A dialogue on a contemporary issue concerning wetware and wireware.
 

T = Teacher
S = Student

S: I have a question.

T: OK.

S: In one of our earlier dialogues we talked about the brain, but didn’t really go into it much. Because it seems to me there is some role of the brain to play, since modifications to the brain obviously result in changes to your experience. Like, someone with a tumor or that has a stroke may lose some language functions, or their vision may be affected on one side, or even emotion or memory can be affected. So doesn’t that mean the organ has something to do with consciousness?

T: Of course. Something to do…but what is that “to do”? If you drink a quart of vodka, your experience is going to be very altered. (laughter). The mind is definitely altered. In fact it’s changing all the time. I was not denying that. However that is not consciousness, or awareness, which is a completely different ball game. You have to be very clear about that distinction.

S: Uh, OK, but if you take, like LSD or a mushroom, a special mushroom, even your consciousness is altered. They call it altered states of consciousness.

T: It doesn’t matter what they call it, all that matters is what the facts are, and the knowledge of them. And in this case, we are looking at the facts of experience. One we want to, or can access, very directly. Namely consciousness.

And the fact is, no matter what kind of experience you’re talking about, including the most amazing one from a gob of mushrooms, or from three years on a meditation cushion, it’s still the mind in action, not consciousness.

S: How can you say that’s mind and not consciousness? Wouldn’t that imply that you can have consciousness without mind? That sounds strange, but… I don’t get it.

T: Good question. Yes, you can have consciousness without mind but you cannot have mind without consciousness.

Let that sink in. Give it a few years. (laughter)

We have to be clear here, about our words. That’s part of the problem, and not just the insight and understanding. So let’s get off on the right foot.

By “mind” here I mean the content of consciousness – any phenomenal experience, such as perception: for example seeing, hearing, smelling, and bodily sensations such as touch, temperature, body kinetics, as well as more subtle mental phenomena like thinking, imagining – which is a type of thinking, just internal. Or, seeing something with your mind’s eye, as they say. And, feeling and emotion. These are all constantly changing, and are part of our functioning and enjoyment. It’s associated with the body and the brain. Without an apparent body how could you have a local camera, or smell-o-vision, or a sense of touch, or what we experience as feelings and emotions, which are really just bodily sensations with associated thoughts, in a loop.

S: Uh, OK, makes sense, I guess… but where does consciousness come in?

T: There is an awareness of the contents, yes? There is an experience, a subjective what-it’s-like to be – to be you, or to be whatever. Doesn’t matter what the experience is, there is an awareness of it. Always. Otherwise, what are we talking about, or as? There’s wouldn’t be to talk about here, in that case, would there, unless we just want to look at behavior, things from the outside.

S: But there isn’t always awareness. I mean, what about sleep, like deep sleep, or anesthesia?

T: We talked about the other day.

S: Oh yes, sorry.

T: It’s OK. I published the dialogue under the post “Is Consciousness Local? A Dialogue” and we were talking about awareness appearing. Or appearing to appear. (chuckles).

We exposed the fallacy of being unconscious, in the sense that it’s an interpretation of experience after the fact. Or, it is looking at a body from the outside that is insentient. In fact, subjectively — which is all that matters when talking about consciousness — we just can’t remember, and so don’t know. We can’t remember a state where there is no content to remember, to hold onto. No mind, so to speak. A content-free state.

And logically, it doesn’t make sense to say one is aware of going from being unconscious, unaware, to being conscious, aware, such as when using the example of going from deep sleep to being awake.

If there is awareness of it, then where is the unawareness? It’s more accurate to say that body functioning changed, came online, the senses, and memories circuits were turned on, or tuned into the outside, or a different channel, and not that awareness was turned on. Unless you want to claim there is no such thing as awareness, no such thing as consciousness. Which is absurd, because I am aware right now.

So, if you need to, ponder that. (chuckles).

