Three cautions about consciousness

As noted in Part 1 of this review, The Blind Spot is right that as individuals we can’t step outside conscious experience in modeling reality: it’s the format in which the world presents itself to us. So in that sense consciousness – what they call “direct experience” – will always remain central to the human perspective on the world. But three points to keep in mind in what follows: First, the fact that one’s experience can’t be transcended as the format of a world model doesn’t mean it necessarily reveals deep truths about reality that should take precedence over the collective, more abstract conclusions reached by science. Experience isn’t epistemically privileged. Second, and relatedly, our conscious takes on the world, even when judged as reflecting a consensus reality, are a product of evolution and as such may have biological limitations. The authors recognize that human consciousness is embodied, which necessarily constrains the scope of sensory perception and perhaps even our cognitive capacities. The rise of very smart artificial intelligence suggests that embodied and culturally contextualized brains, complex though they be, are not necessarily the only, or even the ideal, platforms for modeling the world in the abstract terms favored by science.[1] Third, consciousness, albeit something we can’t step outside of in encountering the world, shouldn’t be granted any sort of ontological primacy. The concrete immediacy of experience doesn’t establish it as more fundamental to reality than what scientific theories describe as the basic constituents of the world.

Is consciousness immune from third-person explanation?

Given the ineliminable role of embodied experience in doing science, it’s no surprise that The Blind Spot includes an extensive chapter on consciousness itself – its nature, possible functions, and proposed explanations. The consciousness at issue is phenomenal consciousness, constituted by the subjective manifold of perception, sensation, emotion, and thought, most elements of which have a felt qualitative character, for example that of pain. Conscious experience is “direct” in the sense that it’s unmediated: we don’t observe or inspect it, it simply presents itself as the contents of awareness.[2] The authors adopt the phenomenological method of investigating one’s experience independently of any assumptions about the external world: the Husserlian “epoche”. Focusing attention on awareness itself highlights what the authors claim is the existential and cognitive primacy of consciousness: it’s the transcendental context within which the world appears and cannot itself be explained in terms of what that world contains:

Consciousness is not just another object of knowledge, but also, and more fundamental, that by which any object is knowable. For this reason, consciousness is irreducible to any object of domain of objects: any explanation of consciousness in terms of a specific object, such as the brain, or even a totality of objects, already presupposes consciousness as that by which objects are individuated and intelligible…[T]here is no way to step outside of consciousness and account for it exhaustively in terms of something else. (187-8)

This is a very strong claim: since the world and its objects only appear to us in terms of consciousness, consciousness itself can’t be explained in terms of those objects. But it isn’t obvious that being a precondition of human knowledge makes consciousness – a first-person phenomenon – immune from explanation in third-person terms, whether physical, functional, representational, or information-theoretic. The ontological status of consciousness is an open question. As noted above, the authors acknowledge that it’s an embodied phenomenon, dependent on the brain, even if such dependency “is inscrutable from within the horizon of first-person awareness” (188). We can’t step outside consciousness because we can’t step outside being brains in bodies, and this immediately suggests that consciousness is, at least in the human biological case, a system-level phenomenon. But the authors say this explanatory route is blocked by our being caught in a “strange loop”: the Husserlian life-world of human experience discloses the universe but is itself contained within the universe since we are embodied subjects. However, it isn’t clear why this mutual enfoldment necessarily prevents consciousness from being explained as a natural phenomenon that arises from non-conscious goings-on (see note 2 of Part 1 and “Privacy and the objectification of experience” below).

