Consciousness is Fundamental
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” - Max Planck
Philosophers often find that it doesn’t matter what philosophical problem you are engaged in, pursue it long enough and doggedly enough and sooner or later it brings you up against the others. It is like entering a deep, dark forest: the path you enter by is not as isolated or stray as first it seems but will be found to meets up with others. Cast light on one problem and the reflection illuminates the rest.
Let us enter the forest by way of an old problem that has puzzled philosophers since the time of the ancient Greeks and, before that, of the Vedic philosophers of ancient India: the matter-consciousness problem.
The relationship between matter and consciousness is traditionally it is known as the ‘mind-matter’ problem. However, mind in this context is a relic of Cartesian thinking. It denotes something that ‘thinks’ in a specifically human way, whereas it is the relationship of any kind of subjective existence to objective reality that is the source of perplexity. So I shall use the term ‘consciousness’ in preference, but only in its most fundamental sense viz. if it is like something to be a particular entity then that entity is ‘conscious’.
The problem is this. How is it possible for there to be any interaction between the subjective world and the objective world? That is to say, how can the world of thoughts, perceptions, feelings, intentions and so on impinge on the world of material objects and vice versa?
Consider what happens when we see something. Light, that is to say electromagnetic waves of a particular frequency and wavelength, enters the pupil of the eye, is focussed by the cornea onto the retina, travels along the optic nerve, then various neural pathways to the visual cortex, and so on....until suddenly, ‘magic’ occurs and we see red or blue or whatever the object of perception is. We see it not as a camera ‘sees’ it but perceive it as conscious experience. How can this happen? How can phenomena existing purely in the external world cause something to happen in the realm of subjective experience?
No less strange is the reverse action: the effect of the subjective world of consciousness on the objective world of material objects which happens when, say, I raise my arm. A brick on a trajectory which brings it into contact with a glass window has a predictable outcome and no one is surprised by it because brick and window belong to the same domain of reality. But a thought or wish or desire that breaks a window elicits would be met with great astonishment – or scepticism by the scientific mainstream. It is psychokinesis, mind over matter, ‘magic’. Yet the simplest act of bodily movement raising is no less ‘magic’, since will and intentions belong to a different domain of reality to hands and arms. So how can such a thing happen?
Science’s answer is that I don’t raise my arm – not ‘I’, nor any thought or desire or will of mine. It is the brain that lifts the arm. Yet doesn’t the mind tell the brain what to do? No, that whole notion is an illusion. The brain responds to certain physical stimuli, originating in external sense data perhaps, and by a purely mechanical and deterministic process, initiates physical and physiological effects that result in the raising of my arm. My experience of will or intention is just a ghostly accompaniment to this physical process, metaphorically a sort of reflection or shadow of what is ‘really’ real.
This theory is called epiphenomenalism. It is the view of the scientific mainstream: that is, of the science of the institutions. It holds that there is no action either of matter on consciousness or consciousness on matter. Consciousness is merely a by-product of matter. Not all matter, of course, just matter such as the brain.
Yet how could any material object, of whatever structure and complexity, ever come to acquire a ‘ghost in the machine’? That is the heart of mystery and no one has a ghost of an answer. Nevertheless, that is what scientific orthodoxy presumes must have happened during the course of biological evolution. In the warm primeval ooze, starting about three and a half billion years ago, matter began to organise itself in such a way that it was eventually able to give rise to organisms that became sentient or conscious, so that it was like something to be those organisms.
Yet again, how was such a thing even possible? How could any arrangement of physical atoms of whatever number and in whatever complex combination, ever give rise to subjective awareness? While the mechanism offered by neo-Darwinism – chance mutation plus natural selection – may explain how physical complexity came about, it is no explanation at all for how consciousness came about.
One consequence of epiphenomenalism, although blindingly obvious, is worth mentioning because it does not seem to have been acknowledged by any life scientist. It is that consciousness could not have evolved at all. For consciousness, in the fundamental sense of subjective existence, is not gradable. You can’t have varying amounts of it like flour or sand. I may ask of a bat or a beetle: ‘Is it like anything to be a... [bat/beetle]? The answer can only be yes or no. It cannot be: ‘Well, it’s like something to be a bat, but much less like something to be a beetle.’ So consciousness must have happened in the twinking of an eye, at a precise moment of history. That is certainly rather queer.
What is not only queer but logically absurd is the idea of matter giving rise to consciousness or the converse or any interaction between the two. That said, epiphenomenalists can adduce strong evidence to support their theory. Ever-increasing amounts of data show beyond reasonable doubt that brain activity and consciousness are inextricably linked. Whatever we consciously experience is invariably accompanied by a corresponding activity in the brain and vice versa. As neuroscientists probe deeper, the correspondence continues to hold up. This is interpreted by neuroscientists as showing that consciousness is a product of brain activity.
However, empirical data can be open to more than one interpretation. The interpretation you favour depends on which paradigm you are locked into. Mainstream science is locked into scientific materialism.
Even more significant is whether a particular interpretation makes sense or not – logical not ‘common’ sense.
