The Empirical Essence of Consciousness

The Empirical Essence of Consciousness

David Culpin

There is no doubt that to the great majority of philosophers the phenomenon of consciousness presents a considerable mystery, as is witnessed by the quantity of philosophical literature devoted to it. On the contrary, it is argued in this essay that, despite its physical complexity, when addressed empirically the phenomenon of consciousness presents no greater difficulty of comprehension than does the theory of evolution, existing as it does entirely concomitant with the human condition.

This investigation approaches the phenomenon of consciousness in empirical terms by placing it in the context of human life, or more generally the life of any animal, as viewed objectively. It thus asks what function consciousness fulfils, thereby recognizing its development as concomitant with the processes of evolution. As consciousness cannot have originated otherwise than as a biological component of an animal’s makeup, it must have played an essential part in the origin and development of species as first formulated by Charles Darwin. That is to say, consciousness must almost certainly have evolved due to some evolutionary advantage that it possesses, and consequently it is only since the discovery of evolutionary processes that a firm basis for a theory of consciousness has become available. The phenomenon of consciousness is accordingly examined from that perspective.

As it is mobility that characterizes the animal kingdom (see below), it is clear that consciousness developed as a characteristic of the animal kingdom over a vast period of time by enabling its possessors to obtain and preserve that mobility, and thereby an animal’s capacity to survive, both individually and as species, in the variety of complex environments in which it may live. An animal’s consciousness does not, in consequence, survive its death.

Animals and their environments possess characteristics of the physical, as addressed by the physical sciences, the biological, including the neurophysiological, and the social. For the purpose of this analysis however, the biological and social may, as confronted by the processes of evolution, be regarded as falling within the realm of the physical, and may thus be potentially and ultimately describable by the physical sciences. Such a description is consistent with the fact that the biological, and thence the social, derive by evolution from the physical in accordance with physical processes.

As an historical precedent, we may note that Democritos, two and a half millennia ago, appears to have been amongst the first to have viewed the world from the physical perspective described above, for he is recorded as having spoken as follows:

By use there is sweet, by use there is bitter; by use there is warm and by use there is cold; by use there is colour. But in sooth there are [only] atoms and the void.¹

Though Democritos’s view was not put forward in the spirit of science as we know it, we nevertheless recognize it as the germ of a scientific explanation of mental phenomena.

Considered, then, in purely physical terms, in the environment in which an organism evolves its survival depends upon its developing the physical means for that survival. In the case of animals, that is to say organisms endowed with voluntary locomotion and thus requiring guidance in an ever changing environment, such means for survival are expressed by the development of a nervous system, including a sensory capability and a brain. As any interaction between an animal and its environment is necessarily physical, that is, as described ultimately by the physical sciences, and as animals are not, ab initio, conversant with the physical sciences, it is accordingly proposed that the only possible way by which an animal can obtain such guidance is by means of the development, or construction, within its nervous system, though for the most part without deliberation, of a representation of those aspects of the physical environment in which it lives, including the biological and social, that are relevant to its own survival and that of the animal group to which it belongs, and thus to the survival of its kind through procreation, thereby functioning for the eventual further evolution of its species. The situation described is, in simplified terms, analogous to the requirement of guidance in navigating the earth’s surface by the use of representations in the form of maps that may be subject to modification in the light of their use. The nature of such a representation inevitably depends upon the nature of the species and the peculiarities of the environment that it occupies. The thesis of this analysis is that such a representational structure forms the basis of an animal’s consciousness. Such a thesis enables a bridge to be made between the mental and the physical.

We are now in a position to propose, by way of explication, the following definition of an animal’s consciousness.

Definition of Consciousness

That aspect of an animal’s representation within itself of its environment and of its own constitution to which it is giving attention at any particular time constitutes the content of the animal’s consciousness at that time.

