The question of what constitutes consciousness arouses quite a bit of controversy, around what is known as ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. Here is a description of what that is.
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why any physical state is conscious rather than nonconscious. It is the problem of explaining why there is “something it is like” for a subject in conscious experience, why conscious mental states “light up” and directly appear to the subject. The usual methods of science involve explanation of functional, dynamical, and structural properties—explanation of what a thing does, how it changes over time, and how it is put together. But even after we have explained the functional, dynamical, and structural properties of the conscious mind, we can still meaningfully ask the question, Why is it conscious? This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science. Consciousness therefore presents a hard problem for science, or perhaps it marks the limits of what science can explain. Explaining why consciousness occurs at all can be contrasted with so-called “easy problems” of consciousness: the problems of explaining the function, dynamics, and structure of consciousness. These features can be explained using the usual methods of science. But that leaves the question of why there is something it is like for the subject when these functions, dynamics, and structures are present. This is the hard problem.
In more detail, the challenge arises because it does not seem that the qualitative and subjective aspects of conscious experience—how consciousness “feels” and the fact that it is directly “for me”—fit into a physicalist ontology, one consisting of just the basic elements of physics plus structural, dynamical, and functional combinations of those basic elements. It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious. And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject. There seems to be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical world and consciousness. All these factors make the hard problem hard.
I must admit I that while I have read many accounts of the hard problem, I still do not get what the mystery is. As a dyed-in-the-wool materialist, I believe that our consciousness and actions are the product of the physical workings of our body, particularly the brain, and that there is nothing immaterial involved and I am baffled as to why it is seen as beyond the limits of scientific explanation. The so-called ‘easy problems’ of consciousness that deal with the ‘function, dynamics, and structure’ of consciousness seem to me to be all that there is. There is no unbridgeable gap. If you have “a complete specification of the creature in physical terms”, then you have solved the problem. I am not sure what the statement that “It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious” even means. The people who say that seem to be simply asserting that there must be more. But why should there be?
The latest controversy over consciousness is reported on in the journal Nature.
A letter, signed by 124 scholars and posted online last week, has caused an uproar in the consciousness-research community. It argues that a prominent theory describing what makes someone or something conscious — called the integrated information theory (IIT) — should be labelled as pseudoscience. Since its publication on 15 September in the preprint repository PsyArXiv, the letter has resulted in some researchers arguing over the label and others worrying that it will increase polarization in a field that has grappled with issues of credibility in the past.
“I think it’s inflammatory to describe IIT as pseudoscience,” says neuroscientist Anil Seth, director of the Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK, adding that he disagrees with the label. “IIT is a theory, of course, and therefore may be empirically wrong,” says Christof Koch, a meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington, and a proponent of the theory. But he says that it makes its assumptions — for example, that consciousness has a physical basis and can be mathematically measured — very clear.
…But why label IIT as pseudoscience? Although the letter doesn’t clearly define pseudoscience, Lau notes that a “commonsensical definition” would be “something that is not very scientifically supported, that masquerades as if it is already very scientifically established”. In this sense, he thinks that IIT fits the bill.
So what is IIT?
There are dozens of theories that seek to understand consciousness — everything that a human or non-human experiences, including what they feel, see and hear — as well as its underlying neural foundations. IIT has often been described as one of the central theories, alongside others such as global neuronal workspace theory (GNW), higher-order thought theory and recurrent processing theory. It proposes that consciousness emerges from the way information is processed within a ‘system’ (for instance, networks of neurons or computer circuits), and that systems that are more interconnected, or integrated, have higher levels of consciousness.
One of the criticisms made of IIT that its critics claim make it a pseudoscience is that its core assumptions are purportedly not testable, a charge that its supporters reject.
Seth, who is not a proponent of IIT, although he has worked on related ideas in the past, disagrees. “The core claims are harder to test than other theories because it’s a more ambitious theory,” he says. But there are some predictions stemming from the theory, about neural activity associated with consciousness, for instance, that can be tested, he adds. A 2022 review found 101 empirical studies involving IIT.