“Science stands either above or below philosophy,” said Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 4.111). Philosophy stands below science where empirical evidence has to decide between one or other of opposing coherent theories. It stands above science where the internal coherence of scientific theories is being examined. If philosophy can show that a particular theory is internally incoherent when unpacked – that is to say, self-contradictory, intrinsically meaningless, a non-sense, then it cannot correspond to anything real, no matter how much empirical evidence appears to support it.
What is internally incoherent about epiphenomenalism is that it is predicated on a logical (philosophical) error: the so-called ‘category error’.
In postulating a relationship – any relationship – between entities like matter and consciousness, which belong to different ontological realms of existence: epiphenomenalists are committing a ‘category error’.
Imagine holding up a test-tube and asking, ‘How much copper sulphate to make a desire?’ It would be a nonsensical question because chemicals substances and desires are of different ontological status. They belong to mutually-exclusive categories of existence. It is like asking what colour a particular mathematical entity is or how many fictional characters you have to think up to bring a real one into existence. All these questions are meaningless because they contain a category error. Imagine a world where the thirteenth decimal place of pi changed every time somebody sneezed. Is such a world less or more imaginable than one in which consciousness and matter interact?
It is not that science is totally unaware of such absurdity. Its attitude to the problem of consciousness though has simply been to shelve the problem in the hope or expectation that enlightenment will come with future scientific discoveries. We cannot see a connection between a desire, a thought or an intention and a physical brain state, it concedes, but then, we once couldn’t see a connection between an increase in temperature and pressure of a gas and its volume.
However this is not at all the same kind of problem. The contingent properties of gas, temperature and pressure belong to the same world of objective existence. Hence no philosophical perplexity at all resulted from not knowing what the causal connection was – merely curiosity. In the case of entities which do not belong to the same ontological realm, it is not that we do not know what the relationship is: we cannot imagine a possible answer. Scientists talk of building a bridge between matter and consciousness. Yet no bridge is possible. There cannot be a solution in the terms stated, whatever data science comes up with in the future. We are seeking an answer to the unanswerable and that suggests there is something wrong with our thinking. In even hoping for a solution via inductive means, we are turning a philosophical problem into a scientific one.
In turning away from the absurdity of epiphenomenalism, we might be tempted to contemplate ideas that lie at the more esoteric end of the spectrum. For example, we might hypothesize that throughout the course of evolution, something distinct from matter – a universal spirit or mind – acted upon, or worked through, matter organising it for its own ends. However, as it stands, this explanation is not coherent either. For if such a ‘universal mind’ is conceived of as a purely subjective entity, the problem remains how it can interact with the physical world.
Or we might subscribe to the idea that all matter throughout the universe is conscious. This is known as panpsychism (‘consciousness everywhere’). It has adherents among some physicists. Holding that elementary particles are conscious in the fundamental sense of the term has certain explanatory power for the behaviour of nature at the quantum level. Panpsychism provides an easy answer to the question: what is so special about brains? The answer is nothing, because all matter is conscious. It needs neither neo-Darwinism nor divine intervention to explain evolution, since life could evolve under its own steam. It can however accommodate the natural selection of neo-Darwinism as complementary to its own natural and spontaneous striving to evolve.
One difficulty with panpsychism is that by itself it cannot account for the hierarchical nature of sentient life viz. accepting that elementary particles may be sentient, it is not clear how nucleotides, chromosomes, cells, tissues, organs, organisms can be so too. More seriously, there is still a category error embedded in the panpsychism, at least in its more popular form. For matter which is conscious – even if it is everywhere present – presents the same problem as an organism which is conscious. It just substitutes for it another puzzling question viz. how can matter be conscious at all? This is not to say ‘consciousness everywhere’ might not be a true description of reality, only that panpsychism in the form of ‘all matter is conscious’ cannot be – unless, of course, matter is a construct of consciousness.
Many have turned to dual aspect theory in the hope of finding a solution to this enigma. This holds that matter and consciousness are simply different aspects of the same thing, like a fish or elephant seen from the front and from the side. This has the advantage over dualism that, unlike dualism, which requires some interaction between matter and consciousness, no interaction is needed in dual aspect theory. For the same event can be described from one viewpoint as physical and from another viewpoint as experiential. One cannot say that one is the cause of the other. The relationship transcends causality because they are not separate entities but manifestations of the same thing.
While seemingly promising, dual aspect theory is not so much a theory as an analogy, which starts to break down once you start asking what exactly it stands for. Whatever it stands for, this ‘same thing’ cannot have a foot in both worlds. It cannot exist both subjectively and objectively. If consciousness and matter are merely different aspects of the same thing then that ‘same thing’ must exist both subjectively and objectively , since subjective existence and objective existence are essential attributes of, respectively, consciousness and matter. Such a notion is incoherent, not logically possible, since an entity cannot exist both subjectively and objectively.
