand the mystery box as much as trying to draw in the entire question of “what exactly is quantum collapse anyhow?” does, but it also observably does nothing to shrink the box.

Again, this may be some progress in the end. If everything is in fact just a bit conscious and that really is how we become conscious, then hey, it’s a step on the journey. My objection is not to that.

My objection is that it seems like a lot of people, including in the research field itself, seem to treat this like it’s the solution to the problem entirely. Or perhaps, the bulk of the solution, and the rest is just details. It’s not. It is at best the first step on the journey of a thousand miles.

And that’s the best case scenario. It could also be entirely wrong, or, right, but only in some mathematical sense that has no further application, theoretical or practical, whatsoever.

Conclusion

Any putative explanation of “consciousness” must reduce the amount of mystery, not leave it the same or increase it. It may be necessary in the meantime to expand the mystery to get to the correct place, there are many similar cases you can find in science, and such expansions may be steps on the path to a solution.

But those things should not be mistaken for solutions.

Supposed “explanations” that utterly fail this test are the most common error in consciousness research, or at least, the most common error in what makes it out to the press.

Not everyone makes this mistake. For instance, the recent paper about color qualia would be an example of what good research looks like. Sure, it’s just a strike of the chisel on the grand problem, and scientists can and I’m sure will quibble and debate and argue about it, but it is a step. It brings a hypothesis, it tests the hypothesis, it generates data, it has something to say. If your reaction to this post is to name what you think are the exceptions… hey, great! I love your exceptions too. It’s not absolutely everybody.

It’s just rather a lot of people who seem to be so confused that they can’t even tell that growing the mystery box is the opposite of a solution to a problem.