J-zine - Conscious Thinking

Conscious Thinking

When asked the question, what is consciousness? we become conscious of consciousness. And most of us take this consciousness to be what consciousness is This is not true.
Julian Jaynes, 1976

Normally we are not conscious of being conscious. Hardly anything else is taken for granted more than conciousness. Since Descartes declared Cognito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), conciousness has become our very proof of existence. This is perhaps why little serious study has been done on the subject, though it is slowly acquiring respectability as a research topic.

It was Descartes, himself, who was the first to attempt to analyse conciousness. He envisioned reality projected in what has come to be called the Cartesian Theatre -- located, he decided, in the pineal gland. The "audience" was, of course, the soul.

Modern thinkers find it difficult to escape this imagery. Dualism is out of favour, but subtly, it continues to influence the way many people think. Indeed much of Daniel C. Dennett's book Conciousness Explained is aimed at guiding his readers away from the Cartesian Theatre. His multiple drafts model of the mind is the neurological version of relativity. Put simply, different parts of the mind have different perspectives, because of the amount time it takes for nerve signals to pass from one part of the brain to another. The catchy title of the book, not withstanding, Dennett admits that his explanation is far from being complete. "One might even say it was just a beginning", he writes.

Another modern thinker who tries to penetrate the mysteries of the mind is John Searle. He presents us with a puzzle. He asks us to imagine that he is locked in a room and, on the basis of a set of instructions -- his program, as it were -- can act as if he understands Chinese -- a language he claims to have no knowledge of. We are to disregard the impracticality of actually doing this; it is simply a thought experiment. Now he asks, where is the 'Conscious understanding' to be found in the room? He takes his failure to find it as proof that computers cannot ever possess conciousness.

Unfortunately for Searle's argument, we can use the same proof on ourselves. Let us (as a thought experiment only, of course) open the skull of a native speaker of some language that is entirely unknown to us. We peer inside and search for the centre of Conscious understanding. We find only a convoluted lump of greyish jelly. Is our failure proof that this poor person does not possess conciousness? I think not. Do we know if we would recognise the seat of conciousness if it stared straight back at us? No we don't.

Roger Penrose's book Emperor's New Mind is a brilliant, if misguided, follow on to Searle's approach. Penrose seems to want us to believe that conciousness is a consequence of the yet to be developed theory of quantum gravity. In the later book, Shadows of the Mind, he invokes Gödel's theorem as an attempt to show that the human mind can know things that are beyond the reach of a computer. Penrose, himself, sees the hole in that argument (p136). Thought processes are based not so much on rigorous mathematical proofs, but 'rules of thumb' or heuristics. He is too much of a mathematician to believe that this affects the core of his argument.

Hoffstader and Dennett in their stimulating book, The Mind's I, offer an all together different perspective. They present a selection of writings that, in their own words, is designed to "provoke, disturb and befuddle" its readers. In various ways, each of the pieces is a quest for the meaning of the word "I". They include John Searle's article as one of their selections, but Hoffstader and Dennett cheerfully admit that their position is quite opposed to Searle. They state quite boldly, "Minds exist in brains and may come to exist in in programmed machines".

Where does that leave us? Despite the optimistic title of Dennett's book, conciousness is still a mystery. Searle and Penrose ultimately want us to share their belief that conscious understanding is only possible for flesh and blood creatures like ourselves. Computer scientists like Hoffstader, tend to believe that it's just a matter of time before computers -- or rather the programs that run on computers -- start thinking. Call them neo-dualists, if you like. Some go beyond that and foresee some distant time when we will have transcended our carbon based bodies and re-incarnate (if that is the word) in silicon based computers. Far fetched? Depends on which camp you belong to.

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