The crux of the consciousness-matter problem and the reason it has not been solved in philosophy is because there cannot be any such relationship. A universe of pure matter presents no problem. Matter interacts with matter – no problem. Neither is there any problem with a universe of pure consciousness. If matter and consciousness appear to interact then either matter is masquerading as consciousness or consciousness as matter. Either the one or the other is fundamental – it cannot be both. This calls for a monist not a dualist or dual-aspect solution. Either consciousness alone is ultimately real or only matter. One or the other is not what it seems. Materialist science tacitly acknowledges this. That is why it has tried so hard to write consciousness out of existence.
Let us then be bold: let us ask, of the one and of the other, first of consciousness, then of matter, whether either may be not what it seems.
Might consciousness be not what it seems?
If we were discussing human consciousness, or its contents or our modes of consciousness (feelings, willing, thinking and so on), we would have to concede that yes, we may be – nay, most assuredly are – largely unknown to ourselves. There may be uncharted oceans of our being, unplumbed depths of our experiencing that cannot get into cognitive awareness, but are nonetheless experienced at some level. But we are discussing consciousness not in that sense but in the most fundamental sense of all: subjective existence, the sine qua non of any specific content or type or mode of conscious experience. The existence of consciousness in that sense is absolutely certain. It cannot be denied. For it directly and immediately experienced.
Then might matter be not what it seems?
The notion of matter that prevailed up until the early twentieth century was bequeathed to science by John Locke and it was formulated in this way. There exist in the external world objects (tables, chairs, trees, clouds) which have certain properties or ‘qualities’. These qualities fall into one or other of the categories, ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’. The secondary qualities (colour, sound, smell, taste etc.) exist only in consciousness and do not correspond to actual qualities inherent in the objects themselves. Primary qualities, on the other hand, are actual qualities inherent in objects. The primary qualities are: location and extension (in space) and duration (in time). These qualities are real and independent of consciousness. We do not apprehend primary properties directly but know about them by means of certain intuitive faculties.
This notion of matter is not far removed from the ‘common sense’ view, except that many people apparently believe that the green of the grass, the sound of thunder, the smell of new-mown hay exist out there in the world entirely independent of us. Perhaps we all do when we are not thinking of scientific explanations.
Locke’s position has always been challenged by other philosophers. Their objection was not that secondary properties were real and independent of consciousness (thus defending the common sense view that grass really is green independent of our perception of it) but that primary properties were no less unreal. They argued that we have no reason for thinking that any of the contents of consciousness should resemble anything supposedly independent of consciousness. It was absurd to postulate any sort of correspondence between consciousness and a consciousness-independent world. What would it even mean for the contents of consciousness to correspond to something not belonging to consciousness? We cannot transcend consciousness with consciousness.
The scientific theory of matter prevalent today bears little resemblance to Locke’s view, even less to that of common sense. Matter, according to Einstein’s famous equation, is fundamentally energy. What is energy? Vibrations in a field, either the electromagnetic field or some other field such as the space-time continuum. Matter is nothing but vibration.
Of course, if space and time turn out to be constructs of consciousness, as Kant argued, then matter too would be have to be a construct of consciousness, as Planck and others maintained it was. That is a step too far for most physicists, though not for all, as some interpretations of quantum physics do in fact do away with an objective reality independent of consciousness. These interpretations are predicated on experimental results that appear to show that the behaviour of matter at the quantum level, e.g. the location of specific particles and even their very manifestation in the phenomenal world, depends on the conscious observer. The observer, it is said, has become the participator in the creation of reality.
Nevertheless, for mainstream science at least, matter remains, if barely, within the realm of the objectively real. It may not have the properties Locke envisaged but something exists out there that is independent of consciousness. Yet really we have no idea of the ontological (‘reality’) status of this ‘matter’. In fact, the philosophical objections to Locke’s primary qualities are just as valid levelled at any proposed consciousness-independent reality.
Let us take a closer look at what it means to exist:
If something exists it can only exist either subjectively or objectively, ‘from the inside’ or ‘from the outside’ (a spatial metaphor, but everyone knows what is meant by it). To borrow from the French: things can only exist either pour soi (lit. ‘for itself’, that is, subjectively, so that it is like something to be a pour soi entity) or en soi (lit. ‘in itself’, that is, objectively, in the manner of, we imagine, a table or coffee cup).
If something has no subjective existence, then it can only exist in the sense of being perceived. This was Berkeley’s insight: esse es percipi, to exist is to be perceived. Berkeley’s argument carried him inexorably along the path of idealism to where, popularly expressed, ‘everything is in the mind’. In doing so, it pushed him into areas in which he was not entirely comfortable. He was forced to confront the question: does the room exist when there is nobody in it. (The quantum physicist Eugene Wigner pondered a similar question about the moon.) Berkeley was able to wriggle out of this uncomfortable position by arguing that even when something wasn’t being perceived it still existed as an idea in the mind of God. Berkeley’s error, I will argue here, lay in presuming that if the room is not perceived then it cannot exist. That does not logically follow. For there is nothing logically absurd in something existing unperceived if it has subjective existence.