Theories of consciousness

In any event, much of the chapter is devoted to a critical examination of the current explanatory options, all of which except one are found wanting since it’s claimed they partake of the Blind Spot in one respect or another. Here I can only address a few of the authors’ many objections, some of which are well-founded, others less so. They first take issue with the so-called “hard problem,” what many empirically oriented investigators of consciousness see as the main explanatory challenge: why are the subjective, qualitative feels of sensory experience, such as the feeling of pain or taste of coffee, entailed by certain physical states of affairs, such as neural processes in the brain and body? The authors argue this is a mistaken quest to reduce or identify experience with abstract physical models. What would result

…is a picture of reality drawn in physicalist, reductionist, and objectivist terms, from which consciousness has been excluded by construction…Claiming that consciousness can be reductively explained by its abstract structural residues in physics or cognitive neuroscience inverts the whole procedure of generating scientific knowledge, which starts from and is forever beholden to direct experience. The move is absurd in principle because it tries to replace the subjectivity it excluded at the start with an abstraction cast in completely objective terms. It fails to recognize the ineliminable primacy of consciousness in knowledge. (195)

Here again the claim seems to be that consciousness, because it’s the untranscendable platform of human understanding, can’t itself be explained in terms that don’t presuppose or involve the characteristics of conscious experience: its mind-dependent subjectivity and qualitativeness. But this isn’t, as the authors seem to suppose, an a priori or logical truth. Minds that host experience, and thus experience itself, might be a function of conditions that aren’t themselves mind-dependent, which is how it currently seems. And indeed, the authors conclude the chapter by recommending we take a neurophenomenological approach to the neuroscience of consciousness, in which fine-grained first person reports of experience are used to help identify neurophysiological patterns in the brain and body (218-9). Understanding the architecture and function of neurophysiological patterns would presumably shed light on why it’s just those patterns, and not other sorts of physical goings-on, which somehow entail conscious experience as reported by subjects.

Although they call neurophenomenology a “radically different approach” to investigating consciousness, their description of it is in line with standard neuroscientific research methods used to evaluate the empirically based theoretical contenders, such as global neuronal workspace, predictive processing, and (more controversially) integrated information theory (IIT). None of these is in the business of “excluding consciousness by construction,” rather they seek to explain why it’s our window on the world in the first place. Whether that explanation ends up being physicalist, information-theoretic, representationalist, or something yet unforeseen is a completely open question, and the fact that consciousness is a participant in the explanatory process doesn’t shield it from explanation in non-conscious terms.

Unsurprisingly, the authors’ objections to physicalism, reductionism, and objectivism lead them to reject all the major explanatory approaches to consciousness, including the three mentioned above. They rightly observe that none of the extant brain-based theories have yet closed the “explanatory gap” between physical goings-on and subjective experience: of how consciousness could be generated, produced, or otherwise entailed by brain processes. Beyond that, they present a variety of arguments intended to show the essential futility of these approaches. One is that, as they put it regarding the predictive processing framework, “It takes an abstract and idealized third-person model of the brain to be the concrete phenomenon of the first-person perceptual experience of the world” (203). But of course, any scientific theory of consciousness, including neurophenomenology, must involve abstractions and idealizations, none of which need be, and usually aren’t, taken to be the phenomenon itself. The same charges of “surreptitious substitution” and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness are made against IIT:

…IIT’s core thesis, that integrated information is consciousness, confuses the map with the territory. It’s a striking case of surreptitious substitution – substituting integrated information for experience – and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – treating integrated information, which is an abstraction from our knowledge of causal interdependencies, as if it were concretely real. (206)

But theorists generally don’t equate theories either with lived experience or the physical world. The claimed identity of consciousness with the integrated information hypothesized to be present in properly configured systems may or may not be true, and it may fail to gain sufficient empirical support, but it doesn’t violate any canon of good scientific or epistemic practice. It only asserts what proponents of IIT take to be the necessary and sufficient conditions a physical system must meet for it to host conscious experience. Science can’t and shouldn’t be barred from making identity claims that link two sorts of descriptions or concepts – one more abstract, one more concrete – as referring to the same phenomenon.