Thus an animal’s consciousness is constituted by its giving attention to an aspect or part of its representational structure, and an object of its consciousness corresponds to a construction within that structure. It is in this way that an animal’s representational structure gives meaning to its sensory input. This definition refers to a dynamic aspect of consciousness: the constantly varying utilisation and restructuring of the vast representational resources available, as perceptual and conceptual attention varies in response to existing representation, and as representation itself changes. This results in a stream of consciousness where any particular conscious state of the stream corresponds to the particular representation attended to at the time, whether in perception, thinking, contemplation or dreaming, all but the first of which occur in the presence of diminished perceptual input, in which stimuli arise largely from the rich resources of representation itself. It is important to observe that there are many aspects of an animal’s representational structure that cannot readily, if at all, be brought to consciousness, that is to say to its own attention, as Sigmund Freud was the first to observe, though they may nevertheless play an essential part in the animal’s representation of its environment. We are here concerned particularly with those aspects that can be brought to consciousness.

A model for the dynamics of consciousness as referred to above has been given by Philip Johnson-Laird and investigated neurologically. It proposes that consciousness be explained in terms of working memory, a concept introduced by Alan Baddeley². Working memory, such as the visual, is described as a kind of serial processor drawing on resources from parallel processing areas of the brain. Johnson-Laird has proposed³ that it is in working memory that the representations constituting consciousness are created, the parallel processing areas from which it draws being unconscious, thus explaining the unity of consciousness.

It hardly needs pointing out that an animal’s consciousness, and hence how it sees the world, must necessarily vary enormously between animal species. In illustration of this observe how the senses themselves vary between species. For example, animals generally, and herbivores in particular, possess only dichromatic vision, from which the colour red is excluded as unnecessary for the identification of edible vegetation. By contrast, primates possess trichromatic vision, enabling them amongst other things to identify ripe fruit, a staple of their diet, by its generally red colour. An exception is the lemurs of Madagascar, which feed at night when the colour red is not readily identifiable, and consequently cannot construct the colour red (Rachel Jacobs, as reported in The Economist, 27 April 2019, p. 69). The implications for animal consciousness are clear.

Given the requirement of a physical basis for consciousness, it is difficult to conceive of an alternative explication to that of the identification of consciousness with attention to an aspect of representational structure—change that structure, or change that attention, and consciousness inevitably changes with it. That representational structure, and therefore an animal’s consciousness, is itself subject to continual change through developmental experience and learning. Representation, and hence consciousness, will moreover be subject also to cultural change, largely restricted to the case of humans, and to evolutionary development. For example, important aspects of the representational base of a scientifically informed modern individual no doubt differ substantially from those of an educated individual of medieval times, and thus they differ accordingly in respect of corresponding aspects of their consciousness, and hence their perception of the world.

There is also a necessary emotional, or motivational, component of consciousness which is concerned with judgement as to the direction in which conscious attention should be directed for survival, and evaluation of consequent decision as to appropriate action, as illustrated by the following example: ‘You are thirsty on the ancient African savannah and a watering hole is just ahead, but you hear a noise in the grass. It could be a lion, or it might just be a monkey. Should you flee?’ Your ancient brain forms itself around how to deal quickly with this situation, giving rise to what we call anxiety. Too much anxiety and we do not drink at all, too little and we never drink again.⁴

Our conscious awareness is thus an awareness of ourselves and our environment (or some aspect thereof), but by way of a world that we ourselves construct, whether by deliberation or otherwise, for our own surviving and thriving. The sometimes tragic truth of this conclusion is demonstrated by those circumstances in which neurological damage or malformation from birth can produce maladaptation of consciousness, resulting in gross behavioural disorders, as described in the many cases recounted by Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