So the room has subjective existence? Well, of course, ‘the room’ is an abstraction. Let us ask, rather: is there any pour soi existence (singular or plural) behind my perception of the room that remains when I leave the room? The answer has to be yes if we are to be rescued from the absurdity of Berkeley’s idealism. Of course, there is nothing special about rooms. The whole phenomenal world of trees, stones, mountains, clouds, moon and stars – the World of Appearances, as Eastern philosophy has it – can be seen as myriad diverse representations (the veil of maya) veiling a realm of pour soi existence.
While Berkeley’s room continued to exist only as an idea in the mind of God when there was no observer, my room continues to exist because of the myriad pour soi entities that lie behind my perception of it that remain when I leave. Of course the room when I leave it does not ‘appear’ like the room when I was in it. In fact it does not ‘appear’ at all, since there is not one for it appear to. There can be no representation when there is no one in the room – except in memory. Yet pour soi existence, of whatever kind and surely beyond human imagination, can not simply fade out of existence when I leave.
It is important to tread carefully and keep our thoughts as abstract as possible. For it is easy to fall into thinking of every rock, river, cloud etc. as a conscious entity. That would be absurd, for human perception is influenced by language that divides the world up in arbitrary ways. What counts as a rock, a cloud, or two clouds, what decides where a river begins and ends, is a matter of the categories we impose on the world. We may have to descend to the molecular or atomic or quantum level to see where identities lie. It may not be a spatial boundary at all that defines subjective identity but something quite beyond our conception.
Neither can we presume that the representation in my consciousness of pour soi existence is in most perceptual instances a direct one. Mediating between my consciousness and a blade of grass must lie a complex chain of interacting pour soi entities: neurons, retina cells, photons of light and so on.
One unexpected consequence of this new thinking is that the neurological evidence adduced by the epiphenomenalists to support their theory fits so beautifully and elegantly into the consciousness-representation model of reality. Indeed, the predicted closeness of correlation between consciousness and brain-as-representation surpassing anything materialist neurophysiologists have propounded for that between consciousness and a materialist brain. For my brain, indeed my heart, nervous system, indeed the whole of my body is nothing less than the representation of my pour soi self. Wittgenstein was right when he proclaimed the human body to be “the best picture of the human soul.” Wittgenstein was neither a materialist nor a behaviourist - his greatest influence was in fact Schopenhauer. (It is gratifying to see Schopenhauer’s ‘The World as Will and Idea’ now being translated as ‘The World as Will and Representation’).
Husserl, Brentano, Sartre et al. observed that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Hume, who tried in vain to find his ‘self’ (a ‘self’ distinct from the idea of self) believed he had failed and hence concluded that we are mere bundles of perceptions, nothing more. I would have to paraphrase Hume and say, bundles of representations. That aside, of Hume is correct in the main thrust of his argument, if my representations were to fade out of existence then I would simply cease to be. It further follows, if Hume is correct, that I am what I am because of the pour soi existence of other ‘selves’ and therefore I owe my existence, my very being, to the consciousness of others and they to me. We hold each other up by our bootstraps. Let go of one another and we fade out of existence.
However, I do not think Hume is correct – not quite. Hume looked everywhere for a self that had perceptions but found only the perceptions themselves, because the self is not to be found in the phenomenal world. As Schopenhauer discovered, there is a pour soi, creative force behind our representations, which is the source of will or intention. This is the self. Perhaps we ought to give it a capital ‘S’ and call it ‘Self’. We could even call it the Spirit. It cannot be observed for the same reason that a bird cannot fly over itself or an eye see itself but it is there. Or rather, not ‘there’ but here, within each of us. You cannot observe it – you cannot catch it in the act of willing, deciding, thinking. Try and you will find yourself in a state of paralysis. You can see its effects in the changes it brings to the world but you cannot observe it in the creative act. You cannot observe yourself making a decision. The will is always a step ahead of you. You will never see anything but its footprints.
Why is the world in which we find ourselves a world of representation – ‘maya’, as Eastern mystics call it? Why do we not apprehend things as they really are? Well, ‘things as they really are’ are not things at all but conscious beings. For that is what the representations are representations of. The myriad conscious beings that comprise All-That-There-Is do not apprehend one another as they really are. That could never be. One consciousness could never fully apprehend an ‘other’ as it really is. I can imagine what it is like to be another person, but only partially. To succeed totally, I would have to feel exactly as the other feels, think as the other feels, have their memories, body... there would have to be no awareness of my own self. Then I would be that entity. Without representation there would be no world. The closest one conscious being can come to apprehending another is to form a representation of the other in its own consciousness. Whatever lies behind our representations of grass, trees, stars, tracks in particle accelerators...is the ding an sich, the Thing-in-Itself, which is not a thing or things at all but pour soi reality. Behind the representations, behind the veil concealing reality, lie conscious beings like ourselves. Or rather, not at like ourselves except in the fundamental sense of it being like something to be such beings.
It is not consciousness and matter that comprise the universe but consciousness and representation. And since representations are self-evidently consciousness-dependent, in the ultimate analysis there is only consciousness. Consciousness is the whole of reality.
If there is a deeper level beyond that then it has to be the unity of all conscious selves, the Oneness of consciousness. For without representation the Many would become the One.