S: Um, OK. But back to the brain, I still have this lingering doubt, that maybe it comes from there. That consciousness does.

T: If you look in a brain, open it up on the operating table, or look at a diagram or x-ray, you will not find any central area, or area at all, for awareness or consciousness. You might have claims by researchers or academics that some theory or model about the brain, or areas of the brain, or the physics of quantum mechanics account for it — all kinds of claims out there have been made over the years — but you will not see anything like that when you look in a physical brain, or diagrams of brains. All you have is unproven models and theories, that in fact fall apart if you look at them closely. They all depend on some mechanism, where suddenly “the magic happens”, like in that cartoon – and you insert another mysterious cause or effect or object such as quantum effects or microtubules, without really explaining anything. We have to take it on faith. And I do not have that faith. I am not a true believer in the paradigm. My faith, or experience, lies elsewhere.

In the brain, there are areas for vision, for smell, for hearing, for sensing all the parts of the body and moving them; there are areas related to emotional responses, and automatic functions of things like beating the heart, breathing, blood pressure, digestion, sleep and so forth. Several areas help with types of memory such as short term memory, longer term memory, fear responses and such. There are areas related to language comprehension and expression, musical and time related perceptual functions. And supposedly the frontal lobes are responsible for what they call higher functions, like planning, decision-making, problem-solving, judgment, emotional regulation, personality expression, and controlling voluntary movement. Much of this is known because of what happens when a part or parts of the brain are damaged or stimulated for whatever reason — injury or tumor growth or from strokes, or certain drugs, whatever — and those functions are lost, or enhanced, and we observe behavior or the verbal reports of the experience.

But you see, all of those are functions. They don’t answer, don’t touch the question of what is aware of the experience, and where it all comes together. Who is home to experience the functions?

Yes, ponder that for a second.

All of this function could be happening with a sleepwalker, or a zombie, or with an alien or an AI in control of it. How would you really know from the outside?

If you had an advanced future robot that perfectly mimicked the behavior of a human being, including verbal behavior, how would you know – how would you know if they were really conscious or not?

Some science fiction stories and movies use the trope of feelings or emotions as the indicator of what they call “sentience”. And by the way, as I’ve made clear, or tried to make clear before, I see feelings and emotions as words we can use to describe two different phenomena. I’d reserve the concept of “emotion” for the more temporary, surface experience of things like anger, fear, aggression, that are fleeting and more, shall we say, primitive. They come and go, like waves in a pond. Then I’d use the word feelings, ideally, for the more subtle, deeper phenomena of sensing joy, sensing true love or connection, or empathy, or a gut feeling about something – harder to define but somehow with a more substantial, solid root to them then the drama of ephemeral emotion, which come and go quickly, are more illusory in a sense – not to be trusted as much.

S: I get it. Yeah makes some sense from experience. You don’t want to make a decision based on emotions or it has, you know, consequences. But sometimes a deeper feeling or sense will guide you more rightly.

T: Exactly. So back to our robotic friend.

There will be some robot, in these fictional scenarios you see or read about, that has no feelings quote unquote, poor thing. Then one day, through some miracle, gets what it wants, which was to be able to experience human feelings. That was even the case way back when, with the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz – if you’re old enough to remember that. That was written before the age of robots. His big dream in life was to get a heart.

The thing is, feelings or not, there is still an assumption that there is a subjective experience, an awareness or consciousness having, or not having, feelings and emotions. Yes? Otherwise, what’s the point of the story of the robot gaining human emotions?

We might as well throw in there, under feelings, the deeper feelings, of intuition, insight, creativity, and the perception of love, truth, and beauty. You can start to see that those are less about emotions, and more about a kind of knowledge, you could fairly say. Those are also core qualities, along with the perception or knowledge of meaning and understanding, that are key.

