The Hard Problem Of Consciousness And Nonduality
Philosophy ·Christ, Buddha, and Krishna are but waves in the Ocean of Infinite Consciousness that I am! - Swami Vivekananda.
Today (12 January) is the birth anniversary of the great Indian monk Swami Vivekananda. This post is a little bit about the teachings of Swami Vivekananda. The topic of today’s discussion is at the intersection of philosophy of mind, neuroscience and computer science. I want to talk about the definition of consciousness and explain a conundrum called the hard problem of consciousness. This is a central problem in the study of philosophy of mind and neuroscience. As a general question as well, it is interesting and worth pondering about. In the first part, I will try to explain the definition of consciousness according to Swami Vivekananda, then I will explain the philosophical problem. Finally I will try to resolve the hard problem of consciousness and make sense of the quote above. I should mention that the description in this post is based on a school of Indian philosophy called Advait Vedant which translates to Nondual Vedanta. Some of the arguments below are directly taken from the talks of a popular Vedantic teacher Swami Sarvapriyananda. I will talk more about Advait Vedanta in some other post.
Let us start with a very simple everyday experience. You take a sip of tea/coffee and you “experience” the taste of tea/coffee, its warmth and the satisfaction of having tea/coffee after craving it. Let us break down the experience of drinking tea/coffee. The first step is the touch of tea/coffee with the sense organ of taste, that is your tongue. The tongue is covered with taste buds which are collection of taste receptor cells. These cells are designed to detect chemicals and then send nerve impulses to the brain. The signal then travel to the sensory cortex of the brain. To be more specific, these nerve impulses reach the gustatory cortex which responsible for the “perception” of taste. Why perception is in quotes will be explained soon. The nerve impulse from the taste receptors is analysed at the gustatory cortex and we miraculously experience the taste of tea/coffee! The question is at what stage did the nerve impulses transform into the subjective experience of taste? This is precisely the hard problem of consciousness.
To formula the problem more clearly, one needs to define consciousness precisely. In plain english consciousness means the state of being able to see, hear, feel, etc. You can see how this related to the above example. In another context, it means the state of realizing or noticing that something exists. A broader definition is consciousness is that state of sentience or awareness that typically begin when we wake up in the morning from a dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until we fall asleep again. This also the most commonly used definition in neuroscience. David Chalmers, who formulated the hard problem of consciousness, defines consciousness as the feeling of what it is like to be something. As you can see it is hard to give a very precise definition of consciousness. In philosophy, one defines consciousness very differently compared to neuroscience. The problem is, neuroscience or any scientific discipline for that matter tries to reduce any problem to more fundamental ones in order to explain it. For example, life was a very mysterious phenomena (not the origin of life, it is still a mystery) a century ago. But with the advancement of biological sciences and technology we have successfully explained life down to the molecular level. We understand why and how any metabolic activity happens in the body based on the activities in a single cell. This is called the reductionistic approach to solving problems.
Let us see why the reductionist approach cannot explain the hard problem of consciousness as presented above. Take for example the experience of seeing. The end result of the sensory perception of sight is us seeing, say a rose. The physical process involves neuronal signals transmitted from the retina to the visual cortex via the neurons while the “consciouss experience” is seeing. The reductionist approach applied to this process will tell us that the conscious experience of seeing a rose is the result of neurons firing in a certain way under certain physical conditions. That is, consciousness is an epiphenomenon. Here is the problem: a thought, which is considered part of consciousness in neuroscience, can cause the physical body to do things. For example, I have a thought of moving my hand, the next moment I move it. This means that mental thoughts has causal feedback. This is a contradiction. In philosophy of mind, epiphenomena cannot have cause feedback. This might seem complicated but it is not. Think of the example of clock, nuts and bolts and screws arranged in a certain order suddenly start showing time — time is an epiphenomenon of the physical clock. Can a particular time of the day cause the hands in the clock to move? Sounds absurd right! This is exactly what is being explained above about consciousness.
Another argument which disaggrees with the reductionistic explanation of consciousness is the fact that in saying that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, we are making what is called a category mistake. To explain this, let us consider the example of life discussed abobe which can be explained using reductionistic approach. In this example, what we are doing is explaining a complex objective phenomena called life in terms of more fundamental objective phenomena occuring at the cellular and molecular level. Now when we want to say that conscious experience is caused by the nerve impuleses in the brain, then we are trying to explain a subjective phenomena (the conscious experience of seeing, tasting, thinking, pain and so on) in terms of objective phenomena in the brain. This is a category mistake, trying to explain phenomena in one category using phenomena in another category. This is a more technical objection but is a valid counterargument nonetheless.