[Joseph Dormer 21.3.13]
Consciousness is Fundamental
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” - Max Planck
Philosophers often find that it doesn’t matter what philosophical problem you are engaged in, pursue it long enough and doggedly enough and sooner or later it brings you up against the others. It is like entering a deep, dark forest: the path you enter by is not as isolated or stray as first it seems but will be found to meets up with others. Cast light on one problem and the reflection illuminates the rest.
Let us enter the forest by way of an old problem that has puzzled philosophers since the time of the ancient Greeks and, before that, of the Vedic philosophers of ancient India: the matter-consciousness problem.
The relationship between matter and consciousness is traditionally it is known as the ‘mind-matter’ problem. However, mind in this context is a relic of Cartesian thinking. It denotes something that ‘thinks’ in a specifically human way, whereas it is the relationship of any kind of subjective existence to objective reality that is the source of perplexity. So I shall use the term ‘consciousness’ in preference, but only in its most fundamental sense viz. if it is like something to be a particular entity then that entity is ‘conscious’.
The problem is this. How is it possible for there to be any interaction between the subjective world and the objective world? That is to say, how can the world of thoughts, perceptions, feelings, intentions and so on impinge on the world of material objects and vice versa?
Consider what happens when we see something. Light, that is to say electromagnetic waves of a particular frequency and wavelength, enters the pupil of the eye, is focussed by the cornea onto the retina, travels along the optic nerve, then various neural pathways to the visual cortex, and so on....until suddenly, ‘magic’ occurs and we see red or blue or whatever the object of perception is. We see it not as a camera ‘sees’ it but perceive it as conscious experience. How can this happen? How can phenomena existing purely in the external world cause something to happen in the realm of subjective experience?
No less strange is the reverse action: the effect of the subjective world of consciousness on the objective world of material objects which happens when, say, I raise my arm. A brick on a trajectory which brings it into contact with a glass window has a predictable outcome and no one is surprised by it because brick and window belong to the same domain of reality. But a thought or wish or desire that breaks a window elicits would be met with great astonishment – or scepticism by the scientific mainstream. It is psychokinesis, mind over matter, ‘magic’. Yet the simplest act of bodily movement raising is no less ‘magic’, since will and intentions belong to a different domain of reality to hands and arms. So how can such a thing happen?
Science’s answer is that I don’t raise my arm – not ‘I’, nor any thought or desire or will of mine. It is the brain that lifts the arm. Yet doesn’t the mind tell the brain what to do? No, that whole notion is an illusion. The brain responds to certain physical stimuli, originating in external sense data perhaps, and by a purely mechanical and deterministic process, initiates physical and physiological effects that result in the raising of my arm. My experience of will or intention is just a ghostly accompaniment to this physical process, metaphorically a sort of reflection or shadow of what is ‘really’ real.
This theory is called epiphenomenalism. It is the view of the scientific mainstream: that is, of the science of the institutions. It holds that there is no action either of matter on consciousness or consciousness on matter. Consciousness is merely a by-product of matter. Not all matter, of course, just matter such as the brain.
Yet how could any material object, of whatever structure and complexity, ever come to acquire a ‘ghost in the machine’? That is the heart of mystery and no one has a ghost of an answer. Nevertheless, that is what scientific orthodoxy presumes must have happened during the course of biological evolution. In the warm primeval ooze, starting about three and a half billion years ago, matter began to organise itself in such a way that it was eventually able to give rise to organisms that became sentient or conscious, so that it was like something to be those organisms.
Yet again, how was such a thing even possible? How could any arrangement of physical atoms of whatever number and in whatever complex combination, ever give rise to subjective awareness? While the mechanism offered by neo-Darwinism – chance mutation plus natural selection – may explain how physical complexity came about, it is no explanation at all for how consciousness came about.
One consequence of epiphenomenalism, although blindingly obvious, is worth mentioning because it does not seem to have been acknowledged by any life scientist. It is that consciousness could not have evolved at all. For consciousness, in the fundamental sense of subjective existence, is not gradable. You can’t have varying amounts of it like flour or sand. I may ask of a bat or a beetle: ‘Is it like anything to be a... [bat/beetle]? The answer can only be yes or no. It cannot be: ‘Well, it’s like something to be a bat, but much less like something to be a beetle.’ So consciousness must have happened in the twinking of an eye, at a precise moment of history. That is certainly rather queer.
What is not only queer but logically absurd is the idea of matter giving rise to consciousness or the converse or any interaction between the two. That said, epiphenomenalists can adduce strong evidence to support their theory. Ever-increasing amounts of data show beyond reasonable doubt that brain activity and consciousness are inextricably linked. Whatever we consciously experience is invariably accompanied by a corresponding activity in the brain and vice versa. As neuroscientists probe deeper, the correspondence continues to hold up. This is interpreted by neuroscientists as showing that consciousness is a product of brain activity.
However, empirical data can be open to more than one interpretation. The interpretation you favour depends on which paradigm you are locked into. Mainstream science is locked into scientific materialism.
Even more significant is whether a particular interpretation makes sense or not – logical not ‘common’ sense.