But again, there’s something even more fundamental at issue where, because you can imagine our future robot seeming to express those qualities or functions, such as understanding your meaning in a conversation, and saying something that strikes you as profound that hits you in the heart. And perhaps it paints a beautiful painting, and composes some beautiful music, and says things that are true and poetic, and even seems to be a loving companion at times, listening and understanding what you say, seeming to be empathetic.

Even there, how do we know it is conscious, is having a subjective experience?

Let’s say that futuristic robot that came down from space, was interviewed by the media, and someone was so impressed with it’s intelligence and insight that it was asked to give a talk, and then made a speech that went viral, and then through some process this robot gets elected to an office in local government. Meanwhile it’s living with someone, the guy that discovered it, after he found it wandering in the desert. And he started to not like what this robot was saying nor what the robot wanted to do, politically speaking. Maybe it would destroy his business in the process of helping the community with a problem, or would go against his radical religious group’s beliefs or something.

Now, this robot had a sleep switch, or a kill switch he knew about.

S: Uh oh, I can see where this is going… (laughter)

T: Yes, or to make it more interesting, let’s say it has a removable memory module, and this guy, this person the robot “unit” is living with, knows about the memory module and how to remove it. So he’s intensely angry with what the robot is doing or proposing to do, and he goes and removes the memory module, hides it or throws it away, replacing it with a fresh one. He then claims he doesn’t know why it lost its memory.

On the social plane, would he be committing a crime, given that this futuristic robot is now playing a role in the community, in politics? For all intents and purposes, the robot is functioning for humans in that society as a conscious being. Where does it cross the line, ethically speaking, and in terms of the robot counting as a person, and as a conscious being?

Actually, come to think of it, there was an old Twilight Zone episode along these lines, of an older, jaded lawyer that said he’d “retired from the human race”, being called out of retirement to defend a robot. I think it was that the perceived to have caused some harm, while trying to rescue a child from a car that was about to hit it, something like that.

Anyway, these are not new questions, obviously.

S: It reminds me of the laws passed in Europe about dolphins and gorillas I think it was, having human rights.

T: Yes, similar situation. In fact, You could come up with all kinds of scenarios. Let’s say you had a futuristic sex robot that appears to talk, and have understanding, and expresses, or seems to express feelings and emotions. A partner gets jealous, and decides to let the robot have an accident and fall off the railing of their 50 story high penthouse. (laughter) Is that murder, manslaughter, negligence, or merely property damage?

S: A sticky wicket as they say.

T: Indeed. But, see, all these social issues still leave the core issue untouched. We can come up with new philosophical arguments, and legal frameworks, and social adjustments, psychological, emotional and physical adjustments to having robots and AI agents among us – people, society will adapt. But what is the real nature of this conscious experience, this awareness – the experience of awareness of anything at all? The so-called “first-person” experience? We have to explore that, because it’s completely unknown.

S: Couldn’t you say the same thing about free will – that the robot has it, or might have it?

T: Absolutely. And it highlights the dilemma for humans, with the present understanding or assumptions in the culture. Because if you claim that the brain is doing everything, is responsible for consciousness, then you are saying that it is all controlled by nature and nurture, cause and effect, a process in time. It leaves no room whatsoever for freewill. The best you could do would be to have consciousness as some separate realm, and then be stuck with the dilemma of Descarte, the famous French philosopher. The question arises: how could a non-material entity affect a material one. Then they came up with crazy theories like some kind of interface happens via the pineal gland.

S: Huh. Yeah, it’s dualistic.

T: It’s a dead end. You’ll have endless quandaries like this, unless there is a recognition that experience is one hundred percent subjective. That that’s the foundation. But you can’t do that within a framework that starts with phenomenon. It’s already too late. It’s already after-the-fact, so to speak, of awareness. It’s a big taboo however, generally speaking.

S: I, I think I’m starting to see what you’re saying. But I have a lot to digest here.

T: Yes, let’s take a break. It’s tea time. (laughter).

S: Thank you.