Liad Mudrik, a neuroscientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel who co-led the adversarial study of IIT versus GNW, also defends IIT’s testability at the neural level. “Not only did we test it, we managed to falsify one of its predictions,” she says. “I think many people in the field don’t like IIT, and this is completely fine. Yet it is not clear to me what is the basis for claiming that it is not one of the leading theories.”
The same criticism about a lack of meaningful empirical tests could be made about other theories of consciousness, says Erik Hoel, a neuroscientist and writer based in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Hoel is also a former student of Giulio Tononi, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who is a proponent of IIT. “Everyone who works in the field has to acknowledge that we don’t have perfect brain scans,” Hoel says. “And yet, somehow, IIT is singled out in the letter as this being a problem that’s unique to it.”
Consciousness has shifted from being a deep mystery that we did not how to empirically address and that only philosophers and religious people debated, to becoming an empirical question, to becoming a puzzle about which we can now pose focused questions and do experiments. The study of the brain’s workings have become possible with the advent of MRI machines and the like. If science history is any guide, once that transition from mystery to puzzle occurs, it is only a matter of time before we achieve a fairly good consensus on understanding it.
So while getting an understanding of the nature of consciousness is not easy, it is going to get clarified as our technological abilities improve.
You can read the letter that critiques IIT here.
This suggests that an explanation of consciousness will have to go beyond the usual methods of science.
Beyond them, to…what, exactly? That’s the “hard problem” that needs to be addressed first.
Reading about the hard problem of consciousness is a good way to lose consciousness (i.e. go to sleep) 😉
i also do not see what the big question is. maybe i’m not understanding the observations and reasoning that lead people to think there is a problem. there’s a feeling of a self that experiences sensation and thought, and that experience could be termed consciousness. but i see no reason to suppose it anything more than another function of the meatpile -- especially since it is subject to damage in the same way as any other brain function.
can someone explain in simple terms for me what the issue is? if they’re just researching how this particular brain function works, without importing supernatural notions, i’d think it pretty straightforward, right?
But, but, we have an emotional need for there to be more, for there to be sense and purpose in the universe. This can’t be all there is!
I’m with Mano. This is it. Get over it.
Now, what is it in our brain that produces consciousness and how does that work, would seem to me to be a valid question worthy of research. Also, is this mechanism common to all organisms that are alive? I suspect that this is the case, but, if not, can we identify a line that must be crossed for consciousness to be present?
I am another that does not understand why consciousness can not arise from the interactions of the physical body, and thus when we have discovered enough about how the body works we should be able to understand it. I do acknowledge that I may be misunderstanding the hard problem, but it does seem to boil down to “there must be more to us than simple flesh” gussied up to sound scientific.
The first quotation is somewhat incoherent, so that’s informative:
Philosophical zombies, eh? I like Dennett’s objection to them (zimboes).
Anyway, it should be clear that if these easily conceived (at the cost of realism or coherence) creatures are just like us functionally but lack consciousness it must be that consciousness adds no functionality.
A good SF book that plays with that idea by Peter Watts: Blindsight.
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PS Back in the day, it was called the mind-body problem.
God’s death, are we gonna lapse into another thread about zombies and qualia like we used to do at Panda’s Thumb? Paging Norman Doehring…
In a wiki article, it might read “it appears [to whom?] …” and of course, we all know appearances can be very deceiving.
Do you see anywhere in these decades-long discussions a fully spelled-out, crystal clear argument, going into detail about every single thing that one could derive from a complete physical description of all the events in a person’s life including their ever-shifting environment? (And then, once you have that you proceed to show that what was claimed to be missing is, in fact, missing… if your claim is sound.) How would you even begin to write down everything like that, and how long do you believe that project might take if it were ever attempted in reality? When do they intend to start?