“Science stands either above or below philosophy,” said Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 4.111). Philosophy stands below science where empirical evidence has to decide between one or other of opposing coherent theories. It stands above science where the internal coherence of scientific theories is being examined. If philosophy can show that a particular theory is internally incoherent when unpacked – that is to say, self-contradictory, intrinsically meaningless, a non-sense, then it cannot correspond to anything real, no matter how much empirical evidence appears to support it.
What is internally incoherent about epiphenomenalism is that it is predicated on a logical (philosophical) error: the so-called ‘category error’.
In postulating a relationship – any relationship – between entities like matter and consciousness, which belong to different ontological realms of existence: epiphenomenalists are committing a ‘category error’.
Imagine holding up a test-tube and asking, ‘How much copper sulphate to make a desire?’ It would be a nonsensical question because chemicals substances and desires are of different ontological status. They belong to mutually-exclusive categories of existence. It is like asking what colour a particular mathematical entity is or how many fictional characters you have to think up to bring a real one into existence. All these questions are meaningless because they contain a category error. Imagine a world where the thirteenth decimal place of pi changed every time somebody sneezed. Is such a world less or more imaginable than one in which consciousness and matter interact?
It is not that science is totally unaware of such absurdity. Its attitude to the problem of consciousness though has simply been to shelve the problem in the hope or expectation that enlightenment will come with future scientific discoveries. We cannot see a connection between a desire, a thought or an intention and a physical brain state, it concedes, but then, we once couldn’t see a connection between an increase in temperature and pressure of a gas and its volume.
However this is not at all the same kind of problem. The contingent properties of gas, temperature and pressure belong to the same world of objective existence. Hence no philosophical perplexity at all resulted from not knowing what the causal connection was – merely curiosity. In the case of entities which do not belong to the same ontological realm, it is not that we do not know what the relationship is: we cannot imagine a possible answer. Scientists talk of building a bridge between matter and consciousness. Yet no bridge is possible. There cannot be a solution in the terms stated, whatever data science comes up with in the future. We are seeking an answer to the unanswerable and that suggests there is something wrong with our thinking. In even hoping for a solution via inductive means, we are turning a philosophical problem into a scientific one.
In turning away from the absurdity of epiphenomenalism, we might be tempted to contemplate ideas that lie at the more esoteric end of the spectrum. For example, we might hypothesize that throughout the course of evolution, something distinct from matter – a universal spirit or mind – acted upon, or worked through, matter organising it for its own ends. However, as it stands, this explanation is not coherent either. For if such a ‘universal mind’ is conceived of as a purely subjective entity, the problem remains how it can interact with the physical world.
Or we might subscribe to the idea that all matter throughout the universe is conscious. This is known as panpsychism (‘consciousness everywhere’). It has adherents among some physicists. Holding that elementary particles are conscious in the fundamental sense of the term has certain explanatory power for the behaviour of nature at the quantum level. Panpsychism provides an easy answer to the question: what is so special about brains? The answer is nothing, because all matter is conscious. It needs neither neo-Darwinism nor divine intervention to explain evolution, since life could evolve under its own steam. It can however accommodate the natural selection of neo-Darwinism as complementary to its own natural and spontaneous striving to evolve.
One difficulty with panpsychism is that by itself it cannot account for the hierarchical nature of sentient life viz. accepting that elementary particles may be sentient, it is not clear how nucleotides, chromosomes, cells, tissues, organs, organisms can be so too. More seriously, there is still a category error embedded in the panpsychism, at least in its more popular form. For matter which is conscious – even if it is everywhere present – presents the same problem as an organism which is conscious. It just substitutes for it another puzzling question viz. how can matter be conscious at all? This is not to say ‘consciousness everywhere’ might not be a true description of reality, only that panpsychism in the form of ‘all matter is conscious’ cannot be – unless, of course, matter is a construct of consciousness.
Many have turned to dual aspect theory in the hope of finding a solution to this enigma. This holds that matter and consciousness are simply different aspects of the same thing, like a fish or elephant seen from the front and from the side. This has the advantage over dualism that, unlike dualism, which requires some interaction between matter and consciousness, no interaction is needed in dual aspect theory. For the same event can be described from one viewpoint as physical and from another viewpoint as experiential. One cannot say that one is the cause of the other. The relationship transcends causality because they are not separate entities but manifestations of the same thing.
While seemingly promising, dual aspect theory is not so much a theory as an analogy, which starts to break down once you start asking what exactly it stands for. Whatever it stands for, this ‘same thing’ cannot have a foot in both worlds. It cannot exist both subjectively and objectively. If consciousness and matter are merely different aspects of the same thing then that ‘same thing’ must exist both subjectively and objectively , since subjective existence and objective existence are essential attributes of, respectively, consciousness and matter. Such a notion is incoherent, not logically possible, since an entity cannot exist both subjectively and objectively.