What then is the resolution of the hard problem of consciousness? I will end this post by giving a glimpse of the philosophy of Advait Vedanta which at this time I find one of the most intelligible ideas to answer the deepest questions of metaphysics. Advait Vedanta “dissolves” the hard problem of consciousness altogether by establishing that the physical world is a mere appearance of a more fundamental reality called Brahman in Sanskrit. Let me begin by defining consciousness in Advait Vedant. To define it, let us go a little deeper into the experience of drinking tea/coffee. The perception of the taste of tea/coffee is a very real experience, the physiological process is very well understood — chemicals in the tea/coffee touches the tongue, activates the taste receptors which transmit nerve impulses which travel to brain and the gustatory cortex reacts to the signal and voila we experience the taste. One can do the same analysis with any other experience with any other sense organ and we end up with the same hard problem of consciousness. But one thing that is common to all these experience is the awareness associated to it. This has been explained in great detail in my previous post here. Let me summarise it briefly here. Every experience is accompanied by a thought in the mind. The experience of seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, pain, memory, emotions, feelings and so on might arise from certain nerve impulses but at the end, these nerve impulses somehow (hard problem of consciousness) end up with a first person subjective experience. But afterall all these experiences appear to a witness which is our real identity, our real self. From this point of view, consciousness in Advait Vedant is defined to be this witness, our real identity and is called Brahman. Thus experience in Advait Vedant is an object (sight, taste, smell, thought, feeling, emotion, etc) plus consciousness. Without consciousness, no experience is possible. Consciousness is thus like a mirror, which just reflects the objects in front of it. It does not get affected by the objects in front of it.
Note the stark difference of the notion of consciousness in neuroscience and in Advait Vedant. What is consciousness in neuroscience is mere mental objects which appears to consciousness in Advait Vedant. Also observe that consciousness has no qualities whatsoever, all qualities is in the object it illumines. This poses a challenge for linguistic philosophers to describe consciousness in language. Language can only describe objects with qualities, but consciousness is neither an object (it is always the subject, objects appear to it) nor possess any qualities. Traditional method in Advait Vedant to describe consciousness is the method of negation or neti-neti in Sanskrit. The idea is to discard things which consciousness is not. So all the physical objects in the universe is not consciousness since they are objects of experience appearing to the consciousness. Similarly any mental object like thoughts, emotions, feelings, pain and so on are also not consciousness (in contrast to neuroscience) since we are also aware of these mental objects. In other words the mind is an object of experience. In the words of the philosopher Arindam Chakrabarti, an object is something which objects to consciousness. Also note that every human being (infact any living organism with an advanced cognition to have experience) has the same consciousness. The is absolutely no difference between the witnesses of different individuals. This is clear in a sense because consciousness has no qualities and we need qualities to differentiate between things. This establishes oneness of all living organisms at the level of their real identity or their consciousness. It is in this sense that Vivekananda claims that Christ, Buddha (these two are historical figures) and Krishna (take Krishna just as a character from the epic Mahabharata if you are not a Hindu!) as the respective individuals are just appearances in the consciousness, the same consciousness that Vivekananda and infact all of us are in essence.
But the problem of many still remains: in the outside world we experience multiplicity. Advait Vedanta claims that Brahman (consciousness) is the only reality, all existent objects are mere manifestations, appearances of Brahman. Since we have already established the oneness of consciousness, once the above claim is proved, we get Nonduality (Advait). But this is a huge subject, very subtle and sometimes complicated arguments are required to prove this. So I will not delve into this subject for now. Let me just give a simple example to elucidate the point: the famous snake in the rope example. In a dark ally, you are walking by and you suddenly notice that there is a snake sitting in one corner. But when you move closer you realise that it was just a rope which you mistook for a snake due to poor lighting. What is more real, the snake or the rope? Obviously the rope but the snake was also real until you realised it was a rope. At what point did the snake become the rope? Never, it was always a rope, the snake was an appearance, a superimposition on the reality which was rope. Similarly, Advait Vedant claims that the reality of this universe and ourselves is Brahman, the consciousness which appears as this universe. The analogue of poor lighting in our world is called Maya in Sanskrit which loosely translates to illusion or ignorance, which causes us to perceive this world as real. Advait Vedant does not claim that we do not experience the world but only questions the reality of the experience. Similar to dreams, where we experience a manifold of objects and thoughts and emotions but all of it is just the mind, none of the objects actually exists. So too is the world according to Advait Vedant.
Let us now see how Advait Vedant solves the hard problem of consciousness. According to Advait Vedant, the mind is itself not conscious but its contents are illumined by consciousness. Consciousness reflected in the mind, through which the mental contents become known to us is called reflected consciousness (Chidabhasa in Sanskrit). It can be illustrated by the following example: take a bunch of pots filled with water. When the sun shines on them, it creates a bunch of images of the sun in each pot. Brahman is like the sun while the individual images are the reflected consciousnesses in individual minds. Just as the image cannot exist without the pot, so too the conscious mind cannot exist without a body. This is how Advait Vedant explain multiplicity of conscious minds from one consciousness or Brahman. Now the hard problem of consciousness exists only at the objective level, that is at the level of physical and mental objects. In these terms, the question is how physical objects (nerve impulses) transform into mental objects (experience of sight, taste, touch, thought, emotions and so on). According to Advait Vedant, the contents of the brain, that is all neuronal activities gets known to us in the form of the associated mental objects by the reflected consciousness. So the inherent phenomena in the hard problem of consciousness is simply the illumination of physical objects by reflected consciousness whic leads us to have conscious experience of tasting tea/coffee for example.
I have raced through a great deal of arguments without providing enough justification. I will take up every claim made in this post one by one in later posts and clarify with (what I find) compelling arguments. I think Advait Vedant gives a solid explanation (to me) of the hard problem of consciousness.