I have not seen anything like that, yet these people act like they’ve already done so and can actually show you something about why physics “can’t” explain this or that, treating that as if it were established fact. However, they might as well just stare into space and gape in awe at everything around them, because that’s what it really is when you boil away the bullshit. And that’s cool – everybody should enjoy those kinds of experiences sometimes, in the appropriate setting.
But just because you’re (to a significant extent) ignorant of something never does mean that you’re not so ignorant after all and are able to make useful and accurate inferences about it. You can’t have it both ways, and this is just a textbook case of jumping to conclusions. It ought to be an exciting topic – this is really fundamental stuff here – but people just need to chill, for fuck’s sake. Keep learning, but don’t jump so far ahead of the stuff that we’ve actually learned, because you’ll just have to unlearn it.
I’d like to know how consciousness really works to see if there’s a way I could turn it off and become one of those fabled philosophical zombies. I hate being aware of my own existence, and I resent the fact that the only permanent escapes I can have right now are either death or becoming a vegetable.
@9:
You might find that such an entity, if you could become one, would just immediately turn consciousness back on, since it is not subject to the same imperatives as you are now.
There is one more option, Unrespected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard%27s_syndrome
First, the obvious book reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind
Second:
I don’t think the bit in italics follows from the bit before at all, unless by “beyond the usual methods of science” you just mean some type of technology or paradigm we’ve not invented yet. (Example: you might have said that relativity or quantum theory were “beyond the usual methods of science” on some level.)
But the crucial bit is this:
That’s the killer. A good friend of mine is a neuroscientist. She worked with a 7T MRI scanner at Oxford University, and what struck me hardest about it was how coarse the resolution of even that instrument is. The voxel resolution is measured in hundreds of microns. I mean -- on one level, that’s pretty fine, of course, but if you’re expecting to interpret the kind of subtle interactions you’d have to be looking at to get into whether or not something has the capacity for introspection and metacognition -- you’re going to have to be able to look closer. Trying to investigate consciousness with the instruments we’ve got right now strikes me as like trying to deduce the structure of DNA, or sequence a genome, using an optical microscope you bought from a toy store.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
Mr Singham writes: There is no unbridgeable gap. If you have “a complete specification of the creature in physical terms”, then you have solved the problem.
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A lazy statement. What constitutes “complete”? When does one know if “completeness” has been acheived.
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Mr Singham’s statement is not only lazy but is faith based.
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Axioms in Mathematics and Postulates in Physics are truthes that cannot be proven from a more fundamental basis. Axioms and Postulates are conjectures that -- for now -- hold up to testing from calculation and experimentation. So Mr Singham has faith in atheist materialism that said ideology will lead to the ultimate understanding of Consciousness.
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The 124-author critique of IIT is just a political polemic. This reminds me of the time when a group of Nazi scientists criticized Einstein’s work. Consensus is the basis of politics so I am not surprised to see Mr Singham writing “…it is only a matter of time before we achieve a fairly good consensus on understanding it…”
Axioms in Mathematics and Postulates in Physics are truthes that cannot be proven from a more fundamental basis.
No, they’re not — they’re based on observation of real-world phenomena, which they’re formulated to express. They are self-evident truths, and not at all based on the kind of faith that undergirds religious beliefs. Stop trying to equate those two very different things — you’re not fooling anyone, and the joke got old decades ago.
Srsly? Is this “Mr Singham” guy still around?
I know Mano moderates with a very light hand, but this displays the patience of a (secular) saint. X-D
If you’re going to get hung up on titles, it’s indisputably Dr. Singham or Professor Singham.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/science-paradox-success/
Silentbob: Dunno how Mano feels about this, but I don’t give a toss about titles. You can call me ‘Rob’, or ‘Rob Grigjanis’, or ‘Grigjanis’, or ‘Mr Grigjanis’ (a bit odd, but OK), or ‘Dr Grigjanis’ (accurate, but looks weird to me).
The norm in academia is to use surnames, if they’re unambiguous. In more informal settings, given names are fine.