The crux of the consciousness-matter problem and the reason it has not been solved in philosophy is because there cannot be any such relationship. A universe of pure matter presents no problem. Matter interacts with matter – no problem. Neither is there any problem with a universe of pure consciousness. If matter and consciousness appear to interact then either matter is masquerading as consciousness or consciousness as matter. Either the one or the other is fundamental – it cannot be both. This calls for a monist not a dualist or dual-aspect solution. Either consciousness alone is ultimately real or only matter. One or the other is not what it seems. Materialist science tacitly acknowledges this. That is why it has tried so hard to write consciousness out of existence.
Let us then be bold: let us ask, of the one and of the other, first of consciousness, then of matter, whether either may be not what it seems.
Might consciousness be not what it seems?
If we were discussing human consciousness, or its contents or our modes of consciousness (feelings, willing, thinking and so on), we would have to concede that yes, we may be – nay, most assuredly are – largely unknown to ourselves. There may be uncharted oceans of our being, unplumbed depths of our experiencing that cannot get into cognitive awareness, but are nonetheless experienced at some level. But we are discussing consciousness not in that sense but in the most fundamental sense of all: subjective existence, the sine qua non of any specific content or type or mode of conscious experience. The existence of consciousness in that sense is absolutely certain. It cannot be denied. For it directly and immediately experienced.
Then might matter be not what it seems?
The notion of matter that prevailed up until the early twentieth century was bequeathed to science by John Locke and it was formulated in this way. There exist in the external world objects (tables, chairs, trees, clouds) which have certain properties or ‘qualities’. These qualities fall into one or other of the categories, ‘primary’ or ‘secondary’. The secondary qualities (colour, sound, smell, taste etc.) exist only in consciousness and do not correspond to actual qualities inherent in the objects themselves. Primary qualities, on the other hand, are actual qualities inherent in objects. The primary qualities are: location and extension (in space) and duration (in time). These qualities are real and independent of consciousness. We do not apprehend primary properties directly but know about them by means of certain intuitive faculties.
This notion of matter is not far removed from the ‘common sense’ view, except that many people apparently believe that the green of the grass, the sound of thunder, the smell of new-mown hay exist out there in the world entirely independent of us. Perhaps we all do when we are not thinking of scientific explanations.
Locke’s position has always been challenged by other philosophers. Their objection was not that secondary properties were real and independent of consciousness (thus defending the common sense view that grass really is green independent of our perception of it) but that primary properties were no less unreal. They argued that we have no reason for thinking that any of the contents of consciousness should resemble anything supposedly independent of consciousness. It was absurd to postulate any sort of correspondence between consciousness and a consciousness-independent world. What would it even mean for the contents of consciousness to correspond to something not belonging to consciousness? We cannot transcend consciousness with consciousness.
The scientific theory of matter prevalent today bears little resemblance to Locke’s view, even less to that of common sense. Matter, according to Einstein’s famous equation, is fundamentally energy. What is energy? Vibrations in a field, either the electromagnetic field or some other field such as the space-time continuum. Matter is nothing but vibration.
Of course, if space and time turn out to be constructs of consciousness, as Kant argued, then matter too would be have to be a construct of consciousness, as Planck and others maintained it was. That is a step too far for most physicists, though not for all, as some interpretations of quantum physics do in fact do away with an objective reality independent of consciousness. These interpretations are predicated on experimental results that appear to show that the behaviour of matter at the quantum level, e.g. the location of specific particles and even their very manifestation in the phenomenal world, depends on the conscious observer. The observer, it is said, has become the participator in the creation of reality.
Nevertheless, for mainstream science at least, matter remains, if barely, within the realm of the objectively real. It may not have the properties Locke envisaged but something exists out there that is independent of consciousness. Yet really we have no idea of the ontological (‘reality’) status of this ‘matter’. In fact, the philosophical objections to Locke’s primary qualities are just as valid levelled at any proposed consciousness-independent reality.
Let us take a closer look at what it means to exist:
If something exists it can only exist either subjectively or objectively, ‘from the inside’ or ‘from the outside’ (a spatial metaphor, but everyone knows what is meant by it). To borrow from the French: things can only exist either pour soi (lit. ‘for itself’, that is, subjectively, so that it is like something to be a pour soi entity) or en soi (lit. ‘in itself’, that is, objectively, in the manner of, we imagine, a table or coffee cup).
If something has no subjective existence, then it can only exist in the sense of being perceived. This was Berkeley’s insight: esse es percipi, to exist is to be perceived. Berkeley’s argument carried him inexorably along the path of idealism to where, popularly expressed, ‘everything is in the mind’. In doing so, it pushed him into areas in which he was not entirely comfortable. He was forced to confront the question: does the room exist when there is nobody in it. (The quantum physicist Eugene Wigner pondered a similar question about the moon.) Berkeley was able to wriggle out of this uncomfortable position by arguing that even when something wasn’t being perceived it still existed as an idea in the mind of God. Berkeley’s error, I will argue here, lay in presuming that if the room is not perceived then it cannot exist. That does not logically follow. For there is nothing logically absurd in something existing unperceived if it has subjective existence.