There are two further points that may be noted, one biological, the other philosophical. First, the biological. It may be observed that amongst all biological structures it is only in the case of those possessing voluntary locomotive ability, and thus requiring a significantly higher order of complexity of adaptation, namely those belonging to the animal kingdom, that the possession of a brain, and thus of consciousness, is evident. An instructive example of this is the tunicate, first studied by the Japanese Emperor Hirohito. As a larva capable of locomotion, the tunicate possesses a brain-like ganglion which can be informed about the environment by peripheral sensory input from a statocyst (organ for balance), a primitive eye, and a notocord (primitive spinal chord). These central nervous structures have the connections necessary to deal with the continuously changing environment, as this primitive tadpole-like larva swims through the water.⁵

On reaching maturity, however, the tunicate implants its head end into a selected location, and, no longer needing much of its brain, consumes it.

The second point to be noted is that the explanation of consciousness as representation is drawn from an old idea, perhaps in the modern era proposed with no greater clarity and elegance than by Arthur Schopenhauer, though not by reference to the processes of evolution or the phenomenon of consciousness as presently conceived, or as referred to above in biological terms, as these were not thus recognized in his time (circa 1820) according to our modern understanding. For evidence of Schopenhauer’s prescience we need go no further than the first pages of The World as Will and Representation, where he wrote as follows:

The world is my representation (Vorstellung): this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.⁶

What is attempted in the present analysis is an unambiguous outline of the empirical basis of consciousness in the context of a physical description of living organisms and their environment. It is thus presented not as philosophical speculation, but as a matter of fact, that is, of biophysical fact. A philosopher may respond to such an argument by pointing out that matters of fact of a physical description are, according to the preceding analysis, themselves based ultimately on human consciousness, that is, on our own constructions, thus rendering the argument apparently lacking in grounding. Here we encounter the old philosopher’s doctrine of foundationalism, concerning the need for an explanatory foundation that requires no further justification, and the consequent endeavour to supply one. Descartes, for example, based his philosophy on the certainty of his proclamation, Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am); Kant postulated the foundational idea of ‘the thing in itself’, inaccessible through perceptual processes, though apparently accessible through philosophical; while the logical positivists sought certainty in their idea of the sense datum (see Austin⁷ for a both amusing and effective demolition of this notion). As in this enquiry we are pursuing an investigation that is primarily empirical, we are precluded from reliance on such philosophical inventions.

Such a foundational predicament as the above was characterized by Otto Neurath using the following well known simile:

We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components. Only metaphysics can disappear without a trace.⁸

It would seem that Wittgenstein regarded his own endeavours in a somewhat similar way, and in agreement with the present exposition, at least in his earlier period, when he wrote at the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy . . .⁹ Let us now see what answer an empirical approach to the problem of a foundation for knowledge can provide. While, as has been observed, to a philosopher the analysis given in this investigation suggests the need for such a foundation, to which he is apt to respond by inventing an entity designed to provide it, what the analysis points to from an empirical viewpoint is the iterative or historical character of cognitive development, particularly scientific, which in turn shows that the supposed requirement of a foundation is misconceived. Ernest Nagel¹⁰ has illustrated such an iterative process by considering the history of successive attempts to measure time, beginning with the water clock, in concert with the development of mechanics. While mechanics depends on an operational definition of time, that is, a definition based on a method of measuring it, and such methods in turn depend on certain assumptions of mechanics, Nagel’s account shows that this mutual dependency has been historically not so much a self-defeating process as a constructive one. This conclusion has a direct application to what we may call the human situation. Thus all we can do is to proceed from the soundest known starting point for our understanding of the world, including an understanding of our own consciousness, one that, as affirmed by Wittgenstein (quoted above), must inevitably lie in the natural sciences, while recognizing, of course, that the natural sciences ultimately depend upon our collective consciousness. That is the strategy that has been adopted in this enquiry.