Privacy and the objectification of experience

Still, the identity claim in the case of consciousness runs up against what the authors argue is the essential privacy of experience, that on the face of it experiences such as pain only exist for the subject undergoing them. This makes it difficult to identify them with any publicly observable state of affairs, such as neurophysiological processes associated with reports of pain. In their brief against panpsychism, they argue that by positing consciousness as a basic constituent or perhaps the essential nature of matter, it mistakenly makes experience a public object, in principle available to observation:

The upshot is to objectify experience, to make it an object out there in the physical world. This is paradoxical, because experience is precisely that which is not an object. Experience is the horizon within which any object or collection of objects is specifiable…Experience escapes objectification, but the panpsychist argument treats experience as if it were a special kind of object. This is symptomatic of the Blind Spot.[3] (213)

Nevertheless, physicalists about phenomenal consciousness who are not panpsychists, of which there are many in the philo-scientific community, will reply that it’s hardly inconceivable that sensory experience is “out there in the physical world.” Pain and other sensations, physicalist philosophers such as David Papineau and Alex Byrne will say, are likely the very same thing as certain brain processes, perhaps those of the global neuronal workspace, or some that participate in the brain’s predictive processing network. Although physicalism shouldn’t be ruled out – we should remain metaphysically agnostic about sensations – such an identity has to be established by a settled theory of consciousness, which still eludes us. The fact that pains seem not to be observables, but their associated neurophysiological correlates are, casts prima facie doubt on their being the exact same thing with all properties in common.

This brings up what it would mean for consciousness to be objectified. Even if consciousness may not be physical (an open question), we conscious human subjects are clearly within the material world as described by science, so consciousness as an embodied phenomenon is at least tied to the physical. This means that objectifying it wouldn’t necessarily show it to be a public physical object, but rather to naturalize it by explaining why experiences like pain are necessarily private and qualitative, even though it takes a physical system to bring them into existence.[4] Such naturalization wouldn’t show consciousness to be generated or produced by neurophysiological processes as a further physical effect – a prospect the authors rightly deem unlikely – but perhaps some sort of non-causal entailment of being a cognitive system, e.g., being the contents of certain of its physically instantiated representational vehicles.

Such a possibility aligns with the authors’ rejection of physicalism but not with their seeming insistence that consciousness escapes objectification in the sense of being explicable in terms that don’t involve anything mind dependent. According to some explanations of consciousness, experience constitutes a behavior-guiding mental model that represents the world of which mind systems like us are a part.[5] If such accounts are on the right track, it means that the personally untranscendable representational reality of consciousness – “direct experience” – will be included in the world as represented by science, a represented reality. Nature, an undivided, mind-independent, physical manifold according to scientific representations of it, has via evolution created mind systems which host representations that seem to entail the sensory feels of phenomenal consciousness, such as pain. Should that entailment be substantiated, or another solution found to the hard problem, this will put consciousness intelligibly within the world as represented by science, aided and abetted by the philosophy of mind.[6] Since this eventuality can’t be ruled out, consciousness may not stand, as the authors contend it must, as a limit on objectivity properly construed, even though it will remain central to the human grasp of reality.

Saving the planet

The last chapter of The Blind Spot argues that the portrayal of science as essentially quantitative and reductionist, as exemplified by economics (the so-called "dismal science”), is a major contributor to our existential crises of meaning and climate change. By claiming physicalist objectivity as the only true picture, the current scientific worldview in effect de-animates nature, and so licenses its heedless exploitation, the effects of which are now upon us.

…numbers can’t reveal entities that exist outside the reductionist, materialist ontology of our economics…in a Blind Spot worldview where everything reduces to “nothing but” objectified physical entities, whether they be fundamental particles or rational actors, we are left without an account of what really matters. (244)

This worry is fairly characterized as fear of scientism: that science, if granted supremacy in all domains of knowledge, will become the dehumanizing technocratic handmaiden of thoughtless resource extraction and consumption, externalities be damned. But to lay all this at the door of our current scientific worldview both misrepresents it and grants it too much power. The humanities and human values aren’t about to be swallowed up by science, nor is scientific knowledge necessarily disenchanting. As Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and others have argued, appreciating the vast scope and complexity of the non-human natural world, and finding ourselves as natural creatures within it, can be awe-inspiring, not demoralizing. The current scientific worldview isn’t intrinsically antithetical to human concerns and aspirations, even if it finds human experience not to be fundamental, epistemically privileged, or beyond explanation. And it isn’t clear that reductionism and physicalism – abstract concepts – have been among the main drivers of the political and economic systems responsible for the climate crisis, instead of basic human nature: our tendency to discount the future in favor of personal survival and enrichment over the near term. Science has certainly enabled the ecologically disastrous consumption of our carbon resources, but a philosophically defective view of it – should that view even predominate – can’t be blamed for the predations of the fossil fuel industry and its political bedfellows.

