Problems with Consciousness and Reality Anna Lezdkan

Problems with Consciousness and Reality

Bellotto painting

Anna Lezdkan

Upper Sixth

Consciousness is a phenomenon that everyone is familiar with, and yet it remains one of science’s biggest unsolved mysteries. We as humans consist of 100 trillion cells, of which not a single one is conscious, and yet we have a vibrant conscious experience, thinking and feeling every day. A major part of this experience is visual perception. 40-50% of the brain is involved in vision, and our visual perception is readily used for survival and our interpretation of the world. Modern research has allowed for some radical theories about visual perception to surface although this has not led to a biological explanation of consciousness yet.

Nearly everything that we understand about the world has come from our ability to observe consciously. Our individual perception of reality is a combination of electrical impulses delivered to the brain via our senses and the brain’s best guess of the cause of that sensory information. In other words, only part of our ‘real’ experience comes from our senses. The other part is our brain guessing. The shadow illusion demonstrates this concept. If you look at the squares marked A and B they appear to be different colours. The sensory information entering your brain is being added to by your brain’s knowledge that casting a shadow causes objects to appear darker which tricks you into thinking square B is lighter than square A but actually, both squares are the same colour. Everyone’s perception of reality is therefore slightly different: no two brains will ever guess in exactly the same way and your perception of the world is unique.

It was thought that we have evolved as a species to have an accurate perception of reality as logically this would suggest a competitive advantage in survival scenarios. We assumed that accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions where the fitness of an animal determines its survival advantage (high fitness- high survival advantage, low fitness- low survival advantage). Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman suggests that fitness, although dependent on reality, is not reality as it is. Australian outback, and Australia had to change the colour of the beer bottles to solve the problem. With our intellectual ability and common sense, we can easily see past the fly’s fairly simple shortcut, but our own, perhaps more complex shortcuts that we have no doubt developed, are inaccessible to us. The very reason we have evolved to have any ‘shortcuts’ is to prevent us from seeing reality as it is, but this enables us to interact with reality in a way that is most efficient for survival, therefore increasing fitness.

Hoffman’s thorough work shows that animals who have no perception of actual reality and only see fitness using their ‘shortcuts’ have a far greater survival advantage than animals who see reality His belief is that all species have evolved to as it is. This suggests that as the species make perceptual shortcuts, and in doing so continues to evolve, we are moving further have gradually lost the ability to perceive away from seeing reality as it is. Such a actual reality. For revelation, if true, will example, a species of fly in Australia has acquired a perceptual [O]nly part of our ‘real’ experience impose a cacophony of questions for the natural sciences to consider. The shortcut to aid each fly to find a mate. They have evolved comes from our senses. obvious problem is that if everyone is creating a slightly different reality to assume that a for themselves then brown, textured, preferably large object, this complicates scientific observations. would make a suitable mate, so much so Considering an evolutionary scale, that large numbers of flies were gathering humans have just started to investigate on discarded brown beer bottles in the phenomena such as the universe, which 23

Shadow illusion

Shadow illusion solution

Edward H. Adelson

is still a fairly abstract concept. Our perceptual mechanisms have only just encountered these confusing objects and it’s possible that although we don’t know it, our ‘shortcuts’ are somehow shifting the picture.

Deciding on what to call real is a problem. Luckily, the majority of people seem to have perceptions of the world that are so similar that any difference is negligible. We casually call this reality. When someone has experiences that disagree with ‘reality’, perhaps if they are having hallucinations, we assume they are under the influence of drugs or mentally ill. However, if someone’s perceptions of the world disagree with our own, this does not mean that they carry any less validity as a perception of reality. At least, we cannot confidently say whether or not James Watson, turned his attention to the problem of consciousness after his work in genetics. His view was that consciousness arises from certain behaviours of neurons, more specifically, he believed that sets of neurons fire in coordination and in doing so give rise to consciousness. For example, firing of this nature at a frequency of 40 hertz is the phenomenon responsible for visual awareness. Crick also believed that free will does not exist, proposing instead that an unconscious part of the brain is responsible for making us think that we have free will. Crick’s dedication to the processes that take place within the body advanced the materialist view of science (the materialist view being that humans are essentially meat machines with nothing extra that could be considered divine). Simply put, Crick’s belief was that a true understanding of consciousness can only be obtained from closely examining neurons, and that no phenomenon that cannot be explained scientifically is responsible for consciousness.

their perception is wrong because our knowledge of reality is limited.

