The Economist Investigates Consciousness

Today I’ll take a break from discussing Six Persistent Enigmas about Consciousness, to comment on The Economist’s recent series on six great mysteries of science. I highly recommend these thoughtful and fact-filled two-page essays, and the final installment (September 12) is titled:

“What is consciousness? The hard problem”

http://www.economist.com/news/science-brief/21664060-final-brief-our-series-looks-most-profound-scientific-mystery-all-one

There’s a lot of good material in this piece, but journalism often contains mistakes, even in a respected periodical such as The Economist. A few examples:

“Subjective though it is, consciousness … looks like a specific phenomenon, not a mere side-effect.” But of course side effects can be “specific.”

I think it’s fairly obvious that being conscious, in the sense of having vivid, sensuous, introspectible experiences, is quite different from being self-conscious, in the sense of being aware of oneself. In all probability, many animals that lack self-consciousness are perceptually aware of their surroundings and their own body-sensations. But the article muddles these two uses of the term “consciousness” repeatedly.

Some people with damaged visual cortices have “blindsight.” They report that they cannot see anything in large areas of the visual field, but if they are asked a yes-no question about the “blind” part of their visual field they can often answer correctly – e.g., “Did a light flash just now?” I have never heard of blindsighters spontaneously reaching out and picking up things they cannot see. But The Economist claims they can “point to, and even grasp, objects in their visual fields.” (If researchers have found blindsighters who do that spontaneously, without being cued, I am happy to be corrected, but I’m skeptical.)

These criticisms aside, the whole series is worth seeking out, and it is complimented by a series of brief videos. The video on consciousness showcases major scientists and philosophers such as Christof Koch, David Chalmers, and Daniel Dennett. See http://www.economist.com/sciencebriefs..

Roger Christan Schriner

What This Blog is About

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science.” – Albert Einstein

Even in the hurried pace of everyday life, we sometimes find ourselves stunned by fundamental mysteries. Three of these basic enigmas are especially astounding. The first mind-boggler is that anything exists at all. The second wonder is the appearance of living creatures. And the third jaw-dropper is that some living creatures have conscious experiences.

The second mystery, of course, is closely related to the third. When people speak of the wonder of life, they are often thinking of the wonder of being conscious. Daisies and dandelions are amazing even if they lack a single shred of sentience, but adding consciousness to living matter is the slickest trick of all.

Consciousness is such a familiar miracle that we usually ignore it, but the flow of our own experiences is at the core of our sense of self. We seem to be intimately entangled in this complex stream of consciousness, in every waking moment and even in our dreams. It seems as if conscious awareness is the very essence of our existence. As Christof Koch puts it, “Without consciousness there is nothing” (Conscious Experience, p. 23).

Consciousness is also at the heart of our sense of value. We value conscious beings in a way that is radically different from the way we value other things. Many of us would agree that it is wrong to needlessly destroy a conscious creature. By contrast, when I drink a glass of water I assume that nothing morally reprehensible happens to this liquid when it plunges into an acid bath in my stomach. Since most of us would say that the water is not conscious, we do not think it suffers in being consumed. Presumably then, the difference in value between me and the glass of water involves the fact that I am conscious and it is not.

So what is this stuff?

This blog will be especially concerned with vivid and sensuous aspects of experience – pleasures, pains, sounds, smells, tastes, touch-sensations, and the rich array of colors and shapes that make up what we see. We would not enjoy these perceptions if we were rocks, baseballs, or Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer. We will consider a question that curious minds of all ages have contemplated: “What is this strange stuff that’s inside of my head?” (And as we will see, some philosophers maintain that “this stuff” is not inside of us after all.)

Roger Christan Schriner

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