Apart from being a response to the apparent deficiency of enquiry into what kind of a phenomenon consciousness is, this investigation also enables a response to be given to the so-called hard problem of consciousness, as introduced by the philosopher David Chalmers (1995): namely, what is it that gives consciousness its verisimilitude; how is it that the real world appears to be living within us?¹¹ The answer, in accordance with the above exposition, is that what to us appears as the real world is a world of our own construction (albeit constructed to fulfil a definite function), which cannot be otherwise than as effectively living within us, and is of vital importance to ourselves as physical entities subsisting in a physical environment.

Thus, for example, when light of a particular wavelength impinges upon our optic nerves, we experience the colour red. Why is this? Because such an experience lies in the construction we make in such a situation that is appropriate to our survival, namely that of experiencing the colour red. Other such constructions occur, for example, with the experiences of touch, sound, smell and pain. Colour and sound are what the empiricist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) termed secondary qualities, as they are closely (though far from identically) related to certain primary properties of physics, thus echoing Democritos (as quoted earlier). Referring to the work of Edwin Land in the ‘Case of the Colour-blind Painter’, a painter who, though suffering colour-blindness resulting from an accident, nevertheless of necessity re-developed his own idiosyncratic experience of colour, Oliver Sacks concluded that ‘colours are not “out there” in the world, nor, as classical empirical theory held, are they an automatic correlate of wavelength, but are, rather, constructed by the brain ’ (1995)¹². In his last collection of essays Sacks wrote:

Every perception, every scene, is shaped by us, whether we intend it or not. We are the directors of the film we are making—but we are its subjects too: every frame, every moment, is us, is ours.¹³

As is exemplified in the cases recounted by Sachs, that we construct our own reality is most clearly revealed in situations where the construction process is subject to distortion due to mental impairment. (It may also result from indocrination!) If there is a real world, it is the world of particle physics—but that also is constructed by us.

What Chalmers¹⁴ sees as a philosophical problem is thus resolved as an evolutionary solution to a practical predicament, namely that of the need for the development within the human form (and, more generally, the animal form) of a physical construction in representation of both itself and its environment, being thereby conducive to its survival.

The really hard problem concerning consciousness is this: how does such a representation develop and function? That it does so is quite clear in principle. The detail as to how it does so is a scientific problem of immense complexity, in particular a neurophysiological problem, deriving as it does from the complexity of both the human neurophysiology and the human environment. (For an insight into this, the reader may like to consult relevant works of J.Z. Young and Jean-Pierre Changeaux.) We are only now beginning to come to terms with this problem, in particular through digital emulation of its solution.

Following his elaboration of a computational framework for the conscious mind, as referred to above, Johnson-Laird wrote¹⁵: ‘No one knows what consciousness is or whether it serves any purpose.’ This investigation gives precise answers to both of these questions. Given the requirement of a physical basis for consciousness, it is difficult to conceive of any other than the one here described.

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¹ John Burnet, Greek Philosophy (London: MacMillan, 1950) 197

² Alan Baddeley, ‘Working Memory’, Science 255 (1992), 556-559

³ Philip Johnson-Laird, The Computer and the Mind, 2nd edn. (London: Fontana Press, 1993)

⁴ David Aaronovitch, Review of Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry by Randolph Nesse (London: The Times, 1/2/2019)

⁵ Rudolfo Llinás, ‘“Mindness” as a Functional State of the Brain’, Mindwaves, ed. Colin Blakemore & Susan Greenfield (London: Blackwell, 1987) 341

⁶ Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, trans. E.F.J. Payne ( USA: Courier Corp., 1958) 3

⁷ J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (London: Oxford University Press, 1962)

⁸ Otto Neurath, ‘Protocol Statements’, Erkenntnis, 3 (1932) 92

⁹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961) 151

¹⁰ Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961) 179

¹¹ David Chalmers, ‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3) (1995) 200.

¹² Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Picador, 1995) 22. For the philosophy of colour perception, the reader may like to consult Color for Philosophers by C.L. Hardin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986).

¹³ Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness (New York: Picador, 2017) 183.

¹⁴ David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996)

¹⁵ Op. cit., 353