Most theories similar to Crick’s are constructed on the basis that a very high level of computation is responsible for consciousness, where computation describes the processing of information. Sir Roger Penrose, an Oxford Physicist whose groundbreaking work has made many contributions to Physics, constructed a theory that is quite different. His suggestion is that to obtain a true understanding of consciousness, we must look beyond the neurons of the brain and enter the world of quantum physics. The present day understanding of quantum mechanics contains large gaps of unknown physical laws. Penrose believes that our brains are exploiting this gap, and that the science in this gap that is yet to be discovered is responsible for consciousness, although any new theories established could be outside a computational system. Consciousness is the phenomenon that we Quantum physics lies on the cutting edge have to thank for visual perception and our of science. Already, many discoveries understanding of the challenged the world. It is also a massive problem to scientifically comprehend and has Consciousness is ... to thank for visual imagination of those who stumble upon them, and been tackled by many perception and ... it is difficult to different scientists and professors from many different fields. understanding of the world. comprehend what else could exist in the world of quantum Sir Roger Penrose and mechanics. As Francis Crick were the first scientists to Penrose suggests, new evidence discovered acknowledge truly that consciousness was in this field could lie beyond coordinated a problem to reckon with, and since then firings of neurons (Crick’s theory), but scientific research in this area has surged. ultimately, Penrose’s view is that a scientific description for consciousness does exist Francis Crick, who discovered the double although it may be radical and for the helix structure of DNA in 1953 along with meantime remain undiscovered.

Although there are many competing scientific theories, some professors believe that explaining consciousness scientifically is simply not possible because science in its nature is objective, and consciousness in its nature is subjective. Some professors believe that consciousness is a problem that humans are simply incapable of understanding and that our efforts to investigate it are pointless. However, many philosophers have developed their own theories about consciousness which lie alongside the scientific theories and are interesting to think about even if there is no scientific evidence to support them.

Daniel Dennett, an American philosopher, is the author of Consciousness Explained. He thinks that consciousness is a trick of the brain, and that the brain makes you think that you are authoritative over your conscious experience, but really the brain is fooling you. In a TED talk, he uses examples to make his argument, one of which is a painting by Bellotto. In a larger version of the painting, you can see figures on the bridge. Dennett says that you would expect to find detail painted on these figures when you move closer to the painting because it appears that way when you stand at a distance. However, the figures are just cleverly Daniel Dennett placed blobs that trick your brain into thinking they are detailed figures. I think that this reinforces the ideas about visual describing how it behaves, in the same perception mentioned earlier. Whilst the way we have developed laws about gravity painting is an example of brain trick, which describe how mass behaves. it concerns visual perception, which is part of our conscious experience, but not His second theory is that consciousness consciousness itself. Dennett’s view on is universal, and that every particle, consciousness is similar to even a photon, has Crick’s. He believes that human consciousness and [T]he 100 some degree of consciousness. In this free will are a result of physical processes, which coincides with the ‘meat trillion cells which humans case, the 100 trillion cells which humans consist of are all machine theory’. consist of are all consciousness, and Philosopher David consciousness. when put together are able to give rise Chalmers, who wrote to the human level The Conscious Mind, has theories of of consciousness. This exists alongside consciousness that are vastly different to Tononi’s theory that says consciousness Daniel Dennett’s. He has 2 main theories is proportional to information stored that he believes could be the first step to in an object. Although this is a popular scientifically explaining consciousness. theory, if true it raises many ethical Firstly, that consciousness is fundamental, questions. Firstly, it means that the more in the same way that space, time, and intelligent a body, the higher the degree of mass are fundamental. If you were to ask consciousness which means in time we will ‘How does mass come to be?’ there is no develop computers so intelligent that their explanation, it just does, and Chalmers level of consciousness will be comparable argues that the same can be said for to a human’s level of consciousness. If so, consciousness. In this case we should treat how do we justify turning off a computer consciousness as we do other fundamental that has a level of consciousness similar to phenomena and start to develop laws our own? The idea of a conscious computer feels wrong, but this theory says that such a computer could one day exist.

These theories about consciousness are radical and muddled. They seem to conjure more questions than they answer. After all, if we are ‘meat machines’ that exist only to reproduce, why are we conscious in the first place? Surely it would be much easier to propagate our genes and find a suitable mate without having the added complications of emotions and conscious thought. If consciousness is a hindrance to reproduction and exists as a result of neuron computation, it would have been driven towards extinction by natural selection, and we know that has not happened. Whilst we have evolved into our current species from other species, consciousness has not been a characteristic that we have dropped and we are still capable of emotion and conscious thought. But if the ‘meat machine’ theory is wrong then the solution to consciousness lies beyond modern day science, which is a difficult conclusion to come to. In any case, consciousness, despite it being a common occurrence, is an abstract phenomenon, and it seems will continue to be a problem for many more years.