Although they acknowledge that they don’t have a clear roadmap for worldview reform,[7] the authors suggest that developments within science itself, such as complex systems theory, relational quantum mechanics, and neurophenomenology, will vindicate non-objectifiable human experience as a constraint on scientific overreach. But even if this should come to pass, it’s doubtful that it would do much to reform the institutions and policies responsible for our collective predicament. What seems more likely is that the negative consequences of global warming will force behavior and policy change at the local, regional, and eventually global level, although not in time to avoid the major environmental change and social disruption already underway.

Conclusion

The advent of new scientific developments and new perspectives on science itself are to be welcomed, whether or not they end up being major players in solving global crises or establish human experience as a limit on objectivity. As it stands, it was the quantitative science of the mechanisms behind climate change that generated the widely ignored prediction of our current catastrophe, and the application of other sciences will facilitate our management and adaptation to the new reality. Advances in the science of human behavior might help us become better self-managers, perhaps with the assistance of artificial agents less subject to short-term and self-centered biases. Good science is clearly key to mitigating the hardships to come.

But all told, I’d suggest our current scientific worldview needn’t be reformed as The Blind Spot recommends; it ain’t broke, so don’t fix it. It already accepts that experience is our untranscendable window on the world: the sensory format of a biological, situated perspective that we shouldn’t suppose gets reality deeply right. The quest for scientific objectivity about consciousness – that is, the quest to naturalize it – doesn’t threaten either the centrality or practical, everyday utility of conscious experience as a world-model. Demonstrating its limitations and explaining it as a natural phenomenon isn’t to dehumanize us or de-animate nature. As argued in Part 1, we shouldn’t grant consciousness an epistemically privileged status that competes with science. The commonsense deliverances of direct experience need not take precedence over more abstract scientific understandings, nor can science displace consciousness as our primary world model. Nor, as the book’s subtitle would have it, is human experience as such being ignored, given the recent explosion of research into the nature of consciousness, addressing as it must the puzzles that arise when awareness studies itself.[8] Nevertheless, and to give the book its due, The Blind Spot’s detailed examination of the purported sins our current scientific worldview supposedly commits in marginalizing human experience (see Part 1) should put us on guard against any such commission.

A scientific worldview – what I’ve called worldview naturalism – places everything within nature since there’s no good empirical evidence that reality is divided between the natural and supernatural. The challenge such a worldview faces, beyond the fact that such things as consciousness, the origins of life, and the nature of the cosmos and its fundamental constituents are still far from understood, is resistance to the idea that we humans are fully included in the natural order, not exceptions to it. Such resistance is understandable given the widespread dualistic conception of ourselves as immortal souls or mental essences inhabiting perishable physical bodies. By denying the soul, science does indeed de-animate us in that respect – anima being Latin for “soul” or “spirit”. But it can hardly discredit our signal achievement: that we’ve constructed it using our purely natural capacity for conscious cognition.

Portraying consciousness as necessarily beyond scientific explanation, and human experience as having a special epistemic status, as the The Blind Spot seems to do, places an unwarranted restriction on the scientific worldview itself. As that worldview continues to gain in scope and plausibility, we need not fear the possibility that conscious experience and the minds that bring experience into being are discovered to be functions of systems whose parts are not themselves minded. Such naturalization would be a satisfying addition to the open-ended project of gaining a maximally objective picture of the reality we inhabit.

 - Tom Clark, October 2024