So the room has subjective existence? Well, of course, ‘the room’ is an abstraction. Let us ask, rather: is there any pour soi existence (singular or plural) behind my perception of the room that remains when I leave the room? The answer has to be yes if we are to be rescued from the absurdity of Berkeley’s idealism. Of course, there is nothing special about rooms. The whole phenomenal world of trees, stones, mountains, clouds, moon and stars – the World of Appearances, as Eastern philosophy has it – can be seen as myriad diverse representations (the veil of maya) veiling a realm of pour soi existence.
While Berkeley’s room continued to exist only as an idea in the mind of God when there was no observer, my room continues to exist because of the myriad pour soi entities that lie behind my perception of it that remain when I leave. Of course the room when I leave it does not ‘appear’ like the room when I was in it. In fact it does not ‘appear’ at all, since there is not one for it appear to. There can be no representation when there is no one in the room – except in memory. Yet pour soi existence, of whatever kind and surely beyond human imagination, can not simply fade out of existence when I leave.
It is important to tread carefully and keep our thoughts as abstract as possible. For it is easy to fall into thinking of every rock, river, cloud etc. as a conscious entity. That would be absurd, for human perception is influenced by language that divides the world up in arbitrary ways. What counts as a rock, a cloud, or two clouds, what decides where a river begins and ends, is a matter of the categories we impose on the world. We may have to descend to the molecular or atomic or quantum level to see where identities lie. It may not be a spatial boundary at all that defines subjective identity but something quite beyond our conception.
Neither can we presume that the representation in my consciousness of pour soi existence is in most perceptual instances a direct one. Mediating between my consciousness and a blade of grass must lie a complex chain of interacting pour soi entities: neurons, retina cells, photons of light and so on.
One unexpected consequence of this new thinking is that the neurological evidence adduced by the epiphenomenalists to support their theory fits so beautifully and elegantly into the consciousness-representation model of reality. Indeed, the predicted closeness of correlation between consciousness and brain-as-representation surpassing anything materialist neurophysiologists have propounded for that between consciousness and a materialist brain. For my brain, indeed my heart, nervous system, indeed the whole of my body is nothing less than the representation of my pour soi self. Wittgenstein was right when he proclaimed the human body to be “the best picture of the human soul.” Wittgenstein was neither a materialist nor a behaviourist - his greatest influence was in fact Schopenhauer. (It is gratifying to see Schopenhauer’s ‘The World as Will and Idea’ now being translated as ‘The World as Will and Representation’).
Husserl, Brentano, Sartre et al. observed that consciousness is always consciousness of something. Hume, who tried in vain to find his ‘self’ (a ‘self’ distinct from the idea of self) believed he had failed and hence concluded that we are mere bundles of perceptions, nothing more. I would have to paraphrase Hume and say, bundles of representations. That aside, of Hume is correct in the main thrust of his argument, if my representations were to fade out of existence then I would simply cease to be. It further follows, if Hume is correct, that I am what I am because of the pour soi existence of other ‘selves’ and therefore I owe my existence, my very being, to the consciousness of others and they to me. We hold each other up by our bootstraps. Let go of one another and we fade out of existence.
However, I do not think Hume is correct – not quite. Hume looked everywhere for a self that had perceptions but found only the perceptions themselves, because the self is not to be found in the phenomenal world. As Schopenhauer discovered, there is a pour soi, creative force behind our representations, which is the source of will or intention. This is the self. Perhaps we ought to give it a capital ‘S’ and call it ‘Self’. We could even call it the Spirit. It cannot be observed for the same reason that a bird cannot fly over itself or an eye see itself but it is there. Or rather, not ‘there’ but here, within each of us. You cannot observe it – you cannot catch it in the act of willing, deciding, thinking. Try and you will find yourself in a state of paralysis. You can see its effects in the changes it brings to the world but you cannot observe it in the creative act. You cannot observe yourself making a decision. The will is always a step ahead of you. You will never see anything but its footprints.
Why is the world in which we find ourselves a world of representation – ‘maya’, as Eastern mystics call it? Why do we not apprehend things as they really are? Well, ‘things as they really are’ are not things at all but conscious beings. For that is what the representations are representations of. The myriad conscious beings that comprise All-That-There-Is do not apprehend one another as they really are. That could never be. One consciousness could never fully apprehend an ‘other’ as it really is. I can imagine what it is like to be another person, but only partially. To succeed totally, I would have to feel exactly as the other feels, think as the other feels, have their memories, body... there would have to be no awareness of my own self. Then I would be that entity. Without representation there would be no world. The closest one conscious being can come to apprehending another is to form a representation of the other in its own consciousness. Whatever lies behind our representations of grass, trees, stars, tracks in particle accelerators...is the ding an sich, the Thing-in-Itself, which is not a thing or things at all but pour soi reality. Behind the representations, behind the veil concealing reality, lie conscious beings like ourselves. Or rather, not at like ourselves except in the fundamental sense of it being like something to be such beings.
It is not consciousness and matter that comprise the universe but consciousness and representation. And since representations are self-evidently consciousness-dependent, in the ultimate analysis there is only consciousness. Consciousness is the whole of reality.
If there is a deeper level beyond that then it has to be the unity of all conscious selves, the Oneness of consciousness. For without representation the Many would become the One.
[Joseph Dormer 21.3.13]